31/05/2017

Sky High Carbon Tax Needed To Avoid Catastrophic Global Warming, Say Experts

The Guardian - 

Leading economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern say taxes of $100 per metric ton could be needed by 2030
The aim of a steep tax on carbon would be essential to meet the targets set by the Cop21 Paris Agreement in 2015, the experts said. Photograph: Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg/Getty
A group of leading economists warned on Monday that the world risked catastrophic global warming in just 13 years unless countries ramped up taxes on carbon emissions to as much as $100 (£77) per metric ton.
Experts including Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said governments needed to move quickly to tackle polluting industries with a tax on carbon dioxide at $40-$80 per ton by 2020.
A tax of $100 a ton would be needed by 2030 as one of a series of measures to prevent a rise in global temperatures of 2C.
In a report by the High Level Commission on Carbon Prices, which is backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, they suggest poor countries could aim for a lower tax since their economies are more vulnerable.
The aim of a tax on carbon would be essential to meet the targets set by the Cop21 Paris Agreement in 2015, they said.
The call for action will sting European leaders, who have presided over a carbon trading scheme since 2005 that currently charges major polluters just €6 (£5.20) for every tonne of carbon they release into the atmosphere.
The European scheme, which issues carbon credits to firms that can be traded on a central exchange, has come under fire for allowing heavy energy users to avoid investments in new technology to cut their emissions.
Critics accuse officials of issuing too many credits and allowing the price to fall to a level that makes it cheaper to pollute than for companies to change their behaviour.
Stiglitz and Stern said prices should rise to $50-$100 by 2030 to give businesses and governments an incentive to lower emissions even when fossil fuels are cheap.
The Trump administration has rejected calls to introduce a carbon tax in the United States, saying it would cost jobs. Washington’s refusal to adopt a tax has deterred Brussels from moving to a more substantial charge on emissions, which would have the effect of increasing energy costs, at least in the short term, and imposing higher costs on European manufacturers.
The European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) is the world’s biggest scheme for trading greenhouse gas emissions allowances. It covers some 11,000 power stations and industrial plants in 30 countries, whose carbon emissions make up almost 50% of Europe’s total.

Links
at No comments:

Queensland Says It Won't Play Any Role In Funding For Adani Project

The Guardian -  and AAP

Annastacia Palaszczuk says the Indian mining group will have to pay ‘every dollar’ of state royalties for the proposed mine
Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has announced that there will be no royalty holiday for the Adani Carmichael mine. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP
The Queensland government has announced it will not act as a “middle man” to funnel federal infrastructure funding to support the Adani Group’s proposed coalmine.
The premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has also confirmed the Indian mining group would have to pay “every dollar” of state royalties for the proposed mine, a significant departure from a previous deal to give the company a “royalties holiday”.
The state government on Saturday provided further detail on its financial support for the $16bn Carmichael coalmine in the Galilee basin.
Palaszczuk said her government would play no role in helping to facilitate a $1bn loan to Adani from the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility – a federal government agency that hands out concessional loans for infrastructure development.
Adani is seeking the loan to build the rail link between its proposed mine site and the Abbot Point coal port.
The NAIF traditionally relies on state governments to administer such loans to the project proponents
The deputy premier, Jackie Trad, said the funding would now have to be provided and administered directly by the commonwealth.
“Our position is that the federal government should be funding Adani from the NAIF directly and not using Queensland as a middle man,” she said.
The new royalties scheme will allow the company to defer a proportion of its payments to the state government until the fifth year of the mine’s operation. But any deferred royalties would need to be paid back with interest, Palaszczuk said.
Palaszczuk and Trad would not give further details of the amount of royalties that could be deferred, or the rate of interest that Adani would be subject to, saying the details would be central to the government’s commercial negotiations with the company in coming days.
“But let me make it very clear, I am not going to budge from the decision that I have made, that we have made as a cabinet, because this is the best decision for Queenslanders,” Palaszczuk said.
“All royalties will be paid, and they will be paid with interest. That is our principle and that is the bottom line.”
Asked whether Adani was aware of the government’s new position, she responded: “They are now.”
The Queensland Conservation Council coordinator, Tim Seelig, welcomed the decisions by the state government.
“While we do not believe any new coal mines, including the Adani mine, should proceed given global warming trends and the imperative of carbon emissions reduction, we still welcome these announcements,” Seelig said.
“These are big, important decisions, consistent with previous election commitments.”
The announcement represents a significant departure from a previous deal reportedly struck with the company to cap its royalty payments, meaning Adani would only pay $2m annually over the first seven years of the mine’s operation, giving the miner a $320m loan.
That proposal had sparked internal tensions within the Labor party, led chiefly by Trad and the left faction, who argued the deal broke an election promise.
A cabinet meeting on Friday resolved to move away from any royalty holiday deal.
The Lock the Gate Alliance, an anti-mining group, has warned that the government, through its deferral of royalties, is still allowing Adani incentives using taxpayers’ money.
Its spokeswoman Carmel Flint told Guardian Australia on Saturday that the state government still appeared to be offering Adani a huge loan using taxpayers’ money.
The group has previously warned that the Adani and Glencore mines would be a “recipe for disaster” for food production and put 110,000 hectares of farmland at risk on the Western Downs.
“As far as we can see, there’s still a deferral, so they’ve changed their language, they’re calling it a deferral in royalties,” Flint said.
“It’s still a massive loan to Adani using taxpayers’ money,” she said.
Flint wanted to see the full detail of any deal with Adani on royalties, demanding that the government does not strike something in secret with the company.
The Australia Institute said, regardless of the announcement, the state government was still supporting new coalmines at a time of climate change and mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
“I think that’s the big picture, that a Labor government in a time of climate change is subsidising new coal,” Rod Campbell, the institute’s research director, told Guardian Australia.
“I’m just concerned that people will see this as some sort of win, or some sort of compromise, when in it’s not,” Campbell said.
Adani released a statement on Friday night saying it would “pay every cent of royalties”.
“Adani confirms again that it will pay every cent of royalties to the state as was always the case,” the company said.
It was quick to defer a decision on its final investment, set down for a board meeting on Monday, when the cabinet failed to follow through on the so-called “royalties holiday” deal this week.
Palaszczuk on Saturday denied there had been any backflip on the state government’s deal with Adani or that she had broken a promise to the company.
The Queensland Resources Council chief executive, Ian Macfarlane, told a Mackay audience earlier on Friday previous governments had burdened the industry through significant increases in royalties.
“It is vital that any changes to the state’s royalty system improve the competitiveness of the resources sector,” he said.
“Queensland’s royalty regime is uncompetitive by global standards so we look forward to seeing the government’s proposal.”
A ReachTel poll released on Friday showed significant opposition to the state government’s financial support for Adani.
A majority – 58.8 per cent – of the 1618 Queenslanders polled were either opposed or strongly opposed to such support.
The LNP leader, Tim Nicholls, criticised the government for delaying the mine’s go-ahead with its infighting, saying the last week had been marked by “crazy leaking” from all factions, and he doubted the hardline stance would stick next week.
“[It’s] a party that’s at war with itself, a government that can’t come up with a policy on Friday and stick to it by Monday,” he said.

 Links
at No comments:

Australians Say Climate Change Is Catastrophic Risk, Even As Government Turns Blind Eye

RenewEconomy -  (Climate Code Red)

Three in four Australians understand that climate warming poses a “catastrophic risk,” even as the Australian government turns a blind eye. That was the clear result from a new survey for the Global Challenges Forum (GCF), and the publications of its 2017 Global Catastrophic Risk report.
84% of 8000 people surveyed in eight countries for the GCF consider climate change a “global catastrophic risk”. The figure for the Australian sample was 75%.
Question were asked about a number of risks, including nuclear war, pandemics, biological weapons, climate change and environmental collapse. The climate question asked how much participants agreed or disagreed that “climate change, resulting in environmental damage, such as rising sea levels or melting of icecaps” could be considered as a global catastrophic risk”? A global catastrophic risk was described as “a future event that has the potential to affect 10% of the global population”.
For Australia, the results were: 39% “strongly agree” and 36% “tend to agree” (for total agree of 75%), whilst “tend to disagree” was 15%, “strongly disagree” was 6% and “don’t know” was 4%.
The  2017 Global Catastrophic Risk report summarises the the evidence for catastrophic climate change risk as:
Discussions of climate change usually focus on limiting temperature rises to 1-3˚C above pre-industrial levels. A rise of 3ºC would have major impacts, with most of Bangladesh and Florida under water, major coastal cities – Shanghai, Lagos, Mumbai – swamped, and potentially large flows of climate refugees. While the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change sought to keep global temperature rises below a threshold of 1.5–2 º C, national pledges have fallen short and set the world on a 3.6°C temperature rise track. There is also now scientific consensus that, when warming rises above a certain level, self-reinforcing feedback loops are likely to set in, triggered by the pushing of the Earth’s systems – ocean circulation, permafrost, ice sheets, rainforests and atmospheric circulation – across certain tipping points. The latest science shows that tipping points with potential to cause catastrophic climate change could be triggered at 2ºC global warming. These include the risk of losing all coral reef systems on Earth and irreversible melting of inland glaciers, Arctic sea ice and potentially the Greenland ice sheet. As well as the immediate risk to human societies, the fear is that crossing these tipping points would have major impacts on the pace of global warming itself. Although climate change action has now become part of mainstream economic and social strategies, too little emphasis is put on the risk of catastrophic climate change.
The same survey found 81% of the 1000 Australian participants in the poll agreed with the proposition: “Do you think we should try to prevent climate catastrophes, which might not occur for several decades or centuries, even if it requires making considerable changes that impact on our current living standards?” The figure across the 8000 people polled in eight countries (Australia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, UK, Germany and USA) was 88%.
This shows a much strongly level of support for action that may impact on future living standards or have a personal material  cost that many other polls. This may be in part due to the framing of climate as a possibly catastrophic risk, which may provides a stronger basis for concern.
The GCF report found that many people now see climate change as a bigger threat than other concerns such as epidemics, population growth, use of weapons of mass destruction and the rise of artificial intelligence threats. GCF vice-president Mats Andersson says “there’s certainly a huge gap between what people expect from politicians and what politicians are doing”.
The report says that:
For the first time in human history, we have reached a level of scientific knowledge that allows us to develop an enlightened relationship to risks of catastrophic magnitude. Not only can we foresee many of the challenges ahead, but we are in a position to identify what needs to be done in order to mitigate or even eliminate some of those risks. Our enlightened status, however, also requires that we consider our own role in creating those risks, and collectively commit to reducing them.
However, “the institutions we rely on to ensure peace, security, development and environmental integrity are woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenges at hand”.
The dissonance between what Australian’s understand and what government is doing is remarkable. Australia is failing in its responsibility to safeguard its people and protect their way of life. It is also failing as a world citizen, by downplaying the profound global impacts of climate change and shirking its responsibility to act.
Australia’s per capita greenhouse emissions are in the highest rank in the world, and its commitment to reduce emissions are rated as inadequate by Climate Action Tracker, which says that “Australia’s current policies will fall well short of meeting” its Paris Agreement target, that the Emissions Reduction Fund “does not set Australia on a path that would meet its targets” and “without accelerating climate action and additional policies, Australia will miss its 2030 target by a large margin”.
Australia’s biggest corporations are no better. The S&P/ASX All Australian 50 has the “highest embedded carbon” of any group in the S&P Global 1200, according to the S&P Dow Jones Carbon Scorecard report, which assesses global companies’ carbon footprint, fossil fuel reserve emissions, coal revenue exposure, energy transition and green-brown revenue strain (Investor Daily 2017). At the 2017 Santos annual general meeting, chairman Peter Coates asserted that it is “sensible” and “consistent with good value” to assume for planning purposes a 4°C-warmer world.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins, File
Former senior fossil fuel industry executive Ian Dunlop has recently noted that the most dangerous aspect of fossil-fuel investments made today is that their impacts do not manifest themselves for decades to come. If we wait for catastrophe to happen — as we are doing — it will be too late to act. Time is the most important commodity; to avoid catastrophic outcomes requires emergency action to force the pace of change. In these circumstances, opening up a major new coal province is nothing less than a crime against humanity.

 Links
at No comments: