Lethal Heating

TIME - Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

A camel herder guides his flock in the desert near Dakhla in Morocco-administered Western Sahara on October 13, 2019. Fadel Senna—AFP/ Getty Images

KENSINGTON, Maryland — In just 50 years, 2 billion to 3.5 billion people, mostly the poor who can’t afford air conditioning, will be living in a climate that historically has been too hot to handle, a new study said.

With every 1.8 degree (1 degree Celsius) increase in global average annual temperature from man-made climate change, about a billion or so people will end up in areas too warm day-in, day-out to be habitable without cooling technology, according to ecologist Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, co-author of the study.

How many people will end up at risk depends on how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions are reduced and how fast the world population grows.

Under the worst-case scenarios for population growth and for carbon pollution — which many climate scientists say is looking less likely these days — the study in Monday’s journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts about 3.5 billion people will live in extremely hot areas. That’s a third of the projected 2070 population.



But even scenarios considered more likely and less severe project that in 50 years a couple of billion people will be living in places too hot without air conditioning, the study said.

“It’s a huge amount and it’s a short-time. This is why we’re worried,’’ said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the study. She and other outside scientists said the new study makes sense and conveys the urgency of the man-made climate change differently than past research.

In an unusual way to look at climate change, a team of international scientists studied humans like they do bears, birds and bees to find the “climate niche” where people and civilizations flourish. They looked back 6,000 years to come up with a sweet spot of temperatures for humanity: Average annual temperatures between 52 and 59 degrees (11 to 15 degrees Celsius).

We can — and do — live in warmer and colder places than that, but the farther from the sweet spot, the harder it gets.

The scientists looked at places projected to get uncomfortably and considerably hotter than the sweet spot and calculated at least 2 billion people will be living in those conditions by 2070.

Currently about 20 million people live in places with an annual average temperature greater than 84 degrees (29 degrees Celsius) — far beyond the temperature sweet spot. That area is less than 1% of the Earth’s land, and it is mostly near the Sahara Desert and includes Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

But as the world gets more crowded and warmer, the study concluded large swaths of Africa, Asia, South America and Australia will likely be in this same temperature range. Well over 1 billion people, and up to 3.5 billion people, will be affected depending on the climate altering choices humanity makes over the next half century, according to lead author Chi Xu of Nanjing University in China.

With enough money, “you can actually live on the moon,” Scheffer said. But these projections are “unlivable for the ordinary, for poor people, for the average world citizen.”

Places like impoverished Nigeria — with a population expected to triple by the end of he century — would be less able to cope, said study co-author Tim Lenton, a climate scientist and director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in England.

Links

• Future of the human climate niche
• One billion people will live in insufferable heat within 50 years – study
• Extreme heat to affect 3.5b by 2070: study
• How the World Will Look in 2050 if We Don't Tackle Climate Change
• Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070
• Billions could soon live in areas too hot for humans without air conditioning, study says
• More than a billion people could live in Sahara-like unbearable heat within 50 years
• Earth's Insect Population Shrunk 27% in Past 30 Years

The Conversation - Jeffrey York

Business closures and recent rain contribute to Los Angeles’ recent uptick in air quality. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

Jeffrey York is Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, University of Colorado Boulder. As the U.S. struggles to control the COVID-19 pandemic, some experts have suggested that we can learn something about how to address climate change from this crisis.

Climate and social policy experts are recommending green stimulus packages to restart the economy.

As a professor of sustainability and entrepreneurship, I see COVID-19 bringing the predicted future human health implications of climate change to horrifying life. Like COVID-19, climate change could increase respiratory illness and strain infrastructure.

However, just as with COVID-19, entrepreneurship can offer solutions to these challenges.

Searching for a solution

Saving small businesses is a central part of recovering from the pandemic. At the same time, entrepreneurs are innovating to preserve their business and help address the challenges of COVID-19.

The same thing is already happening with climate change. When entrepreneurs offer solutions that create simultaneous ecological and economic benefits, it is called “environmental entrepreneurship.” My research shows that such entrepreneurship happens in three ways.

First, successful environmental entrepreneurs tend to see themselves as both environmentalists and businesspeople. Because of this, they often recruit investors, employees and customers from a broader group than traditional startups. Some offer a hope of reducing carbon emissions through new technologies. Others are small business heroes, creating jobs and building new industries.

Second, environmental entrepreneurs are attuned to different signals than large firms are.
While they are encouraged by environmentalist beliefs, we have also found that the importance of family can predict the number of environmental entrepreneurs in a state. Our research shows that solar energy companies are more likely to form in states that value not only the environment, but also family relationships.

Further, while large firms tend to respond to government-driven policy and economic indicators, environmental entrepreneurs respond to more subtle signals, such as local values. In the green building industry, environmental entrepreneurs ignore economic indicators, but are encouraged by local beliefs and activism. In short, they move first, taking on risk before the evidence is in.

Third, environmental entrepreneurs make a difference. We looked at the effect of various policies, activism and business practices on the adoption of new technologies like green building and renewable energy. We then divided the U.S. into more politically conservative and liberal regions to see whether policies, activism or business practices mattered more under different norms.

We found that the only consistent factor that increased green building adoption in both types of political environments was the number of environmental entrepreneurs. These findings suggest that when a critical mass of entrepreneurship occurs, the political divide on climate change fades away, and we see a rapid uptick in adoption of environmentally beneficial practices.

Solar entrepreneurship thrives in states that value the environment and families. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan











Climate conclusions

A variety of proposals before Congress would encourage a green recovery by focusing on policy to simultaneously address climate change and the recession, but these plans will likely become mired in the political debate that entangled the Green New Deal.

Here’s what I’d suggest. Laser-focus on the creation of new small businesses as a way to rebuild, offering consulting, technical training and tax incentives.

By focusing on new ventures, those on both sides of the political aisle can rebuild an economy focused on long-term environmental sustainability and economic stability.

Links

• The Coronavirus and Climate Change: How We’re Making the Same Mistakes
• A Green Stimulus to Rebuild Our Economy
• Climate Change Is The Greatest Threat To Human Health In History
• Exploring Environmental Entrepreneurship: Identity Coupling, Venture Goals, and Stakeholder Incentives
• The impact of social norms on entrepreneurial action: Evidence from the environmental entrepreneurship context (pdf)
• It’s Not Easy Building Green: The Impact of Public Policy, Private Actors, and Regional Logics on Voluntary Standards Adoption
• The Coevolution of Industries, Social Movements, and Institutions: Wind Power in the United States
• A Green Reboot After the Pandemic

The Economist




IN JUNE 1988 scientists, environmental activists and politicians gathered in Toronto for a “World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere”.

The aspect of its changing that alarmed them most was the build-up of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. In the late 1950s, when systematic monitoring of the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide level began, it stood at around 315 parts per million (ppm). By that summer, it had reached 350ppm—and a heatwave was bringing record temperatures to much of North America.

The week before the Toronto conference James Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA, had pointed to the heatwave when telling the US Senate that it was time “to stop waffling…and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”. The Toronto conference took a similar view, calling for an international effort to reduce global carbon-dioxide emissions by 20% by 2005.

A mere four years later a global compact against climate change had been signed. Even with a boost from the end of the cold war, which made global action on shared concerns seem newly possible and provided an opening for a new eschatology to replace that of nuclear Armageddon, that seemed like a remarkable political success on the part of those pressing for action.

Unfortunately, a global agreement to act is not the same thing as global action. Fossil fuels are the bedrock of industrial society. Even though the alternative of renewable energy has, since 1988, become far more plausible, a decisive move away from fossil carbon still means a wrenching and unprecedented shift.

To many convinced environmentalists that shift seems self-evidently worthwhile. It fits with an ideology that commits them to lives that have less impact on the natural world. But in the face of climate change, individual willingness to sacrifice the fruits of a high-energy lifestyle is not enough. People, and countries, that do not share such motivations must act, too.

The challenge of climate politics is to overcome these differences by negotiating ways forward that can gain general assent. It is a challenge that, despite those remarkable four years, has not been met. Instead of emissions in 2005 being 20% lower than they were in 1988, they were 34% higher. By 2017 they were 22% higher still.

Think global, act global

The Toronto attendees’ belief that an international agreement could bring down carbon-dioxide emissions rested in part on an agreement reached a year before to limit the production of ozone-destroying chemicals, most notable among them the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in fridges and spray-cans. That Montreal protocol looked like a template in two ways.

The first was that it was global. Since the 1960s the environmental movement had increasingly taken “saving the planet” as its rhetorical focus. But practical environmental protections, such as clean-air regulations, almost all worked on a national, or at most regional, basis. Because the world’s CFCs are thoroughly mixed together before they reach the stratosphere’s ozone layer, the Montreal protocol had to be genuinely global, and thus balance the needs of developed and developing countries.

The second was that the Montreal protocol required remarkable faith in science. Unlike most pollution controls, which try to reduce harm already being done, it called for expensive action to deal with a problem that, despite the dramatic discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985, was not yet hurting people. It was based instead on the likelihood of future catastrophe.

Climate scientists realised that an emissions-reduction agreement on greenhouse gases would need a similarly strong consensus on their dangers. This led to the creation in late 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Including researchers from governments, academia, industry and non-governmental organisations, the processes of the IPCC required governments to sign off on its conclusions, so reducing their ability to ignore them.

The IPCC’s first assessment of climate-change science, published in 1990, predicted that if greenhouse-gas emissions continued to rise unchecked, the world would warm by 0.2-0.5°C (0.4-0.9°F) every decade over the course of the 21st century, and that sea-level would rise 3-10cm a decade. Changes in the three decades since fit with the low end of both predictions.

Two years later, at an “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, the UN’s members agreed on a framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) which committed them to the “stabilisation of greenhouse-gas concentrations…at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

Despite the fact that such stabilisation implied impressive cuts in emissions, the treaty set no targets along the lines of Toronto’s 20% by 2005. They were to be worked out later. In years to come those negotiations on emission cuts came to dominate discussions between the parties to the treaty, sidelining the vital question of how to help countries, especially poor ones, adapt to the now inevitable changes. To talk of such adaptation was equated with capitulating on emission cuts.

Specific emission cuts were agreed upon five years after Rio, in Kyoto. They were not global in extent, applying only to developed countries, which were responsible for most of the emissions. They were not ambitious either. And the Kyoto protocol was never ratified by America, then the largest global emitter.

The UN imprimatur gave the UNFCCC universal legitimacy. But fashioning a treaty that all could accept had meant producing one with little practical power. The UNFCCC lacked any mechanism for making countries commit to ambitious action, let alone binding them to such commitments.

LARGE IMAGE

If all countries had shared an urgent interest in action, those shortcomings would not have mattered. But they did not. The costs of environmental improvements tend to fall on a few groups—typically, those doing the polluting. In domestic environmental politics, progress typically relies on going some way to placate those groups while increasing the enthusiasm for action among others and the public.

If emissions had been down to just a few companies, as with CFCs, or sectors of the economy, as with the smogs tackled by clean-air acts, such trade-offs might have been possible internationally. But fossil-fuel use permeated rich economies. Those countries knew the cost of reducing them could be severe—and that the benefits would accrue mostly to people in other countries and future times.

These difficulties were exacerbated by attempts to weaken public support for climate action. Fossil-fuel companies and their political allies, understood how important a scientific consensus on future damage was to the case for action. The result was a campaign to make the science look at best dubious, and at worst fraudulent, which went beyond noting that many environmental scientists were committed environmentalists and pointing out truly open questions (the wide range of the uncertainties in the first IPCC report has been slow to narrow). In doing so it helped produce an environment in which some right-wing politicians felt able to oppose all cuts to emissions, with notable successes in America and Australia.

Future targets beat present action

Another source of resistance to emissions reduction was the rise of China. Its GDP, measured at purchasing-power parity and in real terms, increased sevenfold in the 20 years after Rio. Its carbon-dioxide emissions more than tripled, from 2.7bn to 9.6bn tonnes. China showed no real interest in curbing this world-changing side effect, and because it was a developing country it was not even notionally obliged to do so by the Kyoto protocol—despite the fact that, before that protocol was ten years old, China was a bigger emitter than America. Resentment over this was one of the reasons some developed countries became increasingly unhappy with their commitments. China’s unwillingness to offer real action contributed to the near collapse of attempts to move beyond Kyoto at the Copenhagen summit of 2009.

Six years after Copenhagen, though, the UN process made its biggest step forward since Rio: the Paris agreement. This, at last, set a specific global target. Atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels were to be stabilised by the second half of this century at a level that would see an increase of the average global temperature over its preindustrial level well below 2°C, with strenuous efforts made to keep it down to 1.5°C. All the countries, developed and developing, that signed were required to commit to domestic actions towards that aim.

There were several reasons for the success: prior talks between America and China; skilful French diplomacy; canny negotiation by developing countries. Perhaps the most important one, though, was that the cost of renewable energy was tumbling and investments in the field booming. Reducing emissions while continuing high-energy lifestyles felt newly possible.

Perhaps it will be. But the reductions the countries offered in Paris were too small to meet the 2°C target. That insufficiency has seen a new generation of climate activists demand greater ambition at the next big UNFCCC meeting, originally to be held this year in Glasgow but now postponed because of the covid-19 pandemic. There remains no way for them to force action on people and countries who do not share their passion and commitment.

Links

• 1988 World Conference on The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security
• Conference Statement - The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security (pdf)
• IMF Leader Says Pandemic Stimulus Must Focus On Battling Climate Crisis
• (US) Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming
• While We Fixate On Coronavirus, Earth Is Hurtling Towards A Catastrophe Worse Than The Dinosaur Extinction
• The Coronavirus Outbreak Is Part Of The Climate Change Crisis
• Children Of The Crisis
• While We Self-Isolate, It’s A Good Time To Reflect On The Urgency Of The Climate Crisis
• (AU) Summer Of Crisis

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australia Industry Group, says Covid-19 and climate are ‘urgent’ challenges that overlap

Chief executive of industry group representing more than 60,000 businesses says ‘Covid-19 and climate are bigger than any economic challenge we’ve faced in the last century’. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Getty Images

A leading Australian business group is calling for the two biggest economic challenges in memory – recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and cutting greenhouse gas emissions – to be addressed together, saying it would boost growth and put the country on a firm long-term footing.

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says economic recovery from the virus and the transition required to meet net-zero emissions by 2050 are overlapping issues that should be taken on together.

“There’s a lot that we can do to rebuild stronger and cleaner,” Willox planned to say on Tuesday, according to a speech released in advance.

“The need is urgent. Covid-19 and climate are bigger than any economic challenge we’ve faced in the last century.”

Willox is among a band of community leaders and industry groups urging governments to back climate solutions in the pandemic recovery rather than projects that entrench or increase emissions.

They include the Investor Agenda, a global group of institutional investors and managers with members responsible for more than US$55tn worth of assets.

In a statement released on Monday, it said governments should avoid prioritising “risky, short-term emissions intensive projects”, and that accelerating the shift to net-zero emissions could create significant employment and economic growth while improving energy security and clean air.

“The path we choose in the coming months will have significant ramifications for our global economy and generations to come,” the group, which includes Australia’s Investor Group on Climate Change, said.

In Australia, visions for a “clean recovery” or “renewables stimulus” will be the focus of two online industry summits this week. Speakers include the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and energy ministers from four states.

The emphasis of the summits differs from that of the energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, who has backed gas, a fossil fuel, as key to driving the recovery after a slump in global oil and gas prices.

John Grimes, chief executive of the Smart Energy Council, which is hosting a summit on Wednesday, said the country needed to tackle the current economic crisis and the climate crisis at the same time or it would “lurch from one major problem to another”.

“This is Australia’s moment to modernise and grow the economy, create hundreds of thousands of new future-proof jobs and position Australia as a global renewable energy superpower,” Grimes said.

Willox planned to tell a separate forum hosted by the Clean Energy Council on Tuesday that last summer’s bushfires had been a preview of what lay ahead due to climate change. His speech notes said a successful energy transition must leave no-one behind and extend beyond electricity generation to include heavy industry, transport, agriculture, buildings “and more”.

“There is immense scope for reform and investment to support that transition, and getting started during the crisis will contribute to faster recovery,” he said.

He said the industry group had consulted widely on “the most constructive directions for recovery and transition”. Opportunities raised included:

• improving energy management in homes and buildings by plugging drafts, modernising equipment and backing local electricity generation and storage; 
• boosting electricity networks by rolling out smart meters and moving edge-of-grid customers on to mini-grids; 
• helping shift heavy industry to run on clean electricity and hydrogen; and 
• supporting large and small energy storage.

On transport, Willox said it was an excellent time to prepare cities and major corridors for mass take up of electric vehicles by installing or preparing for charging points at service stations, in public and government car parks, and at apartment blocks.

He said governments would have different preferences on whether to use regulatory reform, tax incentives, grants or other approaches. Giving the example of electricity, he said settling on a sound long-term design for market rules and climate policy could do as much to boost investment as direct public financial support.

A report by the Clean Energy Council, also released on Tuesday, estimated that 50,000 construction and 4,000 ongoing jobs could be created, and $50bn worth of renewable electricity and storage projects built, if governments backed green policies and regulatory reform to “jumpstart” the economy.

It said it would require help to overcome policy and grid transmission roadblocks that led to large-scale wind and solar investments falling 50% last year, changes to electricity market rules so the full benefits of energy storage were reflected and support for renewable hydrogen.

On a smaller scale, it would mean governments removing barriers for renters, low-income households and community groups installing solar and supporting home batteries by either reducing costs or offering low-interest loans.

Kane Thornton, the Clean Energy Council’s chief executive, said there were hundreds of large-scale wind and solar projects with planning approval that could proceed quickly, create jobs and bring down prices.

“This isn’t about a handout for industry when government is directing scarce taxpayer funding to other essential services and areas,” Thornton said.

“There is an enormous appetite for private investment in clean energy that can be unlocked through smart regulatory reform, sensible energy policy and investment in the grid and energy storage.”

The International Energy Agency last week reported a “staggering” plunge in global demand for coal, oil and gas during the pandemic, with only renewable electricity proving resilient.

Links

• Australia’s path to net-zero emissions lies in rapid, stimulus-friendly steps
• Trouble with gas: the Coalition is betting on the fossil fuel for recovery – but the sums don't add up
• Tackling climate change is vital for the strongest economic recovery after coronavirus
• Job opportunities call as Australian businesses redeploy coronavirus layoffs
• Climate crisis: Australian businesses back net zero carbon emissions by 2050
• Australians reject Coalition attacks on businesses promoting social issues
• Greens blast key part of Labor's climate policy as 'fake action'
• Australian businesses must do more to disclose climate change risks to investors, ASIC says
• Australian firms told to catch up on climate change risk checks
• Australian shareholders should be told of climate risk to profits, says thinktank
• Finance sector could face climate-risk testing, says Australian watchdog
• The Australian Industry Group (Ai Group®)
• The Investor Agenda: Accelerating action for a low-carbon world
• Trouble with gas: the Coalition is betting on the fossil fuel for recovery – but the sums don't add up
• Australia's booming LNG industry stalls after fall in oil prices amid coronavirus
• Stimulus Summit: A Renewables-Led Economic Recovery
• Covid-19 crisis will wipe out demand for fossil fuels, says IEA

The Guardian - Lola Seaton

Degrowthers are susceptible to caricature – but their ideas raise important questions about how, how much, and why we work

‘Reading the current moment as a repudiation of degrowth is premature and unjustified.’ Photograph: Michael Brochstein/Sopa/Getty Images

Amid the misery and chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there are some short-term consolations.

The precipitous drop in road and air traffic has left the air cleaner and the skies clearer.

For advocates of a Green New Deal (GND) – a vast, state-funded green infrastructure project, including a total transition to renewable energy and the construction of mass transit systems – there are reasons to be optimistic.

As the severity of the unfolding global recession becomes clear – the IMF predicts a 3% global contraction – the GND looks like the best route to recovery.

The GND had been growing in popularity before the outbreak – including among establishment politicians, with all the leading Democratic presidential candidates expressing support for some form of it.

But with with 26 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the past five weeks alone, and given that green industries are more efficient job creators than fossil-fuel ones, there is a powerful, immediate economic rationale for some kind of “green stimulus”.

That is without even taking into account the longer-term economic case for decarbonizing: a 2018 US climate report calculated that the devastating effects of unchecked global warming will shrink the US economy by as much as 10% by the end of this century.

But the economic fallout of Covid-19 has cast a harsher light on another strand of the climate movement, commonly termed “degrowth”.

Influential among Extinction Rebellion activists, but often regarded as unrealistic by mainstream policymakers, degrowthers, as their name suggests, argue that uncontrolled economic growth is ecologically unsustainable and that to avert climate catastrophe we need to not only shut down the fossil-fuel industries but to reduce consumption overall.

Degrowthers insist that we must find ways of living and working that do not require our economies to endlessly expand.

Degrowthers have been particularly susceptible to caricature in recent weeks.

“The coronavirus crisis reveals the misery of degrowth,” the Spectator predictably argued.

 But current living conditions – sudden mass joblessness, confinement and isolation, widespread food and income insecurity – are not a meaningful foretaste of greener things to come.

The nightmare we are currently enduring is not degrowth’s secret dream come true; it is at most a grotesque parody of it, and one which is now liable to be weaponized by opponents of the movement.

Reading the current moment as a repudiation of degrowth is premature and unjustified. It overlooks the distinction between what we are experiencing now – an unplanned, abrupt cessation of vast swaths of economic and social activity – and what advocates of degrowth envisage: a thoughtful, democratic, managed and equitable downsizing of the economy.

Most degrowth advocates do not champion economic contraction as such, but argue for the necessity of adapting to the continuing, long-term global stagnation sometimes called “secular stagnation”.

 The fact that we can only think of slowing down our economies in terms of recession and austerity – with the associated cuts to public spending, growth in inequality and decline in real earnings – says much more about our political landscape than the economic facts.

Yet there is one important criticism of degrowth that has been decisively bolstered by the sharp reversal in global economic fortunes resulting from the coronavirus lockdowns: the consequences for jobs.

GDP is a notoriously crude and partial measure of a society’s wellbeing, failing to account for a whole host of indicative factors including equality, access to energy, the quality of healthcare, education and social support systems.

But when GDP falls or slows because workers cannot produce goods or offer services, unemployment surges.

Coronavirus has brought that reality dramatically home.

As the economist and energy adviser Robert Pollin has written: “the immediate effect of any global GDP contraction would be huge job losses and declining living standards for working people and the poor.

During the Great Recession, global unemployment rose by over 30 million. I have not seen a convincing argument from a degrowth advocate as to how we could avoid a severe rise in mass unemployment if GDP were to fall by twice as much.”

The twin crises besetting us – the public health emergency and the unfolding economic trauma triggered by the measures to contain it – have laid bare much about the configuration of our world that we already knew but rarely fully apprehend: its interconnectedness, its fragility, its stark inequalities.

But these crises have also brought into visceral relief the fact that employment is the heart and soul of the economy. As the British economist James Meadway has argued, the economic depression now upon us threatens “the most fundamental institution of all in capitalism: the labor market itself”.

Since we have so little time left in which to stabilize the climate, we must be ruthlessly pragmatic in assessing the limitations of green strategies. Degrowth is no exception.

The scale and speed of investment required to completely renovate the energy and transportation sectors does not seem conceivable without growth continuing, at least for the time being.

Politically, as long as a steadily rising GDP remains an electoral necessity, it is difficult to imagine a recovery that doesn’t involve desperate efforts to restore growth – and not necessarily through greener means – by politicians anxious to revive flagging ratings.

Yet to fixate on the question of growth risks exaggerating the differences between the Green New Dealers and degrowthers – elevating the former as practical-minded technocratic capitalists who want a return to normal economic activity, just motored by a different energy source, and dismissing the latter as abstemious, back-to-the-land utopians who want to deprive of us most of the luxuries of modern capitalist life.

This in turn could lead to our learning only some of the lessons of the current predicament, and taking only some of the opportunities it offers.

What both strands of climate thinking ask us to consider – and what the current crisis poses with special, brutal force, as phrases like “key workers” and “essential services” enter common parlance – is the question of what kinds of jobs we need, and what kinds our planet needs of us.

Which goods and services are indispensable, and which would we be better off without? Degrowth and the GND offer different answers to this question – from green infrastructure construction to the care economy – but they both pose it, as well as raising important broader questions about how, how much and why we work.

Once it is safe to emerge from economic survival mode, I hope we will have the wisdom to follow the lead of both movements by systematically reflecting on which kinds of productive activity actually enrich our lives – and which among these our planet can sustain.

Links

• U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy
• This Theory Explains Why the U.S. Economy Might Never Get Better
• De-Growth Vs A Green New Deal
• The coronavirus crisis reveals the misery of ‘degrowth’
• Coronavirus Will Require Us to Completely Reshape the Economy
• Could Microsoft’s climate crisis ‘moonshot’ plan really work?

The Hill - Zack Budryk

© istock

Sweden has shuttered its last remaining coal-fired power plant two years before its scheduled closure, making it the third European nation to transition away from coal, following Belgium and Austria.

The plant is located in eastern Stockholm and is run by Stockholm Exergi, which is partially owned by the city, according to The Independent. Stockholm Exergi called the closure a “milestone” and said it will halve the company’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Stockholm is on track to produce its district heating, the method of heating used in numerous European cities, entirely by renewable or recyclable energy, according to the publication.

“This plant has provided the Stockholmers with heat and electricity for a long time — today we know that we must stop using all fossil fuels, therefore the coal needs to be phased out and we [did] so several years before the original plan,” Anders Egelrud, chief executive of Stockholm Exergi, said in a statement.

“Since Stockholm was almost totally fossil-dependent 30-40 years ago, we have made enormous changes and now we are taking the step away from carbon dependence and continuing the journey towards an energy system entirely based on renewable and recycled energy,” Egelrud added.

Stockholm Exergi had previously been on track to end coal operations at the plant by 2022 but had already significantly scaled down coal output by last autumn, according to The Independent.

However, a milder-than-expected winter reduced demand for electricity, allowing the plant to close ahead of schedule. France, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy and Slovakia are projected to transition away from coal by 2025 at the latest.

“Against the backdrop of the serious health challenges we are currently facing, leaving coal behind in exchange for renewables is the right decision and will repay us in kind with improved health, climate protection and more resilient economies,” Kathrin Gutmann, campaign director for Europe Beyond Coal, told industry publication PV Magazine.

Links

• Two Years Early, Sweden Shuts Down Its Final Coal-Fired Power Plant
• Sweden becomes the third European country to close its last coal power plant
• In One Week, Both Sweden and Austria Celebrated the Closing of Their Last Coal Plants
• Sweden adds name to growing list of coal-free states in Europe
• Climate crisis: Sweden closes last coal-fired power station two years ahead of schedule
• Looming Coal and Nuclear Plant Closures Put ‘Just Transition’ Concept to the Test

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

Investment mandate of the Clean Energy Financing Corporation will be changed, but no guarantee hydrogen will be produced from renewables

The energy minister, Angus Taylor, has announced the Clean Energy Finance Corporation will provide $300m for investment in the hydrogen industry. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP

The Morrison government will change the investment mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, directing it to make up to $300m available for a new Advancing Hydrogen Fund as part of the national hydrogen strategy.

The Coalition’s move to create a dedicated hydrogen financing fund will be confirmed on Monday, and comes ahead of other changes the government intends to make to the CEFC’s investment program, including requiring it to support new investments in grid reliability.

Requiring the CEFC to support grid stability will require legislative change. It is unclear when that legislation will be introduced, given parliament is currently working on a reduced sitting schedule. The government will need to table a legislative instrument to update the investment mandate to facilitate the new hydrogen fund.

The independent MP Zali Steggall has recently asked the auditor general to investigate the Coalition’s scheme to underwrite gas, hydro and coal power, saying it lacks transparency and citing legal advice that the Coalition had no constitutional or legislative authority to introduce it.

In a joint statement, the energy minister, Angus Taylor, and finance minister, Mathias Cormann, said the CEFC would provide concessional finance for projects to support a national hydrogen industry.

It would consider new investments in advancing hydrogen production, developing export and domestic supply chains, establishing hydrogen hubs and backing projects that build domestic demand for hydrogen.

Australia’s energy ministers signed off on a national hydrogen strategy in November at the Coag energy council meeting – the first meeting of the federal/state decision-making body for more than 12 months.

Hydrogen has been championed by Australia’s chief scientist, Alan Finkel. In a joint statement after the November meeting, ministers noted markets for hydrogen were growing in Asia and Europe, and said Australia could replicate its success “in becoming a leader in the global LNG market over the past 40 years”.

“We have the resources, technology, workforce and experience needed to be a world leading hydrogen producer and exporter,” the joint statement said. “Australia’s renewable energy generation capacity provides particular advantages in the production of green hydrogen.”

The ACT attempted to amend the national hydrogen strategy at the meeting to support only hydrogen produced from renewable electricity, but that amendment was not supported by other jurisdictions.

Taylor said the government had “a strong commitment to building a hydrogen industry which will create jobs, many in regional areas, and billions of dollars in economic growth between now and 2050”.

“Importantly, if we can get hydrogen produced at under $2 a kilogram, it will be able to play a role in our domestic energy mix to bring down energy prices and keep the lights on,” he said.

Separately to the hydrogen strategy, Taylor has been spruiking a gas-led economic recovery as Australia slowly recovers from the economic shock associated with Covid-19. But the government is yet to release a technology roadmap it was developing before the pandemic hit, which will guide the transition to lower emissions.

Links

• Australia’s path to net-zero emissions lies in rapid, stimulus-friendly steps
• Victoria asks Angus Taylor to fast-track work on Snowy-Melbourne energy line
• Coalition pumps $1bn into clean energy projects to stabilise grid
• 'The perfect storm': hydrogen gains ground on LNG as alternative fuel
• Toyota's Altona site to become hydrogen production and refuelling centre
• Coalition launches push for hydrogen power in energy policy reboot
•  Labor promises to 'supercharge' hydrogen industry as green groups say 'no role for coal'
• Energy minister declares Snowy Hydro expansion 'fundamental' to Australia
• Angus Taylor condemns us to another round of energy stupidity

InsideClimate News - Dan Gearino

The documentary's "facts" are deceptive and misleading, not to mention way out of date

Filmmaker Michael Moore released the documentary "Planet of the Humans" last week, a critique of the movement to renewable energy. Credit: Rich Fury/Getty Images

Dan Gearino covers the U.S. Midwest, part of InsideClimate News' National Environment Reporting Network.
His coverage deals with the business side of the clean-energy transition and he writes ICN's Inside Clean Energy newsletter. Filmmaker Michael Moore's new documentary purports to expose hypocrisy at the heart of the renewable energy movement.

But the video, released on YouTube last week, is a mess of deceptive and outdated anecdotes, and a succession of ridiculous arguments. It will almost certainly do far more harm than good in the struggle to reduce carbon emissions.

As a reporter who covers renewable energy and has a background in covering the business of energy, watching "Planet of the Humans" was a slog, the equivalent of being cornered at a backyard barbecue by someone who wants to share conspiracy theories.

The writer and director, Jeff Gibbs, and the executive producer, Moore, have put together something that is woefully dated—the kind of commentary that was more common years ago, when renewable energy was more expensive and less efficient and we knew much less about what an energy transition might look like. Today we know more and we know better, but to watch this film you'd think it was about 2010.

I reached out to the producers, but did not get a response. Here are some questions that the film raises, and my answers:

Are EVs Just as Polluting as Gasoline Vehicles?

The time-capsule quality of the film is underscored by a scene filmed in Michigan about a decade ago showing an event tied to the rollout of the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid vehicle that began production in 2010. The narrator makes the point that the vehicle was powered by a local utility that runs almost completely on coal, as if to say that the environmental benefits of an EV are illusory.

The film is recycling an old argument: that the use of fossil electricity means electric vehicles have about the same emissions as gasoline vehicles. But researchers have looked closely at this and found that there is a clear emissions benefit of using an EV.

For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists has found that EVs have lower emissions—including emissions from generating electricity—than typical gasoline models, even in the parts of the United States that still rely the most heavily on fossil fuels for electric power.

The environmental benefits of EVs will increase as utilities continue to reduce their emissions and as batteries used in the vehicles become more efficient.

Do Solar Panels Only Last 10 Years?

Planet of the Humans shows an unidentified man at a solar trade show who says, "Some solar panels are built to last only 10 years, so it's not as if you get this magic free energy."

I can only guess that this comment is from years ago, when panels were less durable and efficient than they are today. I know of no solar panel on the market today with such a short life span.

A workman installs solar panels in Colorado. Credit: John Moore/Getty Images

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has done extensive work to determine how much solar panels degrade over time. Researchers there have found a median degradation rate of 0.5 percent per year, which means a median panel is still producing at 90 percent of its capability after 20 years.

Most solar systems come with warranties of at least 20 years.

How Much Wind and Solar Does Germany Generate?

The narrator of the movie makes the point that Germany's substantial spending on renewable energy has had almost no effect. A graphic appears on screen showing that Germany's solar energy consumption is 1.5 percent and wind energy consumption is 3.1 percent. It doesn't list the year.

As you can see from my story published today about the German energy transition, this is a subject I've followed closely, and I knew something was awry with the film's statistics.

The filmmakers appear to be using percentages that include energy used for home heating and transportation to arrive at such low numbers for wind and solar, without making clear that this is what they're doing. It is, at best, misleading.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel walks past wind turbines while visiting a wind farm in 2010 in Krempin, Germany. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Last year, renewable sources generated more than 40 percent of the electricity in Germany, more than double the share in the United States. Onshore wind energy is the country's leading renewable power source, with 17 percent of generation. Solar accounts for 8 percent. The other leading renewable sources are biomass (7 percent), offshore wind (4 percent), and hydroelectric (4 percent).

Germany's success in developing renewable energy and maintaining a reliable grid is a compelling counterpoint to much of what the film is arguing.

Do Solar and Wind Energy Components Have a Carbon Footprint as Large as Fossil Fuels?

This question gets at the issue of "life-cycle emissions" of power plants, which takes into account the carbon emissions of every part of the life of a plant, including obtaining and manufacturing its components.

There is a deep body of research showing that wind, solar and nuclear power have much lower life-cycle emissions than natural gas and coal.

One example is a 2017 paper published in the journal Nature Energy that showed very small carbon footprints for wind, solar and nuclear, while coal and natural gas power plants had much larger carbon footprints, even if they were using carbon capture equipment to store their emissions. Carbon Brief wrote about this research at the time.

An older, but still widely cited, example is a 2013 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that analyzed previous research on the subject to date and used it to produce ranges of findings. It showed a wide gap between life-cycle emissions of fossil fuel power plants compared to wind, solar and nuclear. For instance, the report showed that the median estimate of life-cycle emissions for a coal-fired power plant was about 100 times per unit of electricity than that of a utility-scale wind farm.

Tesla's Factories Generate 100 Percent of Their Own Electricity. So Why Are They Connected to the Grid?

The film shows Tesla officials boasting about how their factories get 100 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. Then the camera pans from a factory to the power lines connecting it to the grid.

Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images 

There are many reasons that a building needs to be connected to the grid even if it has access to its own electricity sources. First, the power lines can be used to export any excess electricity. Second, the grid is available as a backup whenever needed.

This doesn't mean that Tesla's claim of 100 percent renewable energy is incorrect. Most of the time, when companies make this claim, they mean that they buy or generate enough megawatt-hours of renewable energy to meet their needs over the course of a year, not that they have gone off-grid.

Do the Environmental Concerns about Biomass Energy Mean that All Renewable Energy is Suspect?

The short answer is an emphatic "No," but there's a longer answer that gets to the heart of one of the film's biggest shortcomings.

The film spends much of its time criticizing energy systems that use biomass, including those that use wood chips to make electricity or corn to make ethanol for motor fuel.

There are some well-documented concerns with using biomass in terms of land use to produce feedstocks, and emissions related to the burning of the fuels. Many environmental advocacy groups do not support the expansion of biomass energy systems, and see a clear difference between biomass and other renewable technologies like wind and solar.

But by lumping together biomass with wind and solar in an argument about renewable energy, the film is oversimplifying. While biomass is clearly a form of renewable energy, the better question is whether it is clean energy. I'm not going to attempt to answer that one today other than to say it is a source of fierce disagreement.

Links

• ‘A Bomb In The Center Of The Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal 
• Michael Moore’s Planet Of The Humans: A Reheated Mess Of Lazy, Old Myths
• Climate Experts Call For 'Dangerous' Michael Moore Film To Be Taken Down
• New Michael Moore-Backed Documentary On YouTube Reveals Massive Ecological Impacts Of Renewables
• Planet of the Humans (video)
• Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans: A reheated mess of lazy, old myths
• New documentary 'Inner Climate Change' focuses on effects of Climate Change and Consciousness
• Pop Culture And Climate Change
• Inner Climate Change: The Change Starts Within You (2020)
• An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
• 2040
• Ice on Fire
• Chasing Coral

ABC Central West - Micaela Hambrett

Typically a bird that does well in built-up areas, the decline in magpie numbers across the country has shocked experts. (Supplied: David Flannery)


Key points

• BirdLife Australia is concerned magpie and kookaburra numbers are declining
• Theories include the use of second-generation rodenticides, changing agricultural practices, climate change and more frequent droughts
• One positive, though, is coronavirus shutdowns mean more people may be free to participate in the annual Birds in Backyard survey this year

Sean Dooley describes magpies as being one of the few native bird success stories of European settlement.

So when dwindling observations were recorded across 15 years of Birdlife Australia surveys, alarms bells started ringing.

Mr Dooley, BirdLife Australia's national public affairs manager, said magpies were "open grassland and woodland birds".

"With agricultural and urban areas we've actually created pretty amenable habitat for them in that there's a lot of open space with scattered trees so they can nest in, roost in and survive in the landscape," he said.

But BirdLife Australia data shows that Australian magpies declined by 31 per cent in the East Coast region — including Sydney and Brisbane — between 1998 and 2013.

"They declined by roughly 20 per cent in the South East Mainland Region, which includes Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide [for the same period]," Mr Dooley said.

The data also reflected a dramatic decline in kookaburras and birds of prey, suggesting carnivores were potentially more vulnerable to these unknown environmental changes.

Kookaburra numbers have declined by up to 40 per cent on the east coast of Australia. (Supplied: David Flannery)

Agriculture, climate change and drought

One possible theory was that the use of second-generation rodenticides was having a bigger toll on birds through secondary poisoning.

"Birds like boobook owls, other birds of prey, and magpies are actually eating rats that have been affected by the poison and it can actually kill them, whereas the earlier rodenticides didn't seem to affect the birds as much." Mr Dooley explained.

Other factors the group was considering included changing agriculture practices, climate change and more frequent droughts.

Although this did not mean magpies or kookaburras were endangered yet, it did indicate food and habitat conditions were under serious pressure.
"It's a huge wake-up call. If these really successful birds are starting to suffer, something's going on in the environment," Mr Dooley said.With the next report due out next year, he said he expected the downward trend to continue.

"The additional five years [since the last report] have just been more drought conditions. I can't imagine things would be bouncing back," he said.

Largest natural history data set

BirdLife Australia's data is critical to painting a large scale, real-time picture of Australia's bird populations providing insight to researchers and academics.

BirdLife Australia's Sean Dooley hopes unique insights into backyard birds will emerge from the coronavirus lockdown. (Supplied: BirdLife Australia)

The data that made up these reports was nearly all gathered by volunteers.

"We have literally thousands of people sending in tens of thousands of surveys every year. It's probably the biggest citizen science project in Australia and one of the biggest natural history data sets in the country," Mr Dooley said.

Urban and suburban observational data was critical to "filling in the gaps" for common birds that share our spaces, as birdwatchers typically head to more pristine environments seeking rarer species.

Although an entry level survey, Mr Dooley said backyard bird observational data had been able to reflect nuanced trends, such as population decline between regional and metro areas indicating widespread environmental degradation.

Take cover! A young cyclist takes evasive action as a magpie swoops in Casino, New South Wales. (ABC Open contributor Dee Hartin)

This year, the coronavirus lockdown has coincided with the organisation's annual autumn Birds in Backyard survey and it might provide an accidental boon for BirdLife's data sets.

"One bit of positivity is with everybody at home, if we can get them to do their surveys, we're going to get a huge boost in our knowledge of what birds are using urban, suburban and town areas," Mr Dooley said.

Links

• Climate Change Is Pushing Bird Boundaries, Community Scientists Confirm
• (AU) Birds are the “canaries in the climate-change coal mine”
• (AU) Birds threatened by rapid climate change
• Rising temperatures could make some U.S. state birds ‘stateless’
• Climate change isn't just shifting how the world feels, it's changing how it sounds
• Decline in 'successful' bird species like magpies and kookaburras rings alarm bells
• Climate change is causing birds to shrink, study suggests
• Population responses of bird populations to climate change on two continents vary with species’ ecological traits but not with direction of change in climate suitability

The Conversation - Elizabeth Thurbon | Hao Tan | John Mathews | Sung-Young Kim

Chris Fithall/Flickr

• Elizabeth Thurbon, Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor in International Relations / International Political Economy, UNSW
• Hao Tan, Associate professor, University of Newcastle
• John Mathews, Professor Emeritus, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University
• Sung-Young Kim, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics & International Relations, Macquarie University

The chaos of COVID-19 has now hit global energy markets, creating an outcome unheard of in industrial history: negative oil prices.

With the world’s largest economies largely in lockdown, demand for oil has stagnated.

Essentially, the negative prices mean oil producers are willing to pay for the oil to be taken off their hands because soon, they will have nowhere to store it.

Federal energy minister Angus Taylor has proposed a partial solution: Australia will spend A$94 million buying up oil, to bolster domestic supplies and help stabilise global prices.

That strategy is a fool’s path to energy security.

Right now, the best way to shore up Australia’s future energy supplies is to invest economic stimulus money in renewables – essentially to manufacture our own energy security.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison with Angus Taylor, right, who wants Australia to buy surplus oil. Mick Tsikas/AAP


A flawed plan

Australia’s oil reserves have for years languished well below the International Energy Agency’s recommended 90 days. Taylor says his plan would address this, and help stabilise (read: push up) oil prices and restore faith in the global oil market on which Australia depends.

But the plan is undermined by a simple fact: unstable global oil prices have been a recurring problem for decades, largely for political reasons well beyond Australia’s control. We need look only to the price shocks triggered by the Yom-Kippur war of 1973, the Iraq war of 2003, and the Saudi drone attack of 2019 - to name just a few.

Price instability is all but guaranteed to increase in future, as climate change concerns drive insurers and investors away from fossil fuels and towards green energy.

The current chaos actually creates a much better opportunity for Australia: use the massive COVID-19 economic stimulus to manufacture real energy security in the form of renewables.

Buying large volumes of surplus oil will not ensure stable prices. Flickr


Renewables: a win-win

The price and supply of energy from fossil fuels is vulnerable to natural resource depletion, geopolitical tensions and climate change concerns. This is true not just for oil, but coal and gas too.

The only real path to energy security is manufactured energy such as solar panels, wind turbines, electrolysers, batteries and smart grids.

These technologies can turn infinite natural resources into energy, then store and distribute it to ensure stable supply.

Victoria and South Australia now enjoy higher levels of energy security thanks to large-scale stationary batteries that even out electricity peaks and troughs.

For example, a large-scale battery in Victoria stores energy produced by the Gannawarra solar farm. The battery provides energy during peak times when there is no sun.

Manufacturing energy is also important from an economic security perspective, promoting the creation of high-tech, high-wage industries.

These industries can create thousands of skilled jobs and open up massive new export markets – all while helping to mitigate climate change. This reality has been accepted by major East Asian economies, including China to South Korea, for more than a decade.

The Australian government must use its enormous stimulus to help local companies dramatically expand their wind, solar, hydrogen and energy storage investments. This would satisfy domestic energy needs and grow the new green export markets ready and waiting in Asia.

Asia presents huge export potential for Australia’s renewable energy. DAN HIMBRECHTS/AAP



A jobs boon

There is no shortage of projects waiting to be turbocharged. The government could start with Sun Cable, linking Australia’s and Singapore’s clean energy markets via an undersea cable.

It could also kickstart Australia’s clean hydrogen industry. According to the government’s own National Hydrogen Strategy, developing hydrogen would dramatically reduce Australia’s oil import reliance and energy costs and vastly expand its clean energy exports.

By simply following its own strategy, the government could create about 7,600 skilled and semi-skilled jobs and add about A$11 billion each year to Australia’s gross domestic product to 2050.

The cheaper energy prices that follow could help Australia revive its techno-industrial base by making energy-intensive manufacturing a viable proposition once again.

According to leading economist Ross Garnaut, Australia could then bring home its long-lost materials-processing industries and re-emerge as a world-leading exporter of (clean) steel and aluminium.

Geopolitical benefits would also flow from Australia becoming a green hydrogen superpower, such as reducing our worrying export dependence on China.

An investment injection in renewables would be a huge jobs boost. Flickr


Seize the moment

The idea of using the COVID-19 stimulus to turbocharge Australia’s clean energy shift is not pie in the sky. Indeed, doing so is the explicit recommendation of the International Energy Agency, which this week noted: These huge spending programmes are likely to be once-in-a-generation in scale and will shape countries’ infrastructure for decades to come… Governments can … achieve both short-term economic gains and long-term benefits by making clean energy part of their stimulus plans. COVID-19 has undoubtedly been disastrous for Australia and the world. But it creates new opportunities in energy, economic security and climate action. To seize these opportunities, the Morrison government must chart a new industrial course for the nation by manufacturing Australia’s energy security.

Links

• Making Australia a renewable energy exporting superpower
• It might sound 'batshit insane' but Australia could soon export sunshine to Asia via a 3,800km cable
• Australia could fall apart under climate change. But there's a way to avoid it
• Economics: Manufacture renewables to build energy security
• Australian economic stimulus package: how much governments have committed to coronavirus crisis
• Batteries and Energy Storage
• Australia’s National Hydrogen Strategy
• Grand opportunities for Australia’s hydrogen industry – and for a strategic regional rebalancing
• What the 2008 financial crisis can teach us about designing stimulus packages today

TheJournal.ie - John Gibbons

John Gibbons lays out the stark climate facts and urges us to take coronavirus as a warning that it’s now time to act, or perish.

Protesters in Paris waiting for the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Source: Apaydin Alain

John Gibbons is an environmental writer and commentator who specialises in covering the climate and biodiversity emergency.
He is a contributor to The Irish Times, The Guardian and DeSmog.uk and is a regular guest environmental commentator on broadcast media.
He blogs at Thinkorswim.ie and also runs the website Climatechange.ie. IMAGINE FOR A moment that our government and others around the world had been given detailed information and warnings about the coronavirus years, even decades before it finally erupted.

Imagine also that experts had shown the path to minimising or even avoiding this global disaster, but our political and business leaders, uneasy about the costs of taking action and possible disruption to commerce, chose to ignore the expert warnings as alarmist and carried on regardless.

In reality, full-blown pandemics are vanishingly rare. Almost no human is alive today who lived in the time of the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1918-19.

In the modern era, our collective cultural experience is that of taming, rather than being at the mercy of, nature in general and deadly diseases in particular. Consider smallpox: during the 20th century, it killed an estimated 300 million people worldwide. A global vaccination campaign eventually led to its eradication in 1980. Likewise, polio, another dreaded disease, has been almost completely vanquished by vaccination.

The damage done

Until very recently, premature death had been the norm for most humans. However, in the last five decades, largely freed from the threat of predators, large and small, our numbers on this earth have more than doubled, to over 7.8 billion, while average life expectancy in the same period has increased by well over a decade per person.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this unprecedented global expansion of the human footprint has brought the biosphere, our living planet, to the brink of collapse. There are many ways of measuring this, such as the precipitous decline in biodiversity, the average annual loss of 15 billion trees, many of them from razed ancient rainforests.

A major report on biodiversity and ecosystems published last May found that the natural world is declining globally ‘at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely’.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report concluded that around one million animal and plant species now face extinction in the coming decades. ‘The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed…this loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being’, the IPBES report warned.

The unavoidable warming

We face an equally daunting and arguably more intractable challenge from climate change. In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report on the likely impacts of global warming at and beyond 1.5ºC over pre-industrial temperatures.
Arising from this landmark report, it emerged that in order to keep global temperatures within relatively safe limits, carbon emissions would have to fall by at least 45% by 2030, which is just ten years from now.This is in line with commitments made by almost all the world’s leaders, including Ireland, when we signed up for the 2015 Paris Agreement, which legally committed us to doing everything possible to avoid extremely dangerous climate change at 2ºC and beyond.

This commitment was underlined in January 2020 by the all-party Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action when it agreed a minimum targeted emissions reduction of 7%+ per annum and this, in turn, has become the Green Party’s key precondition for entering into a coalition government.

Activists of the fridays for future movement placed a poster at a tree in Erfurt, Germany, April 24, 2020. Source: Jens Meyer

According to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the economic impact of the coronavirus is likely to see global carbon emissions fall by some 6% in 2020.
We need to flatten both the pandemic and climate change curves; we need to show the same determination and unity against climate change as against Covid-19”, according to WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. Action, he added, would be needed “for many generations ahead".What this underlines is that to achieve a compound 7% annual emissions cut every year from now until 2030 would require the most radical rethink of how we organise our society and economy since the foundation of the state.

Can you see it happening?

Many are deeply sceptical. Former ‘Climate Action’ minister, Denis Naughten dismissed the 7% target as ‘unachievable’, claiming it would equate to banning every private car and slaughtering every (farm) animal in the country.

Naughten is at least being consistent. Back in 2017, he threatened to block implementation of the Paris Agreement at the EU level, claiming it was ‘unaffordable’ for Ireland to implement.

Since 2011, a succession of Fine Gael-led governments has stymied meaningful climate action. As a result, Ireland has now the third-highest per capita emissions in the EU, with the average Irish citizen accounting for more than double the emissions of their high-income Swedish counterparts.

As Sweden shows, ultra-low carbon solutions in transport, energy, home heating, agriculture and industry are indeed possible, but in Ireland, these have been held back by vested interest groups pursuing short-term agendas and TDs engaged in parish pump politics.

A young environmentalists holds a placard during the protest at Parliament Square in London. Source: SIPA USA/PA Images

Even Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has had to concede he was “not proud of Ireland’s performance on climate…as far as I am concerned, we are a laggard”.

At what cost?

Apart from constant lobbying by commercial and agri-industrial groups, another reason politicians have run scared of climate action is that the issue is consistently framed in the Irish media in terms of the cost of tackling climate change. However, international studies have shown repeatedly that the price of inaction far outweighs the costs of addressing the crisis.

It is estimated that the cost of the coronavirus to the global economy is in the range of $2–$4 trillion this year. A 2018 report calculated that failure to rein in climate change would deliver a devastating $34 trillion hit to the global economy – many times greater than the economic chaos arising from the pandemic.

Other estimates are even less sanguine. An Australian study published in 2019 argues that ‘climate change represents a near to mid-term existential threat to human civilisation’.
Should global temperatures reach 3C over pre-industrial by mid-century, ‘the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end’, the report warns.So, the next time someone asks if we can ‘afford’ to tackle climate change, a better question might instead be: what price isn’t worth paying to avoid the collapse of civilisation?

Links

• (AU) Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach (pdf)
• UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
• Climate change mitigation 'far cheaper than inaction'
• Could Global Warming Cause a Global Economic Collapse?
• How trees could save the climate
• IPCC Special Report: Global Warming Of 1.5º Summary For Policymakers

The Economist




TO IMAGINE EARTH without greenhouse gases in its atmosphere is to turn the familiar blue marble into a barren lump of rock and ice on which the average surface temperature hovers around -18ºC.

Such a planet would not receive less of the sunlight which is the ultimate source of all Earth’s warmth. But when the energy it absorbed from the sunlight was re-emitted as infrared radiation, as the laws of physics require, it would head unimpeded back out into space.

Greenhouse gases block that swift exit. Transparent to incoming sunlight, they absorb outgoing infrared radiation, thus warming the atmosphere and, in so doing, the surface below. The result is an average surface temperature of some 15ºC—warm enough for open seas and oceans and a vibrant biosphere.

In the late 19th century the discovery of the ice ages led scientists to the conclusion that climate could change on a global scale. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, wondered if a weakened greenhouse effect might be to blame. Carbon dioxide was known to be a greenhouse gas: Eunice Foote, an American scientist, had found in the 1850s that the rate at which a sealed jar of air warmed up in sunlight depended on the level of carbon dioxide in that air. So Arrhenius—recently divorced, somewhat melancholy and in need of a project—began laboriously to calculate the effects on the climate of halving the atmosphere’s level of carbon dioxide.

Doing so required him to tackle a problem of the sort that most frustrates and most delights scientists who study the Earth system: a feedback loop through which a change in one factor affects another factor which, in turn, affects the first factor more.

Because water evaporates more slowly in cooler climes, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere falls with the temperature. And water vapour, like carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas. Cooling the atmosphere dried the atmosphere which cooled the atmosphere further. Many pencils and thousands of sheets of paper into his exploration of this, Arrhenius concluded that halving the carbon-dioxide level would cool the planet by 5ºC (9ºF).

He also noted that the same relation would hold the other way round: double the carbon dioxide and you would get 5ºC of warming. Industry’s coal burning could thus warm the world—but only, he thought, very slowly indeed. He never imagined that the carbon-dioxide level would increase by a third in just a century.

Around the same time as Arrhenius was pondering the climate, a Norwegian scientist called Vilhelm Bjerknes was working on the physics of how heat drives fluid flow. His students applied these insights to large scale flows in the atmosphere and the oceans, laying the foundations of 20th-century weather forecasting. In 1950 one of those students’ students, Ragnar Fjørtoft, was part of the team which first programmed a computer to forecast the weather by solving such equations.

The computer models central to today’s climate research bring together Arrhenius’s curiosity and Bjerknes’s techniques. Programmes developed from weather-forecasting software calculate how the level of carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases is likely to affect the world’s flows of heat, energy and water, and through them the future climate. To do so they use computers that can be some 25trn times faster than the one used in 1950.

These climate models do not treat the atmosphere as a whole. They divide it into millions of “cells”. The conditions in each of these cells depend on the conditions in its neighbours above, below and to the sides as well as on its own history. The idea is to calculate how conditions in each cell change over time.

Unlike a weather forecast, which tries to predict how a specific state of the atmosphere will evolve over a few days, these climate models simulate years, even centuries, of weather in order to discover the averages and probability distributions that define the climate—the envelope which constrains the norms and extremes of future weather.

Dozens of teams at meteorological and research organisations around the world run such models, each using different code to capture the climate’s underlying mechanisms and study everything from future peak rainfall to the tracks of storms to shifts in seasonality. Since 1995 the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP, has brought these teams together by providing standardised tasks for their models and then looking at the range of results.

Thus, for example, the 56 different models considered in the fifth of the CMIP projects, which concluded in 2013, found that doubling the carbon-dioxide level would, in time, bring about a warming of between 1.5ºC and 4.5ºC. The uncertainty in what the models suggest at smaller scales is greater still. Different models can provide very different pictures of the future of regional climates.

Rows and floes of angel hair

The wide range of outcomes is, for the most part, down to the fact that no two models represent the mechanisms of the climate—and particularly its feedbacks—in precisely the same way. Some ways of doing things can be ruled out because the models they produce fail to capture the behaviour of the climate as it is, or as it was in the past (studies of the low-carbon-dioxide ice ages provide useful calibration, which would have pleased Arrhenius).

But among models which reproduce past and current climates reasonably well, there is no clear way to say which one’s representations are most reliable. The differences between the models represent a basic level of uncertainty, given the current state of knowledge.

This endemic uncertainty, though, does not mean the models have nothing useful to say. Given how long modelling has been going on, it is now possible to compare predictions made decades ago with the way things have turned out.

A study published last year systematically assessed what models published between the 1970s and 2007 had said about the way the climate would respond to steady rises in carbon dioxide. It found that for 14 out of 17 models what had happened had been within the model’s error bars; of the other three, two had overshot, one had undershot. Taking the models seriously would have been a good bet.

The most important source of uncertainty in the models lies in the clouds. As greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere its humidity changes, as does the extent to which it cools with altitude. These changes affect how clouds develop; the clouds, in turn, change surface temperature. Most clouds warm the world; some cool it.

The problem is that the processes which control a cloud’s thickness, lifetime and other qualities work on pretty small scales. The models do not. Even if every layer of the atmosphere is represented by hundreds of thousands of grid cells, they still end up being hundreds of kilometres on a side—much too large to capture the processes responsible for individual clouds.

Not all the feedbacks sit squarely within the atmosphere; some extend beneath it. Various feedbacks link the atmosphere to the oceans, which store, move and release heat in ways that do a great deal to shape the climate. In the 1960s modellers began trying to capture these effects by “coupling” models of the ocean to models of the atmosphere, so that what they saw in the atmosphere reflected changes in the oceans and vice versa.

Feedbacks involving the land matter, too. Cold weather brings snow; snowy ground, especially under clear skies, reflects away more sunlight, cooling things further. Biology adds yet more complexity. A tropical forest pumps water vapour into the atmosphere with far greater efficiency than a savannah does.

In warmer oceans it is harder for nutrients to rise to the surface, which reduces the ability of plankton to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Melting permafrost produces copious microbial methane—a gas which absorbs infrared much more strongly than carbon dioxide does. Over the decades modellers have attempted to build more and more of these interrelationships into their models, adding greatly to their complexity.

Unfortunately increasing complexity does not always reduce uncertainty. A model which ignores, say, the instability of ice sheets—as most did until recently—is clearly missing something important. However, because there are always different ways to incorporate something new, two models updated to capture ice-sheet dynamics may diverge more after this “improvement” than they did when, unrealistically, they simply ignored the issue. In the CMIP6 process, which is currently winding up, preliminary results show a wider range of uncertainties than was seen in CMIP5.

The biggest source of uncertainty, though, lies not inside the models but outside them. Climate change is a problem because human activity is adding carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere at a rate that is both prodigious and impossible for the physics, chemistry and biology encoded in the models to predict.

To estimate how changes in policy might affect emissions a different family of models is used—“integrated assessment models” (IAMs) which import simplified results from climate models into models of the economy.

One of the things that CMIP5 asked climate modellers to look at is the way that the climate might evolve if emissions followed four standardised “pathways” developed from four particular IAMs in the 2000s. Three were generated from IAMs trying to simulate various types of climate policy. The fourth, RCP8.5, though often referred to as “business as usual”, was generated from an IAM run featuring high population growth, low technological progress and very large scale use of coal. As a result it shows emissions increasing at a spectacular rate, which makes it scary, but not a helpful baseline.

LARGE IMAGE
The uncertainties in what the models predicted was as striking as ever (see chart). But they all agreed that only the pathway embodying the strongest climate action—much stronger than what is seen and promised today—might allow the world to keep the temperature rise since the 18th century well below 2ºC in the 21st, the target enshrined in the Paris agreement of 2015.

Links

• (AU) Australia Listened To The Experts On Coronavirus. It's Time We Heard Them On Climate Change
• The Solutions To The Climate Crisis No One Is Talking About
• The Age Of Stability Is Over, And Coronavirus Is Just The Beginning
• (US) Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming
• While We Fixate On Coronavirus, Earth Is Hurtling Towards A Catastrophe Worse Than The Dinosaur Extinction
• The Unholy Alliance Of Covid-19, Nationalism, And Climate Change
• OPINION: Coronavirus Should Not Be Exploited To Fuel Climate Emergency
• (US) Coronavirus Is A Dress Rehearsal For Climate Change

ABC Science - Zoe Kean

Loss of ice from the margins of Antarctica outweighs the gains in the interior of the continent. (Supplied: British Antarctic Survey)

Key Points

• NASA satellites help scientists track Greenland and Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise
• Melting Antarctic ice shelves lead to glaciers flowing into the sea
• More research is needed to understand how East Antarctica is responding to climate change

NASA satellites bearing advanced laser technology have recorded the most accurate picture of large scale ice sheet melting in Greenland and Antarctica to date.

Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica contributed to 14 millimetres of sea level rise between 2003 and 2019, according to a study published today in the journal Science.

"[Into the future] with that 14 millimetres happening every 16 years, it adds up to a pretty significant amount of sea level rise", said lead author Benjamin Smith of the University of Washington.

If all the melt observed in this study was to flood an area the size of Australia, we would all be wading through 66 centimetres of water, Professor Smith calculated.

Two satellites, the ICESat-1 and the more advanced ICESat-2, were equipped with "laser altimeters" that bounced light pulses off the ice sheets to determine their height.

Researchers compared measurements taken in the early 2000s by ICESat-1 with measurements taken in 2018 and 2019 by ICESat-2.

"The two sets of measurements intersect each other at millions of points, it's those intersections that let us map how the ice changed between ICESat-1 and ICESat-2," Professor Smith said.

"This is a much more significant climatic signal than what you might see if you just surveyed for two or three years," Professor Smith said.

Greenland vs Antarctica

Previous satellite data from NASA shows the rate of global mean sea level rise is accelerating by an average of 3.4 millimetres per year.

Melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica contributes to about a third of the sea level rise we're seeing, Professor Smith said.

The latest data showed melting was more extreme in Greenland than in Antarctica.

Greenland's ice cap calving (Gfycat)

Greenland's ice sheet lost an average of 200 gigatons of ice a year, contributing up to two thirds of the sea level rise. The majority of this ice loss was from thinning of coastal glaciers, which have been impacted by warmer summer temperatures melting the ice on the surface, and warmer ocean temperatures eroding the edges of the ice.
"Greenland melts at the surface quite a bit every year whereas the surface of Antarctica does not melt over a significantly large areas of the continent," he said.The satellite data showed Antarctica lost an average of 118 gigatons of ice in the same time frame.

While there are gains in ice coverage in the interior, due to increased snowfall, these did not outweigh the losses in coastal areas.

"The total amount of thinning vastly outweighs the small amount of thickening in the interior of the ice sheets," Professor Smith said.

Satellite data shows the amount of ice gained (blue) or lost (red and purple) by Antarctica between 2003 and 2019 (Supplied: Smith et al/Science)

The majority of Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise comes from its glaciers flowing into the ocean as warmer water erodes the ice. This process is far more rapid in West Antarctica than in East Antarctica where it is quite patchy, with areas of thickening and thinning.

Measuring ice shelf losses

Glaciologist Matt King said a strength of this research is that it observed both grounded ice such as glaciers and land ice extending onto the sea, whereas previous studies focused on just one or the other.

"We know that ice on land responds to ice extending onto the sea, so looking at the ice sheet as a whole is an advance," said Professor King of the University of Tasmania.

Study co-author Helen Amanda Fricker of the University of California said land-based ice that extends out to sea has previously been excluded because melting ice on land directly contributes to sea level rises, whereas ice that floats on water does not.

But, she said, scientists need to know how ice sheets are changing if we are going to be able to predict how grounded ice might leave the Antarctic continent.

"Knowing this won't slow it down, but it will help us make informed decisions."

The anatomy of an ice shelf. (Supplied: Dr Sue Cook)

"We have discovered that where grounded ice changes most is where the ice shelves are thinning," said Professor Fricker While ice shelves, which float on the ocean, don't contribute to sea level rise, they act like a barrier, anchoring glaciers on the Antarctic landmass.
"Antarctica functions a bit like a giant apple pie, when the crust is removed, the filling leaks out."Research needed where Australia is based

Professor Fricker is calling for more on-the-ground research in East Antarctica, where Australia's research bases are located.

"Key systems are changing in East Antarctica, it's in Australia's backyard," she said.

Professor King agreed.

"Satellite studies provide a great continental view, but we also need good field measurements to understand what's going on in these vulnerable places," said Professor King.

"We don't really know enough about East Antarctica to understand the changes going on," he said.

"So we are left with a general state of confusion, flying blind from both directions."

Links

• 'Very Un-Antarctic': When The Icy Continent Was Not Very Cold At All
• Guest Post: How Close Is The West Antarctic Ice Sheet To A ‘Tipping Point’?
• Antarctica Logs Hottest Temperature On Record With A Reading Of 18.3C
• Past Antarctic Ice Melt Reveals Potential For 'Extreme Sea-Level Rise'
• If Warming Exceeds 2°C, Antarctica’s Melting Ice Sheets Could Raise Seas 20 Metres In Coming Centuries
• Iceberg The Size Of Sydney Breaks Off Amery Ice Shelf In Antarctica
• Devastating Simulations Say Sea Ice Will Be Completely Gone In Arctic Summers By 2050
• Arctic Climate Change – It’s Recent Carbon Emissions We Should Fear, Not Ancient Methane ‘Time Bombs’
• The Arctic May Have Crossed Key Threshold, Emitting Billions Of Tons Of Carbon Into The Air, In A Long-Dreaded Climate Feedback
• Climate Change: Arctic Permafrost Now Melting At Levels Not Expected Until 2090
• Melting Permafrost In Arctic Will Have $70tn Climate Impact – Study
• Melting Arctic Ice Is Now Pouring 14,000 Tons Of Water Per Second Into The Ocean, Scientists Find

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

Economic reconstruction is a chance to speed up decarbonisation, and the pandemic has shown a different kind of politics is possible

‘The energy market operator says Australia could accommodate levels of up to 75% “instant” wind and solar penetration in its main grid by 2025.’ Photograph: Tim Phillips Photos/Getty Images

Lenore Taylor is Guardian Australia's editor. She has won two Walkley awards and has twice won the Paul Lyneham award for excellence in press gallery journalism. Lenore co-authored, Shitstorm, a book on the Rudd government's response to the global economic crisis. We’re already being swamped with ideas about “reforms” needed to recover from the pandemic crisis.

But the word reform is like gift wrap – a handy cover for any offering, thought-through or otherwise.

Perhaps we should ditch the word entirely, and with it the forest of feelpinions about what governments “must” do to advance an author’s previously-held ideological positioning in the post-corona world.

Imagine if we took just two lessons from the way Australian governments responded to the coronavirus: that good decisions are made when they consider the evidence and the best available expert advice; and that policy-making can accommodate reasonable differences of opinion, without becoming a “war”.

Think, as Laura Tingle did in a piece for the ABC’s 7.30 this week, of the difference it would make if interviewers and commentators allowed room for discussion of complex and competing ideas, before demanding that politicians rule them “in” or “out”, or before finding a backbencher who will say they might cross the floor on a policy that conflicts with their ideological prejudice – even if that policy hasn’t yet been outlined.

Now consider if those principles were applied to climate policy in Australia.

I concede that’s quite a leap given the past decade of mind-numbing debate, during which experts have struggled to get a look in. But in the background, some have been giving it a shot.

For six years now leading business, environmental, investor, union, farming and social welfare groups have been trying, largely in vain, to create a space for a sensible discussion about global heating, and to give Australian politicians a way to retreat from the self-defeating culture war that has scuppered all attempts at policy.

They wouldn’t put it this way, but in effect the environmentalists, desperate for Australia to make some meaningful move towards reducing emissions, and the business groups, desperate for some kind of investment certainty, have been trying to save Australia’s politicians from themselves.

The starting point for the Australian Climate Roundtable’s deliberations is that Australia needs to reach net zero emissions, and that delaying action just increases the cost of reaching that goal. Unremarkable propositions in any fact-based forum, but in some Coalition circles, still close to heresy.

Now the roundtable, including its business members, argues that this post-corona reconstruction is a chance to speed up decarbonising the economy.

The Business Council of Australia chief executive, Jennifer Westacott, argued in an opinion piece that the post-corona discussion should divest itself of “ideological constraints”.

“In resuscitating our economy, we can tackle some of our most vexed problems. Every dollar we invest in energy should be a dollar towards a lower carbon economy and lower energy bills,” she wrote.

And expert evidence about what might be possible has been flooding in by the day.

The Australian Energy Market Operator this week released its long awaited “renewable integration study”, which found Australia could accommodate levels of up to 75% “instant” penetration of wind and solar in its main grid by 2025 – that we have the know-how, but need to update market and regulatory settings.

Think about that next time someone starts burbling on about the impossibility of a renewable-dependent grid coping “when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine”.

Less than a year after an election in which Bill Shorten’s target of 45% renewables by 2030 was attacked for being “unachievable” and “economy wrecking”, the expert market operator says 75% is technically achievable – and in just five years time.

And then there was the advice from the International Energy Agency this week that renewable electricity will be the only energy source resilient to the biggest global energy shock in 70 years, triggered by the pandemic.

The Morrison government is supposed to be working on a “roadmap” towards some kind of long-term emissions reduction policy, understandably delayed while it deals with the pandemic.

It could draw on the work of a bunch of expert groups who have already had a go – the latest Climateworks report released earlier this month found that net zero emissions by 2035 is possible in Australia, using technologies that are mostly already mature and available.

The CSIRO’s roadmap released last year found there was no trade-off between economic growth and transitioning to zero emissions, and in fact strong action could lead to GDP growth, an increase in real wages and net zero emissions by 2050.

But then, apparently pre-empting his own policy, and contradicting his own government’s claim to be “technology neutral”, the energy minister, Angus Taylor, has spent the week calling for a “gas-fired recovery”, variously advocating more gas-peaking plants, more long-term gas supply for manufacturers and more onshore gas production.

The details of what he’s advocating remain opaque, but as the Grattan Institute’s energy expert Tony Wood points out, renewed suggestions of government intervention are only likely to deter investment, presumably the opposite of what Taylor is seeking.

If there’s a coherent policy in there somewhere, it really is time for the government to unwrap it. The experts have been waiting for years, and it turns out that listening to them is a good idea.

Links

• Australia's electricity grid could run with 75% renewables, market operator says
• Investors call on Australia's largest oil and gas company to set greenhouse targets
• Covid-19 crisis will wipe out demand for fossil fuels, says IEA
• Coronavirus downturn prompts call for economic reforms
• No one should be left behind in the recovery
• Australia’s path to net-zero emissions lies in rapid, stimulus-friendly steps
• Low Emissions Technology Roadmap

Rolling Stone - Bill McKibben

It hurts to be personally attacked in a movie. It hurts more to see a movement divided

Jeff Chiu/AP/Shutterstock; Craig Lassig/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming.
He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org.
He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change. If you’re looking for a little distraction from the news of the pandemic — something a little gossipy, but with a point at the end about how change happens in the world — this essay may soak up a few minutes.

I’ll tell the story chronologically, starting a couple of weeks ago on the eve of the 50th Earth Day. I’d already recorded my part for the Earth Day Live webcast, interviewing the great indigenous activists Joye Braum and Tara Houska about their pipeline battles. And then the news arrived that Oxford University — the most prestigious educational institution on planet earth — had decided to divest from fossil fuels. It was one of the great victories in that grinding eight-year campaign, which has become by some measures the biggest anti-corporate fight in history, and I wrote a quick email to Naomi Klein, who helped me cook it up, so that we could gloat together just a bit. I was, it must be said, feeling pleased with myself.

Ah, but pride goeth before a fall. In the next couple of hours came a very different piece of news. People started writing to tell me that the filmmaker Michael Moore had just released a movie called Planet of the Humans on YouTube. That wasn’t entirely out of the blue — I’d been hearing rumors of the film and its attacks on me since the summer before, and I’d taken them seriously. Various colleagues and I had written to point out that they were wrong; Naomi had in fact taken Moore aside in an MSNBC greenroom and laid it all out, repeating the exchange with him while campaigning in Iowa. But none of that had apparently worked; indeed, from what people were now writing to tell me, I was the main foil of the film. I put together a quick response, and I hoped that it would blow over.

But it didn’t. Perhaps because everyone’s at home with not much to do, lots of people watched it — millions by some counts. And I began to hear from them. Here’s an email that arrived first thing Earth Day morning: “Happy Dead Earth Day. Time’s up Bill. You have been outed for fraud. What a MASSIVE disappointment you are. Sell out. Hypocrite beyond imagination. Biomass bullshit seller. Forest destroyer. How is it possible you have led all of us down the same death trap road of false hope? The YOUTH! How dare you! Shame on you!” More followed, to say the least. (If you’re wondering whether it hurts to get this kind of email, the answer is yes. In a time of a pandemic, it’s hard to feel too much self-pity, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to read someone accusing you of betraying your own life’s work.)

Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”

That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.” Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.”

Here’s long-time solar activist (and, oh yeah, the guy who wrote “Heart of Gold“) Neil Young: “The amount of damage this film tries to create (succeeding in the VERY short term) will ultimately bring light to the real facts, which are turning up everywhere in response to Michael Moore’s new erroneous and headline grabbing TV publicity tour of misinformation. A very damaging film to the human struggle for a better way of living, Moore’s film completely destroys whatever reputation he has earned so far.”

But enough about the future of humanity. Let’s talk about me, since I got to be the stand-in for “corporate environmentalism” for much of the film. Cherry-picking a few clips culled from the approximately ten zillion interviews, speeches, and panels I’ve engaged in these past decades, the filmmaker made two basic points. One, that I was a big proponent of biomass energy — that is, burning trees to generate power. Two, that I was a key part of “green capitalism,” trying somehow to profit from selling people on the false promise of solar and wind power.

The first has at least a kernel of — not truth, but history. Almost two decades ago, wonderful students at the rural Vermont college where I teach proposed that the oil-burning heat plant be replaced with one that burned woodchips. I thought it was a good idea, and when it finally came to pass in 2009, I spoke at its inauguration. This was not a weird idea — at the time, most environmentalists thought likewise, because as new trees grow back in place of the ones that have been cut, they will soak up the carbon released in the burning. “At that point I would have done the same,” Bill Moomaw, who is one of the most eminent researchers in the field, put it. “Because we hadn’t done the math yet.” But as scientists did begin to do the math, a different truth emerged: Burning trees put a puff of carbon into air now, which is when the climate system is breaking. That this carbon may be sucked up a generation hence is therefore not much help. And as that science emerged, I changed my mind, becoming an outspoken opponent of biomass. (Something else happened too: the efficiency of solar and wind power soared, meaning there was ever less need to burn anything. The film’s attacks on renewable energy are antique, dating from a decade ago, when a solar panel cost 10 times what it does today; engineers have since done their job, making renewable energy the cheapest way to generate power on our planet.)

As for the second charge, it’s simply a lie — indeed, it’s the kind of breathtaking black-is-white lie that’s come to characterize our public life at least since Vietnam veteran John Kerry was accused by the right wing of committing treason. I have never taken a penny from green energy companies or mutual funds or anyone else with a role in these fights. I’ve never been paid by environmental groups either, not even 350.org, which I founded and which I’ve given all I have to give. I’ve written books and given endless talks challenging the prevailing ideas about economic growth, and I’ve run campaigns designed entirely to cut consumption.

Let me speak as plainly as I know how. When it comes to me, it’s not that Planet of the Humans overstates the case, or gets it partly wrong, or opens an argument worth having: it is a sewer. I’ll finish with just the smallest example: In the credits, it defensively claims that I began opposing biomass only last year, in response to news of this film. In fact, as we wrote the filmmakers on numerous occasions, I’ve been on the record about the topic for years. Here, for instance, is a piece from 2016 with the not very subtle title “Burning Trees for Electricity Is a Bad Idea.” Please read it. When you do, you will see that the filmmakers didn’t just engage in bad journalism (though they surely did), they acted in bad faith. They didn’t just behave dishonestly (though they surely did), they behaved dishonorably. I’m aware that in our current salty era those words may sound mild, but in my lexicon they are the strongest possible epithets.

A reasonable question: Given that the film has been so thoroughly debunked, can it really cause problems?

I’ve spent the past three decades, ever since I wrote The End of Nature at the age of 28, deeply committed to realism: no fantasy, no spin, no wish will help us deal with the basic molecular structure of carbon dioxide. That commitment to reality has to carry over into every part of one’s life. So, realistically, most of the millions of people who watch this film will not read the careful debunkings. Most of them will assume, in the way we all do when we watch something, that there must be something there, it must be half true anyway. (That’s why propaganda is effective). To give one more small example from my email, here’s a note I received the other day:

Stop killing trees you lying murderer.  
Forests are life.  you are killing us all.  
You can change your stance and turn back the tide of destruction you unleashed… or perhaps just go throw yourself in a fire and go down as one of the worst humans to ever exist.  
Straight up evil. 

When I wrote back (and I always write back, as politely as I know how), explaining what I’ve explained in this essay, the writer’s reply was: “I have read your dribble and am glad someone has finally called you out for the puppet you are.”

I don’t think most people are that mean-spirited (or maybe I just hope not) and of course dozens of friends within the climate movement wrote to express their solidarity and love. But I have no doubt that many of the people who’ve seen the film are, at the least, disheartened. Here’s what one hard-working climate activist wrote me from Montana: “The problem is, this movie is all over the place and is already causing divisions and conflicts in climate action groups that I’m involved in — it’s like they detonated a bomb in the center of the climate action movement.” Which I’m sure is true (and I’m sure it’s why the film has been so well-received at Breitbart and every other climate-denier operation on the planet).

Which may well mean that for now — maybe for a long time — my work will be at least somewhat compromised and less effective, because my work is mostly about trying to build that movement, to make it larger and more unified. Yes, there are days (and more of them than I would have expected) when it’s about going to jail, but mostly it’s been a long, long process of reaching out and talking to groups and people — helping them raise consciousness (and sometimes helping them raise money). I’ve spent a very large percentage of my life in high school auditoriums and at Rotary lunches; I’ve traveled to every corner of the world, and in recent years, as the technology improved, I’ve traveled too by low-carbon Skype and Zoom. (Pandemic communications is old-school to me; for some reason I now forget, my invaluable colleague Vanessa Arcara assembled a list of the virtual talks I gave in one stretch of 2015-16, which will give you a sense of what my days are like). But if those visits and talks end up igniting suspicion and controversy, then they’re obviously less useful. I want to help important organizing, not disrupt it.

I’m used to attacks, of course. The oil industry has been after me for decades, and some of their tactics have been far worse than Moore’s — the period when they assigned videographers to literally follow me whenever I set out the door was another low point in my life, but I didn’t complain until it seemed like they were doing the same to my daughter. I’ve gotten used to an endless and creative series of death threats — each one jolts you for a moment, but clearly, since I’m still here, most of them are not serious. And again, I’ve only complained once, when they were bandying about my home address and particular methods of execution on well-trafficked websites. But those kind of attacks don’t confuse and divide environmentalists; if anything, they do the opposite. They’re a punch in the nose, which turns out to be far less damaging than a stab in the back.

And I think this leads to the larger point, about what’s useful for movements and what isn’t.

I’m going to begin by boasting for a moment, if only to make myself feel a little better: Here’s what I’d like people to recall from my work these past years, as opposed to the notion that I am a forest-raping sellout. See if you can figure out what every item on this short list has in common.

• My role in helping found and build an actual climate movement. I decided at a certain point that we weren’t in an argument over global warming (we’d won that), but that we were in a fight. And the other side — the fossil fuel industry — was so powerful they were going to win unless we built some power of our own. Hence my decision to go beyond writing and to try to learn how to organize. In 2007, with my seven original undergraduate collaborators, we formed Step It Up and found people to organize 1,500 simultaneous demonstrations across the U.S.; two years later, at the start of 350.org, the numbers were 5,200 rallies in 181 countries.
• My role in helping nationalize the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline, and in the process lay the seedbed for much of the ‘keep it in the ground’ work that has led to challenges of fossil fuel infrastructure around the world.
• My role in helping launch the divestment fight, with a piece of writing and with the Do the Math campaign around the U.S. and then Europe and the antipodes. (Here’s the movie from that; I think it’s better than Moore’s). We’re currently at $14 trillion in endowments and portfolios that have divested.
• My role in helping solidify and unify the newer fight against the banks, asset managers, and insurance companies that fund the fossil fuel movement — the StopTheMoneyPipeline.com effort that is fighting pitched battles right now with Chase Bank, Liberty Mutual, and BlackRock.

The thing that unites these four things is the word “helping.” So many others have fought just as hard. If I started listing names I literally would never stop; the pleasure has been in the teamwork and collaboration.

And that’s the point: Movements only really work if they grow, if they build. If they move. And that’s almost always an additive process. The trick, I think, is figuring out how to make it possible for more people to join in. When we started 350.org, we gave out the logo to anyone. It was like a potluck supper; if you organized a little demonstration in your town, you were a part. (One of the early protests we were proudest of involved exactly one woman: an Iranian in a headscarf who worked her way through half a dozen army checkpoints to hold up a sign). The Keystone fight was well underway when we came on board — indigenous groups and Midwest ranchers had been fighting hard — but we helped to create ways to let anyone anywhere join in, framing it as a fight about climate change as well as land. Divestment, similarly: not everyone has a coal mine in their backyard, but everyone’s connected through a school or a church or a pension to a pot of money. Banks may be the best example: Chase has tens of millions of credit cards out there. Or, to take the example of the movie, biomass: Thank heaven for campaigners like Danna Smith and Mary Booth and Rachel Smolker, who built a movement to help explain why this was a bad idea. It worked for me — I changed my mind, which is what you want movements to do.

You can, in other words, change the zeitgeist if you get enough people engaged — if they both see the crisis and feel like they have a way in.

But that’s precisely what’s undercut when people operate as Moore has with his film. The entirely predictable effect is to build cynicism, indeed a kind of nihilism. It’s to drive down turnout — not just in elections, but in citizenship generally. If you tell a bunch of lies about groups and leaders and as a result people don’t trust them, who benefits?

To be clear, I doubt that was Moore’s goal. I think his goal was to build his brand a little more, as an edgy “truth teller” who will take on “establishments.” (That he has, over time, become a millionaire carnival barker who punches down, not up — well, that’s what brand management is for). But the actual effect in the real world is entirely predictable. That’s why Breitbart loves the movie. That’s why the tar-sands guys in Alberta are chortling. “People are going ga-ga over it,” Margareta Dovgal, a researcher with the pro-industry Canadian group Resource Works, told reporters. The message they’re taking from it is “we’re going to need fossil fuels for a long time to come.”

Actually, we won’t. We’ve dropped the price of sun and wind 90 percent in the last decade (since the days when Moore, et al. were apparently collecting their data). As Stanford professor Marc Jacobson has made clear, we could get much of the way there in relatively short and affordable order, by building out panels and turbines, by making our lives more efficient, by consuming less and differently. But that would require breaking the political power of the fossil fuel industry, which in turn would require a big movement, which in turn would require coming together, not splitting apart.

It’s that kind of movement we’ve been trying to build for a long time. I remember its first real gathering in force in the U.S., with tens of thousands of us standing on the Mall in Washington on a bitter February day in 2013 to demand an end to Keystone and other climate action. “All I’ve ever wanted to see was a movement of people to stop climate change,” I told the crowd. “And now I’ve seen it.”

We did an immense amount of work to get to that moment, helping will a movement into being. But from that moment on, for me it’s been mostly gravy — the great pleasure of watching the movement grow and then explode. Watching the kids who had built college divestment campaigns graduate to form the Sunrise Movement and launch the Green New Deal. Watching Extinction Rebellion start to shake whole cities. Watching the emergence of the climate strikers — and getting to know Greta Thunberg and many of the 10,000 others like her across the world. In each case, I’ve tried to help a little, largely just by amplifying their voices and urging others to pay attention.

I remember very well the night that same autumn after an overflow talk in Providence when my daughter, then a sophomore at Brown, said something typically wise to me: “I think you should probably be less famous in the years ahead.” I knew what she meant even as she said it, because of course I’d already sensed a bit of it myself. It wasn’t that she thought I was a bad leader — it was that we needed to build a movement that was less attached to leaders in general (and probably white male ones in particular) if we were going to attain the kind of power we needed.

And so, even then I began consciously backing off, not in my work but in my willingness to dominate the space. I stepped down as board chair at 350.org, and really devoted myself to introducing people to new leaders from dozens of groups. So many of those leaders come from frontline communities, indigenous communities — from the people already paying an enormous price for the warming they did so little to cause. Their voices are breaking through, and thank heaven: If you follow my twitter feed, you’ll see that the most common word, after “heatwave”, is “thanks,” offered to whoever is doing something useful and good. If you get the chance to read the (free) New Yorker climate newsletter I started earlier this year, you’ll see the key feature is called Passing the Mic: So far I’ve interviewed Nicole Poindexter, Jerome Foster II, Mary Heglar, Ellen Dorsey, Thea Sebastian, Virginia Hanusik, Tara Houska, Vann R. Newkirk II, and Christiana Figueres; this week Jane Kleeb; next week Alice Arena, helping lead the fight against a new gas pipeline across Massachusetts.

I think that one thing that defines those movements is their adversaries — in this case the fossil fuel industry above all. And I think the thing that weakens those movements is when they start trying to identify adversaries within their ranks. Much has been made over the years about the way that progressives eat their own, about circular firing squads and the like. I think there’s truth to it: there’s a collection of showmen like Moore who enjoy attracting attention to themselves by endlessly picking fights. They’re generally not people who actually try to organize, to build power, to bring people together. That’s the real, and difficult, work — not purity tests or calling people out, but calling them in. At least, that’s how it seems to me: The battle to slow down global warming in the short time that physics allots us requires ever bigger movements.

It’s been a great privilege to get to help build those movements. And if I worry that my effectiveness has been compromised, it’s not a huge worry, precisely because there are now so many others doing this work — generations and generations of people who have grown up in this fight. I think, more or less, we’re all headed in the right direction, that people are getting the basic message right: conserve energy; replace coal and gas and oil with wind and sun; break the political power of the fossil fuel industry; demand just transitions for workers; build a world that reduces ruinous inequality; and protect natural systems, both because they’re glorious and so they can continue to soak up carbon. I don’t know if we’re going to get this done in time — sometimes I kick myself for taking too long to figure out we needed to start building movements. But I know our chances are much improved if we do it together.

Thanks so much to all who fight for all that matters. On we go.



Links

• Michael Moore’s Planet Of The Humans: A Reheated Mess Of Lazy, Old Myths
• Climate Experts Call For 'Dangerous' Michael Moore Film To Be Taken Down
• New Michael Moore-Backed Documentary On YouTube Reveals Massive Ecological Impacts Of Renewables
• Planet of the Humans (video)
• Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans: A reheated mess of lazy, old myths
• New documentary 'Inner Climate Change' focuses on effects of Climate Change and Consciousness
• Pop Culture And Climate Change
• Inner Climate Change: The Change Starts Within You (2020)
• An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
• 2040
• Ice on Fire
• Chasing Coral

gestalten - Mark Mann

The non-profit startup aiming to turn India's class of small-scale farmers into 'smart' farmers



Climate change is threatening the viability of millions of small farms in India, but an innovative new greenhouse solution is transforming the lives of vulnerable farmers.

For small independent farmers in dry regions of India, water supply can too easily mean the difference between life and death.

The long droughts, extended heat waves, and unpredictable rainfall brought about by global warming have proven disastrous for many of India’s 146 million small farms, 85 percent of which now lose more money than they make.

Venkatesh Appala grows bell peppers in his Kheyti greenhouse and is using the extra income to save for his daughter’s dowry. (Photo: Sara Hylton, The New Traditional)


In aid of soaring demands, a new kind of greenhouse is making a dramatic difference for some vulnerable farmers.

Hyderabad-based non-profit Kheyti (Hindi for farming) has created an affordable and effective greenhouse system that helps small farms bring stability to their crop production and withstand the worst effects of climate change. The company is calling it the “smart farmer revolution.”

Goats eat tomatoes in an empty farming field in a rural area near Laxmapur village, just north of Hyderabad city. (Photo: Sara Hylton, The New Traditional)

Unlike typical glass greenhouses, Kheyti’s modular Greenhouse-in-a-Box (GIB) is designed to keep light and heat out. Draped across a simple metal frame, the system uses four layers of breathable aluminum-coated nettings to stop pests, partially reflect sunlight (preventing crop damage from excessive heat), and reduce water loss through evaporation.

 The technology allows impoverished farmers to use 90 percent less water, grow seven times more food, and achieve better and more dependable yields, thereby helping to stabilize income. Kheyti’s system costs about half the price of other greenhouses, and the company says that after six years farmers can expect to earn $100 (€90) a month, the equivalent of one year’s revenue under normal conditions.

Kheyti’s greenhouse also employs micro-irrigation, or drip irrigation, a technology that was first commercialized over 80 years ago but has not reached the vast majority of farmers in India until now. Drip irrigation confers much better water efficiency than the reliance on seasonal rainfall.

Coupled with its heat-resistant netting, the Kheyti greenhouse requires just 265 gallons (1,000 liters) per day, which is 20 percent of what farmers would otherwise use in an open farming plan, according to co-founder Shradha Sharma.

Biki Malavath, whose age is unknown, holds her great-granddaughter, nicknamed “Milky,” the youngest member of the village. Laxmapur in Thanda is a village for Lambadi people, considered one of India’s more disadvantaged communities. (Photo: Sara Hylton, The New Traditional)

Launched in 2015, Kheyti offers more than just specialized technology. To help achieve the best results, the social enterprise conducts in-person field training workshops and provides advice via mobile devices (80 percent of India’s farmers own some sort of smartphone).

They even built in a supply chain. The GIB package comes bundled with added seeds and fertilizer, and Kheyti is also set up to connect farmers with produce retailers.

Since most of India’s farmers don’t have the capital to purchase a greenhouse, Kheyti has partnered with the country’s Bank of Baroda to help farmers obtain flexible loans. After an initial down payment of 30,000 rupees, or about $471 (€423), farmers can pay back their loan in installments after each growing season.

Bhavanth and his wife, Bujji, grow tomatoes in their greenhouse, located on the family farm near Laxmapur village in Telangana state. Bhavanth was the first to purchase a greenhouse from Kheyti. (Photo: Sara Hylton, The New Traditional)

One of the best parts of Kheyti’s approach is the culture of sharing and collaboration it creates between participating farmers. When they sign up for a greenhouse, farmers automatically join a collective that meets weekly to compare notes and discuss best practices. Sometimes they pitch in and help with each other’s crops.

These extra supports, both from Kheyti and the collective, enable farmers like Katikala Shyamala, the head woman of a small village called Laxmapur, to operate a greenhouse while still managing other responsibilities and raising children.

The co-founder Sathya Raghu Mokkapati made it his mission to help India’s poor farmers after witnessing a penniless farmer resort to eating mud.

An accountant by training, Mokkapati understood the importance of small farmers to be able to access financing and the difference it could make for their profitability, but he knew he would need more hands-on experience to tackle the problem.

After leaving his corporate job, he and Sharma spent three and a half years farming a 100-acre plot and working with nearly 8,000 farmers to try different methods and crops.

Yadav Bhavanth’s nieces and nephews get ready to take produce to the local market. (Photo: Sara Hylton, The New Traditional)

Along with their third co-founder, Saumya (who doesn’t use a surname), and some help from engineering students at Northwestern University and Stanford University, the entrepreneurs created a design that would mitigate the effects of extreme climate variability.

Once finalized, Kheyti began performing proofs of the concept with 150 farmers in 15 villages in 2018. The trials proved immediately and immensely successful. Early participants found they were able to produce the same yield in their small greenhouses as an entire acre outside, and use the leftover profits to send their children to school.

In the past year, Kheyti has impoverished people, and yet these worked to bring on another 1,000 farmers—all low-income women farmers—in collaboration with the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty. Kheyti’s ambitions go much further: they aim to reach 100,000 environmental volatility, and market farmer families by 2025.

If all goes well, their greenhouse tech has the simple, innovative greenhouse sole potential to expand internationally. Smallholder farmers make up one of the world’s largest constituencies of impoverished people, and yet these farms are responsible for growing 80 percent of the food on the planet.

Around the world, half a billion small farmers are struggling to survive due to factors like poor yields, environmental volatility, and market fluctuations.

If it scales, Kheyti’s simple, innovative greenhouse solution could have a transformative impact on the lives of millions.

Links

• Deadly Tensions Rise As India’s Water Supply Runs Dangerously Low
• 12-Step Climate Change & Global Warming Action Plan For India
• India, Once A Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green
• India's Women Seaweed Divers Swim Against The Tide Of Climate Change
• For Mumbai's Slum-Dwellers, Climate Change Is Slicing Away The Haves From The Have-Nots
• India Taps Solar, Storage To Ensure All Homes Have Power In 2018
• India Will Sell Only Electric Cars Within The Next 13 Years
• To Slow Climate Change, India Joins The Renewable Energy Revolution

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick Toscano

Woodside Petroleum has been hit with a record-breaking investor push to slash emissions and link executive pay to achieving bold new targets, as Australia's oil and gas industry emerges as the next front for shareholder pressure on climate change.

More than 50 per cent of investors backed motions on Thursday for Woodside to commit to hard targets to reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions and its vastly greater "indirect" emissions – known as Scope 3 emissions – from customers of its products such as power plants around the world.

Australian oil and gas giants Woodside and Santos have come under mounting investor pressure on climate change.

A similar revolt rocked Australia's second-largest oil and gas producer, Santos, last week when 43 per cent of investors voted in support of the same demands.

The climate motions, prepared by ethical investment group the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR), called for Woodside to set emissions targets in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement to limit global warming well below 2 degrees.

It also called for details of how the company's remuneration policy incentivised progress against these targets, and how Woodside's looming investments in dramatically expanding gas output in the coming years were aligned with the Paris goals.

The resolution won the backing of more than half of Woodside's investors, despite the urging of the board. The support is the highest ever in corporate Australia for a shareholder resolution calling for direct and indirect emissions targets.

"This is a breakthrough moment for investor action on climate change in Australia," the ACCR's Dan Gocher said.

"The call for companies to set target on Scope 3 emissions is now supported by more than 50 per cent of shareholders in Australia's largest oil and gas company ... a striking number in the absence of board support.

Woodside would now be in "open conflict" with the majority of its shareholders until it moved to set meaningful targets, Mr Gocher said.

Woodside, which has an ambition for "net zero" emissions for its own operations by 2050, had urged shareholders to vote down the motions, saying it was supportive of the Paris goals while its gas exports were helping to displace higher-emissions fuel sources in Asia such as coal-fired power.

"We produce an energy source, natural gas, that can displace higher emissions fuels and get the
world's energy mix shifting in the right direction," Woodside chairman Richard Goyder said. "Our industry has a big role to play."

While supporters of gas argue it's a vastly less emissions-intensive energy source than coal, critics say it remains a heavy source of emissions and believe its role in keeping global warming well below 2 degrees is limited.

A second resolution on Thursday, for Woodside to review its links to fossil fuel industry groups to determine if their positions were inconsistent with goals to arrest global warming, gained a 42 per cent yes vote.

Both resolutions were not officially put to Thursday's meeting as they depended on the passing of another motion to amend the company's constitution, but results were disclosed in the "interests of transparency"

In recent months, some of the world's top oil and gas giants including BP and Royal Dutch Shell have vowed to set targets for Scope 3 emissions, meaning they will account for the carbon footprint of the energy products they ship and sell to customers around the world. To lower indirect emissions, companies will work with customers to help them decarbonise and seek to diversify into cleaner sources of energy.

BHP is Australia's only resources company to vow to set Scope 3 targets.

Emma Herd of the Investor Group on Climate Change, representing Australian and New Zealand institutional investors with $2 trillion of assets under management, said Australia's oil and gas producers were "now clearly at risk of falling behind" their European counterparts in establishing plans to diversify their businesses and set targets in line with the Paris agreement.

"The sizeable investor votes in favour of climate change resolutions at the Woodside and Santos annual general meetings are a reminder that investors are deeply concerned about the systemic threat global warming poses to sustainable returns fo their beneficiaries," Ms Herd said. "It is incumbent now on Woodside to work constructively with their investors to develop real plans to transition to a net-zero emissions company by 2050."

Mr Goyder said Woodside's response to global warming was a topic the board regularly discussed with investors.

"The fact that global emissions growth is likely to slow this year due to the severe economic downturn is not in anyway an excuse for inaction," he said. "This is still major challenge for the world."

Links

• German Companies Call For COVID-19 Aid To Be Tied To Climate Action
• (US) Companies Expect Climate Change To Cost Them $1 Trillion In 5 Years
• Bank Of England Chief Mark Carney Issues Climate Change Warning
• The New Science Fossil Fuel Companies Fear
• Bank Of England Boss Says Global Finance Is Funding 4C Temperature Rise
• Companies Expect Climate Change To Cost Them $1 Trillion In 5 Years
• Australia’s Biggest Property Companies Are Making Net-Zero Emissions Pledges – Now We Can Track Them
• 'Out Of Line': Top Australian Companies Accused Of Undermining Paris Deal
• Climate Action Helps Companies Build Reputations And Attract Investors

National Audubon Society

In the first peer-reviewed study of its kind, participants in Audubon’s Climate Watch program helped determine the ongoing impact of climate change to bluebirds and nuthatches.

Eastern Bluebird. Photo: Lewis Barnett/Audubon Photography Awards


Birds In This Story

• White-breasted Nuthatch
  Sitta carolinensis
  song

• Eastern Bluebird
  Sialia sialis
  song

• Painted Bunting
  Passerina ciris
  song

NEW YORK — Today, the journal Ecological Applications published a final version of a study from National Audubon Society scientists demonstrating that climate change is causing a measurable shift of birds’ ranges during winter and breeding seasons.

Years of bird observations gathered by hundreds of volunteer participants in Audubon’s Climate Watch community science program confirm projections made earlier by Audubon that rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will likely result in the colonization of new territories by North American birds.

“Climate change is disrupting hundreds of bird species, and thanks to community scientists all across the country, we can visualize these disruptions in real time and plan conservation efforts accordingly,” said Sarah Saunders, PhD, quantitative ecologist at Audubon and lead author of the study.

The study concludes that climate-vulnerable birds are indeed shifting their distributions at pace with changes in climate suitability due to rising global temperatures.

The most outstanding examples take place during the birds’ wintering season, which is not unexpected given the more pronounced changes in temperature attributable to climate change taking place in winter months.

Notably, the study is also the first to use independently gathered volunteer observations to validate climate suitability projections.

The authors of the study suggest further assessment of the habitat suitability of the newly colonized territories to determine whether these new areas can sustain the avian newcomers.

Climate Watch, an Audubon community science program that invites volunteers to count and identify select species of birds deemed climate vulnerable by Audubon climate science, provides the observation data used in the analysis.

Each year, from January 15 to February 15 and May 15 to June 15, community scientists all across the country look for 12 species: White-breasted Nuthatch, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Brown-headed Nuthatch, Pygmy Nuthatch, Western Bluebird, Mountain Bluebird, Eastern Bluebird, Lesser Goldfinch, American Goldfinch, Eastern Towhee, Spotted Towhee and Painted Buntings.

The dual two-week windows represent wintering and breeding seasons for the chosen species.

The climate-suitable ranges for each of these species are projected to change as their habitats shift, shrink, or expand due to rising global temperatures.

Regularly gathered observations allow researchers to track any shifts in species distributions.

“Climate Watch volunteers have confirmed the accuracy of Audubon’s climate projections, which show that two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction by the end of this century,” said Brooke Bateman, PhD, Audubon’s senior climate scientist and lead author of Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink, a report published in October 2019.

“Luckily, Audubon science also shows that we can protect three-quarters of these vulnerable bird species by keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius,” said Bateman.

Audubon’s climate suitability projections for each of these climate-vulnerable bird species allows conservationists to protect not only the places birds need today, but also the places birds will need in a climate-altered future.

For further study, five new species have been added to the list of Climate Watch birds—the towhees, goldfinches and bunting listed above—representing birds found across a broader geographic area and in urban areas, which will allow a more in-depth look at the validity of climate suitability projections and invite even more community scientists to participate in the effort.

Links

• (AU) Birds are the “canaries in the climate-change coal mine”
• (AU) Birds threatened by rapid climate change
• Rising temperatures could make some U.S. state birds ‘stateless’
• Climate change isn't just shifting how the world feels, it's changing how it sounds
• Decline in 'successful' bird species like magpies and kookaburras rings alarm bells
• Climate change is causing birds to shrink, study suggests
• Population responses of bird populations to climate change on two continents vary with species’ ecological traits but not with direction of change in climate suitability

Reuters - Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Massive fiscal stimulus measures adopted by governments around the world to combat the coronavirus pandemic must be tailored to tackle climate change at the same time, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Wednesday.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva speaks during a conference hosted by the Vatican on economic solidarity, at the Vatican, February 5, 2020. REUTERS/Remo Casilli/

Speaking at a virtual summit known as the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, Georgieva joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.N. Secretary Antonio Guterres in calling for focused efforts to promote a “green recovery” from the pandemic crisis.

“Taking measures now to fight the climate crisis is not just a ‘nice-to-have’. It is a ‘must-have’ if we are to leave a better world for our children,’ the IMF leader told the summit.

“What we do now will not only reshape our economies and societies; it will also reshape humanity’s future on this planet,” she said. “A ‘green recovery’ is our bridge to a more resilient future.”

Georgieva said governments had already adopted extraordinary measures to fight the pandemic, which has now infected over 3.11 million people and killed 216,667, but further efforts would be needed to respond to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

To ensure that fiscal stimulus addressed climate change risks, she said governments should make financial lifelines for carbon-intensive companies contingent on commitments to reduce carbon emissions. This was done during the global financial crisis, when some automakers committed to higher fuel efficiency standards.

Georgieva urged governments to focus fiscal spending to promote green technologies, clean transport, sustainable agriculture and climate resilience.

“With oil prices at record-low levels, now is the time to phase out harmful subsidies,” Georgieva said, citing the IMF’s estimate that a low-carbon transition would require $2.3 trillion in investment every year for a decade.

She also urged governments to promote green finance by focusing on green bonds and other forms of sustainable finance, and mandating financial firms to better disclose climate risks in their lending and investment portfolios.

Raising the price of carbon would help generate revenues to increase public revenues in the future, she said.

“A substantially higher carbon price is needed to encourage climate-smart investment and to accelerate the shift to cleaner fuels and more energy efficiency,” Georgieva said.

The IMF estimates that the global carbon price should rise to $75 per ton from $2 per ton currently to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius.

Links

• Parallel Threats Of COVID-19, Climate Change, Require ‘Brave, Visionary And Collaborative Leadership’: UN Chief
• The Solutions To The Climate Crisis No One Is Talking About
• (AU) Tackling Climate Change Is Vital For The Strongest Economic Recovery After Coronavirus
• It’s Important To Keep Talking About Climate Change Now
• Climate Responsibility
• How Changes Brought On By Coronavirus Could Help Tackle Climate Change
• Here Are The Top Ways The World Could Take On Climate Change In 2020
• (AU) We Must Fight Climate Change Like It’s World War Iii – Here Are 4 Potent Weapons To Deploy

RenewEconomy - Ketan Joshi



The film ‘Planet of the Humans’ opens with the director, Jeff Gibbs, operating a fossil-fuelled combustion engine vehicle, on a road full of combustion engine vehicles, followed up with some footage taken from the International Space Station (fossil fuelled rockets put that in space).

This is not a documentary about the environmental damage that had to occur for Gibbs to go on his drive – it is not mentioned. Nor is it about the harm from fossil fuels.




It is about why renewable energy is bad. I used to work in the renewable energy industry – first, with wind farms and later in research, government agencies and advocacy groups.

So it was hard to resist both watching and reviewing this one, considering it launched on ‘Earth Day’, and it has been widely promoted.

Not only is the documentary bad, it’s old bad. Please join me on this journey back in time. It won’t be fun, but I’m glad you’re here with me.

All of the stuff in this documentary is ancient

It is clear that Gibbs has been trying to make this documentary for a long, long time.

“He is currently working on a film about the state of the planet and the fate of humanity”, read his bio, in 2012. It is clear, digging into these early posts, that he very passionately loathes the burning of trees to generate energy – a wildly controversial and genuinely problematic thing, for sure.

But as early as 2010, Gibbs was posting HuffPost blogs extending that into wind and solar, too.

This one, for instance, repeats a bog-standard list of anti-wind and anti-solar memes that, back in 2010, were fashionable among climate deniers.

The ‘wind and solar are too intermittent’ meme, for instance, is a great hallmark of that era. “How much variable energy can a grid accept? Around ten percent, twenty percent tops it appears”, he wrote back then. I’d include examples of grids with higher percentages operating without a hitch today, but it feels almost cruel.

The extreme oldness of this documentary stands out. In one instance, he tours a solar farm in Lansing, Michigan, in which a bemused official states that a large farm can only power ten homes in a year.

It is the Cedar Street Solar Array, a 150 panel 824 kilowatt (that’s small) farm in downtown Lansing. Guess when that bad boy was built? 2008.

Twelve years ago – an absolute eternity, in solar development years.

As PV Magazine writes, “The film reports on a solar installation in Michigan with PV panels rated at “just under 8 percent” conversion efficiency. It’s difficult to identify the brand of panel in the film (Abound?) — but that efficiency is from another solar era”.

Efficiency gains in solar have been so rapid that by leaving the dates off his footage he is very actively deceiving the audience.

The site generates 64-64 MWh a year, according to the owner – a more recent installation in the same area generates around 436.

The footage really is from another era. It’s like doing a documentary on the uselessness of mobile phones but only examining the Motorola Ultrasleek.

Later, they visit the Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS) solar farm, only to feign sadness and shock when they discover it’s been removed, leaving a dusty field of sand.

In the desert. “Then Ozzie and I discovered that the giant solar arrays had been razed to the ground”, he moans. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at. A solar dead zone”.

Which is a weird one, because the latest 2020 satellite imagery shows a site full of solar arrays, and a total absence of any “dead zones”. The damn thing is generating electricity.
















Without knowing when the footage was taken, the only likely explanation for this is the pair of dudes visited the site midway through the point at which one of the fields was being removed and replaced with newer models, something which has happened several times over the past few decades.

In a red flag for any veteran of the wind farm debate, Gibbs then uses footage of a collection of old wind turbines – rusted, gross and horrible – to illustrate the short life and lasting damage of these huge spiky bastards.



If you’re familiar with the network of anti-wind farm groups, you’ll recognise that they’re old machines from South Point on Big Island, Hawaii.

They were removed in 2012, by the owner of the facility. All that is left now are small hexagonal pads on farmland used by the cattle that roam it:




“Why for most of my life, have I fallen for the illusion that green energy would save us?” It sounds like he’s saying this in 2020, but he is saying it well in the past. Gibbs was posting anti-wind memes roughly 23 full epidemics ago.

Nothing in this is new. With regards to its wind and solar parts, it smacks of 2010s era climate change denial, in which renewables were seen by detractors as expensive, wasteful, low-capacity, heavily corporatised and destined to fail.

Things are different in 2020, but the director isn’t. He doesn’t need to be.

Even the ideas are old

Putting aside the sites they visit and the footage they use, there are some ideas in this documentary that are well worn and highly recognisable memes from the 2009 – 2013 climate denial wonder years.

You can tell when someone’s knowledge of this has formed solely from doing a Google search for “solar panels bad don’t like”, and it really shows in this film.

Early on in the documentary, Gibbs has an exchange with an anti-wind farm protester about coal-fired power:

Protester: You need to have a fossil fuel power plant backing it up and idling 100% of the time, because if you cycle up or cycle down as the demand on the wind comes through, you actually generate a bigger carbon footprint if you ran it straight”.

Gibbs: Do you ever go to things where they just go “Oh, that’s not true, it doesn’t matter we’re going to have a smart grid”?.

Protester: Doesn’t make any difference, they still gotta– they’re using it. You gotta have it idling. Because, let’s just say the wind stopped right now. Just stopped for an hour. You’ve got to have that power.

This extremely silly concept – that coal-fired power stations run at 100% capacity all the time regardless of how much power they output – is so old it hurts my brain. In fact, it was big in 2012, when I came across it in Australian media.

It’s wrong. If the power plant generates less electricity, it uses less coal. Gibbs is putting this eight-year-old meme in the microwave and serving it up in for his audience.

Later, he presents the work of a researcher named Richard York, who claims that the addition of renewable energy has no impact on fossil fuel output.

I can’t access the paper, which is from – you guessed it – 2012, but the premise is mind-numbingly silly.

Electric grids match supply and demand at all times. Energy generated from one new source has to replace energy generated from an existing source – the grid would collapse, if it didn’t.

That is why South Australia’s grid looks like this:

LARGE IMAGEAnd Denmark looks like this:

LARGE IMAGEThings start to get into proper, outright, anti-vax / climate denier grade misinformation when producer Ozzie Zehner comes in.

“One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies like solar and wind are somehow different from fossil fuels”, he tells Gibbs.

“You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place, instead of playing pretend” .

It is, in fact, possible to scientifically examine the emissions associated with making, transporting and erecting renewable energy, and compare it to the emissions saved by using it.

There are just so many studies on this, but here’s the Breakthrough Institute’s Zeke Hausfather:

IMAGE

It’s important to be really clear about this: Zehner’s remarks in this film are toxic misinformation, on par with the worst climate change deniers. No matter which way you look at it, there is no chance that these projects lead to a net increase in emissions.

Gibbs attends a solar conference – again in some non-specific year – and is told by a bunch of obviously well-meaning and slightly baffled young renewable energy experts (literally the only young, diverse people in the film) that battery storage is a way of managing intermittency.

“When I looked up how much battery storage there is, it was less than one-tenth of one percent of what’s needed”, he says, presenting a pie chart (laugh) of IEA data with a minuscule slice from batteries.

But grid scale of batteries doesn’t need massive capacities to be functionally useful for managing the integration of renewables – so it’s a deeply misleading chart.





In checking the information, I can’t find International Energy Agency data for “51 giga BTU” of battery capacity anywhere on their site. 546,000,000 “Giga BTUs” is 546,000,000,000,000 BTUs. which is 160,032,600,000,000 watt hours, or around 160 terawatt hours.

This is ‘primary energy supply’ – how much energy was generated, but includes the quantity of energy wasted through inefficiency.

If you only look at global annual electricity – the field in which batteries play – it’s around 20 TWh (they use a similar deception for Germany’s biomass share). So it’s an extra dodgy comparison.

Gibbs has created a self-sustaining argument here. If someone builds a battery storage installation, he can visit the site and monotone sadly about its presence.

If someone decides to not build that battery, he can look up the statistics and monotone sadly about the lack of battery capacity.

In an earlier scene, at the launch of the General Motors Chevy Volt (2010, of course), he complains that the cars are being charged by the coal-sodden electric grid of that state – another great example of the infinite loop Gibbs has created for himself, considering his reaction if more wind and solar were built to make that electricity cleaner.

There’s gas, too. They repeatedly claim that shutting down coal plants results in replacement with gas. And in the US, gas has indeed expanded to fill a decent proportion of the gap left by coal:
LARGE IMAGEThe UK has a similar thing too, where both renewables and gas are squeezing out coal. But scroll back up to Denmark, above, where a combination of interconnection with other countries, massive wind build-out and coal and gas shutdown has cleaned up the grid.

Or Germany, where gas output remains unchanged as coal plants shut down.

There is nothing inherent to renewable energy that makes gas compulsory. All that matter is how the transition is managed.

For a long time, gas was sold as a transition fuel, including by organisations like the Breakthrough Institute.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that while it might ease change, it isn’t compulsory, and the urgency of decarbonisation has increased.

This film is a long, slow painful monument to laziness

It feels so weird writing about these things again. I feel like I’ve been transported back in time ten years, back to my early days in the renewable energy industry.

We’d combat these viral memes every single day.

The industry looks different now. Many wind companies have learnt that insensitive, clumsy development leads to backlash that is harmful for everyone, so they’ve started to clean up their act. Solar developers are figuring out more sustainable pathways than the boom and bust of government subsidies.

The human rights issues around mining and materials are becoming more prominent. Renewable companies are taking waste removal seriously.

And then this documentary comes along – a dumb old bull in the china shop that is 2020’s hard-earned climate action environment.

There’s a lot of fragile, hard-fought stuff to wreck in there, and Gibbs goes absolutely wild. He’s bulldozing a lot of hard work.





Gibbs obviously has a long-running gripe with biomass, which has a whole range of serious issues associated with it. Though I don’t know the industry well, I suspect many of his gripes there are valid.

But the outright lies about wind and solar are serious and extremely harmful. Wind and solar aren’t just technological tools with enormous potential for decarbonisation.

They also have massive potential to be owned by communities, deployed at small scales with minimal environmental harm, and removed with far less impact on where they were than large power stations like coal and gas.

They do incredible things to electricity bills, they decentralise power (literally and figuratively), and with more work they can be scaled up to properly replace fossil fuels.

Gibbs isn’t interested in this stuff. No one in 2012 was. He’s armed with a list of dot points from climate denier blog Watts Up With That, and he’s ready to go.

The key harm of this documentary is that it does what so many communicators struggle, but fail to do – it presents ideas from one ideological cluster into the world of another. It is very actively and successfully escaping the ‘bubble’, and selling far-right, climate-denier myths from nearly a decade ago to left-wing environmentalists in the 2020s, and going by much of the comments, it seems to be doing well.

Gibbs is transcending both time and ideological space, held aloft by a system that provides prominence to mediocrity.

It’s tough to look past how popular this has been. The film’s been boosted because many interviews feature the popular and well-known producer Michael Moore, including on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.

Ludicrously, it received four stars (four. fucking. stars.) in the Guardian, a media outlet normally careful to not boost climate-denier grade misinformation.

All this prominence despite the fact that the film failed to find a distributor, and was dumped onto Youtube instead.

“We’ve talked to sales agents. We believe that there will be a tremendous amount of interest in this film… This is going to get distributed. It will be seen”, Moore insisted last year.

It is clear that Gibbs’ starting point was a loathing of biomass, which then turned into a loathing of every single decarbonisation technology (except nuclear power, which isn’t mentioned in the film).

But he ends up at population control – a cruel, evil and racist ideology that you can see coming right from the start of the film. I wish I had the emotional energy to go into it, but I have spent it all. Earther’s Brian Kahn writes:
“There’s a reason that Breitbart and other conservative voices aligned with climate denial and fossil fuel companies have taken a shine to the film. It’s because it ignores the solution of holding power to account and sounds like a racist dog whistle”The film features a parade of – solely – white Americans, mostly male, insisting the planet has to reduce its population.

There is no information provided on which people in the world need to stop fucking, but we can take a guess, based on the demographics of the people doing the asking.





This documentary – particularly the parts on energy, renewables and industry- is extremely bad. It is Jeff Gibb’s 2010 Huffington Post blog drawn out in one hour and forty minutes, which feels like like a decade. I knew it would be lazy, but the magnitude of laziness here is incredible.

It it mostly old.

It is obviously re-hashing some specific gripes, like its attacks on the nicest guy in the whole of climate activism, Bill McKibben.

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface and I’m like 2,000 words in. I don’t have the energy to glue together every single fragile thing that this bulldozer has destroyed.

It is the ultimate expression of lazy privilege to make something so void of effort, but so widely viewed and promoted. Criticism will be rebuffed as Not Being Able To Handle The Truth, or the classic We Just Wanted To Start A Discussion.

It is still a package of old, dead ideas reheated by someone who knew that he did not need to put any effort into updating his thinking.

There was no chance he would be talking to climate activists, talking to young people, talking to experts, talking to community advocates, talking to people from other countries, or really talking to anyone who wasn’t already mostly in his vicinity.

It should have faded off into the pit of Youtube’s unwatched terabytes, but it didn’t, because mediocrity is celebrated, boosted and broadcast if it comes from someone who looks and sounds the right way.

That is a serious vulnerability.

The hard work of climate and energy advocates, as they grapple with challenges like corporate malfeasance, the impacts of mining and bad development can be shattered by the monotone arrogance of a single person inflicted with the Dunning Kruger effect.

Somber music.

Links

• Climate Experts Call For 'Dangerous' Michael Moore Film To Be Taken Down
• New Michael Moore-Backed Documentary On YouTube Reveals Massive Ecological Impacts Of Renewables
• Planet of the Humans (video)
• Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans: A reheated mess of lazy, old myths
• New documentary 'Inner Climate Change' focuses on effects of Climate Change and Consciousness
• Pop Culture And Climate Change
• Inner Climate Change: The Change Starts Within You (2020)
• An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
• 2040
• Ice on Fire
• Chasing Coral