Lethal Heating: 10/31/16

31/10/2016

Climate Change Is Invisible, Insidious And Urgent. Can The Arts Help Us See It?

The Guardian - Lucy Wood*

The fact of climate change is beyond serious dispute, but has yet to become part of mainstream discourse in the UK or indeed beyond. Arts and climate science collaboration can help change this

Diamonds in the Sky by HeHe, part of the Cloud Crash commission for the Manchester Science Festival, at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester. Photograph: Jason Lock

Soaring mercury, sinking cities, mass extinctions. It is easy to catastrophise climate change: faced with the sheer enormity of the climate challenge, people can tend towards despair and nihilism. For others, its seeming distance (both chronologically and, for many of us in the global north in particular, geographically) can seduce us with the easy denial that it is someone else’s problem to fix.
The technology and resources to move towards a post-carbon society are essentially all there. What we lack is a broad, civic movement to get behind the urgency – and significant opportunities – of this transition. So rather than looking darkly into a dystopian future in which we are passive victims, it is vital to make climate change relevant in the here and now – the air we breathe, the food we eat, the way we travel. Human-scale things we have agency to change. We need to find new ways to narrate and envision a fairer, cleaner future in which we can actively participate.
This year’s annual Lovelock Commission Cloud Crash by artist duo HeHe, a collaboration of Cape Farewell, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in Manchester, is an example of how art can enable major public engagement in what former chief scientific advisor Sir David King posits as ‘the biggest challenge of all time’.
The Lovelock Commission takes inspiration from pioneering climate scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, which posits the earth as a single self-regulating organism – and this year the commission focuses on atmospherics - namely, man-made emissions. The headline event for this year’s Manchester Science Festival, Cloud Crash seeks to make pollution – and its component part, climate change – visible, and asks some uncomfortable questions of society.
The role of the scientist and that of the artist is to make the invisible visible. Gone are the pea soupers that choked London 60 years ago. Today’s pollution is largely invisible to the naked eye – and all the more insidious for it. A recent study by King’s College London revealed that 9,500 Londoners die each year due to long-term exposure to air pollution, and that levels of pollution in major cities including London, Leeds and Birmingham will exceed legal limits until at least 2030. WHO estimate exposure to the particulate matter - small particulate matter of 10 microns or less in diameter (PM10)- caused 3 million premature deaths worldwide per year in 2012 through cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and cancers.
This invisible menace needs to brought into the light so that we can understand what we are fighting. With Cloud Crash HeHe took as point of departure the air quality forecast maps produced by the (NERC funded) National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) – that show, in hauntingly beautiful detail, levels of ozone, particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide as it sweeps across the UK.

Airbag by HeHe, part of the Cloud Crash commission. Photograph: Jason Lock

What they have produced are three new pieces placed in-situ across the MSI site. In Airbag an ordinary car has crashed against a steel post in the courtyard. In a playful reversal of the polluting emissions of everyday cars (one of the largest contributors to lethal nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter emissions), this car has become a suspended cloud chamber, insulating a floating microclimate from the outside world. It is an object of reflection and provocation – as HeHe explain ‘there is a certain irony in admiring the beauty of such a fragile atmosphere, held inside an object which is so violently transforming our own unprotected airspace.’
Diamonds in the Sky is an immersive audio-visual experience based in the Air and Space Hall, that imagines a swarming cloud of pollution particles slamming into the side of Beetham Tower – Manchester’s landmark skyscraper which has come to symbolise the post-industrial reinvention of the city. Expanding on pollution forecast maps, this video piece highlights invisible ozone, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter using vivid saturation colour – each particle per million represented by a pixel.

Burnout by HeHe, part of the Cloud Crash commission. Photograph: Olivia Hemingway

Finally, Burnout asks difficult questions of the arts industry and its role in climate change. A scale-model of the Tate Modern belches out vapour clouds – as if it is simultaneously an art museum and an active energy producer. The building’s original incarnation was Bankside, London’s major fossil-fuel power station from 1952 to 1981, whereas today Tate Modern is often referred to as an ‘art powerhouse’. By so doing, Burnout confronts both the building’s past and the arts sector’s modern day collusion with the fossil industry. Despite a recent decision from Tate to drop BP sponsorship after 26 years, the sector is still overshadowed by certain partnerships. For instance, what many pressure groups such as BP or Not BP call the ‘controversial and ironic’ sponsorship of ‘Sunken Cities’ exhibition by BP (a show rebranded as ‘Sinking Cities – Flooding our World’ by Greenpeace in a publicity stunt back in May).
Above and beyond, Cloud Crash explores a key issue – that to consume and create culture of all kinds is also to consume energy, however it may be sanitized. Brilliant organisations such as Julie’s Bicycles are doing vital work in helping the arts sector reduce their own environmental impacts. Without this, even the most successful public engagement activity and artworks relating to climate change could prove something of a Phyrric victory.
Artists and scientists are natural collaborators, both are explorers and storytellers, seeking out new ways of understanding, communicating (and indeed, changing) the world around them. So when it comes to the dry (or simply terrifying) language of climate science, the marriage of the two can be particularly fruitful. Artists can respond to environmental data in work that provokes real engagement. By communicating these issues in lateral, innovative ways, by using humour and humanity, these sorts of works can reach us on a more animal, cellular, level – and therefore, hopefully, demand our response.
It is important to remember that the dialogue between artists with scientists is two-way. The innate creativity of artists can also inform the work of scientists. NERC’s recent call for public engagement pilot activity celebrates this dialogue, as they seek to support new work that engages members of the UK public with relevant contemporary issues of environmental science whilst also building engagement capacity in the environmental science research community - in particular providing opportunities for early career researchers and PhD students to develop skills in they way they approach, and present, their own research. The arts can come to the service of sciences as much as the other way round.
When it comes to climate science it is all about finding the right language and tone for it - reframing it as an opportunity not sacrifice, making tangible the intangible and giving agency where once there is apathy. Above all, we need to make climate change relatable to us all – and in this there is a great deal more work to do. It is vital that climate-focused arts reach as wide and varied an audience as possible. Diversity is critically important in the climate battle, enabling the society-wide engagement it demands.
Cloud Crash runs across the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) site from 20 October 2016 – 4 February 2017.

*Lucy Wood is an arts producer with a focus on climate change, food systems and migration. She is Director of international environmental arts charity Cape Farewell. She is on twitter as @lucywoodie.

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Company Directors To Face Penalties For Ignoring Climate Change

Fairfax - Jessica Irvine

Australia's fall from grace as a global leader in the fight against dangerous climate change was rapid and inglorious.
But any Australian business leaders who think they got away with sticking their heads in the sand should think again.

Reduction in arctic ice has threatened the habitat of mammals such as the polar bear, walrus and ice seals. Photo: Nick Cobbing / Greenpeace

New legal advice by senior Sydney silk Noel Hutley being released on Monday, suggests it is almost certain that directors of an Australian company will one day face legal action for neglecting to properly account for the potential impact of climate change on their business.
"It is likely to be only a matter of time before we see litigation against a director who has failed to perceive, disclose or take steps in relation to a foreseeable climate-related risk that can be demonstrated to have caused harm to a company (including, perhaps, reputational harm)," the advice, commissioned by the Centre for Policy Development and the Future Business Forum, titled "Climate Change and Directors Duties" concludes.
Politicians who fail in their endeavours to combat climate change can simply retire on a taxpayer-funded scheme.
For company directors who fail in their duties, the penalties are much more severe, including fines of up to $200,000 and disqualification from holding directorships.
Under the Corporations Act, directors have a duty to apply care and diligence in considering all the risks that might apply to their company.
They are required to take into account all "foreseeable" risks.
Given the weight of scientific evidence of climate change, Hutley's advice is that it will not be sufficient for company directors to argue they could not reasonably have believed that climate change was real or human induced.
In considering the risks posed by climate change, directors are not required to become green-caped climate change crusaders.
But many are failing in their most basic duty to consider and disclose the potential risks or to form a business case about whether action is needed to protect their company.
There are two classes of risk posed to Australian companies by climate change.
First, there is physical risk. Rising sea levels, for example, make writing mortgages on coastal properties a riskier business for banks. Rising incidence of severe weather events makes writing insurance products riskier. In a more recent example, power outages resulting from severe weather may affect power supply to all sorts of businesses. Companies that fail to take into account these risks will suffer lower profits.
But the risks are even greater than that.
There is also "transition risk" that must be taken into account. As the world inevitably moves to a lower emissions footprint, governments are likely to make sudden rule changes that will adversely affect firms. Consumers will also dictate the pace of change. It depends what question you ask them, but citizens are demonstrating a greater preference for more sustainable "green" products.
If this means less demand for emissions-intense products, company directors who fail to take account of this would be failing in their duty to protect their company into the future.
Diligent directors can still make a "business judgment" that their company is still best served by continuing with potentially risky activities. But they must at least consider it.
Many people are rightly disappointed by the inadequacy of the Australian government's current policies to reduce emissions.
But regardless of what actions policymakers take, this new legal perspective leaves some hope.
Rather than a top-down approach by government, company directors facing legal action if they fail to plan for the risks of climate change should help drive bottom-up reforms to Australian business that will assist in the transition to a lower emissions economy.
If they don't, they will be sued. Already actions are being brought against US firms, such as Peabody Coal, for failing to take into account the risks of climate change to business as usual.
Company directors looking to avoid a similar fate need to act now.
"To consider climate change risks actively, and disclose them properly, will reduce exposure to liability, and maximise the potential for activating the 'business judgment' rule," the legal advice states.
The penalties for a breach of fiduciary duties are listed in the Corporations Act and include a maximum penalty for individuals of $200,000, potential disqualification from being a director and payment of compensation to a corporation for damage suffered.
Mark Joiner was the chief financial officer of NAB when it was subject to several class actions. He is now a director on a number of boards and agrees it's only a matter of time before an Australian firm is sued for failing to take climate change into account.
"Australia hasn't found a way to advance the progressive values of business. You have got to realise that social values are changing all the time."
It is no longer good enough for companies to make money and spend some of it on progressive issues, like charities. Companies today must earn their "social licence" by finding a purpose that fits with societal values.
The Paris Agreement will enter force on November 4. Current policies are inadequate to achieve even the modest emissions reduction target pledged under the Paris agreement.
Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned this presents serious "transition risk" for companies as it brings forward the need for action to meet targets.
Australian companies are highly exposed to climate change risk.
It's time Australian company directors realised they are too.

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Australia's Climate Change Challenge To Make Clean Energy Work

The Age - Editorial

So much of what we read and hear about climate change is bad news. Recent days brought a welcome update on how far we have come as a global community in starting to address this epoch defining problem, but also a reminder of how far we have to go in Australia.
In a market analysis last week, the Paris-based International Energy Agency found across the globe there is now more renewable energy capacity installed than coal. This is an extraordinary shift, hastened by a dramatic fall in the cost of clean electricity that few predicted just a handful of years ago. Over the past five years, the price of wind energy has decreased by about a third and solar by two-thirds.

The question Australia faces is not whether to embrace clean energy, but how to make sure it works. Photo: Paul Rovere

Coal and other fossil fuels continue to be the largest source of power and the shift to emissions-free technology is still much slower than necessary, but agency executive director Fatih Birol was right to describe the change under way as nothing short of a transformation of global electricity markets. His team predicts a further 15 per cent drop in the cost of wind and 25 per cent for solar by 2021.
Despite this, the story in Australia is otherwise not as positive as elsewhere. The scale of the problem the country faces was described in detail last week by Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox in a speech to the Re-powering NSW Conference. While some media coverage has focused on Mr Willox's concern about state renewable energy targets in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland that are out of step with the national goal, in truth his speech was much broader in scope.

We hope our leaders were listening to his full message. It included taking it as a given that the climate agreement reached in Paris last year means the world has set itself the challenge of global net zero greenhouse gas emissions, and that we need to take that goal seriously. It means that we are going to have to replace most of our electricity system, and will need to do that while ensuring supply and keeping price rises down as much as possible.
Mr Willox stressed that Australians need to re-think their expectations about the cost of electricity. Australia has historically enjoyed cheap power, but prices are rising and are likely to continue to increase due to the cost of building new generation.
That cost is coming regardless of what sort of electricity plants we build to replace today's ageing infrastructure, but no business is going to build traditional coal power in Australia again given they reasonably assume at some point there will be policies in place to put the country on a trajectory to meet that zero emissions goal. They are not viable commercially.
As Mr Willox also pointed out, the projected cost of building new electricity generation appears significantly cheaper overseas compared with Australia. It is possible it has been overestimated and that cleaner energy will be cheaper than previously thought. There is already evidence that costs in Australia have been less than expected. Alternatively, it is possible projections that Australia will pay more are correct, but not inevitable. Mr Willox raised the prospect that construction costs were inflated and could be reduced, but also that finance costs were higher here than they need to be, in significant part because energy and climate policies have been so unstable.
We agree with the growing call from leaders across business, labour, welfare, science and the environmental movement that policy stability is key. The question Australia faces is not whether to embrace clean energy, but how to make sure it works across a vast but lightly populated continent. The country urgently needs enduring cross-party policies that can be scaled up to meet increasingly ambitious climate targets at lowest cost. It also needs new electricity market rules to ensure a rapidly changing system delivers reliable supply across the grid. This may not be easy, but is achievable. Overwhelmingly, politics is the major barrier. We urge the government to listen and take the lead.

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