Lethal Heating: 09/14/17

14/09/2017

The Guardian View On Climate Change: See You In Court

The Guardian - Editorial

It is possible to determine which nations and companies are responsible for damaging the climate. It’s only a matter of time before courts decide they must pay for global warming

Storms clouds move in over the skyline of downtown Orlando as Hurricane Irma makes its way up the Florida peninsula. Photograph: Joe Burbank/AP

Recent days have seen Houston, Texas literally sunk under sheer weight of rain, Carribbean islands battered by powerful storms barrelling across the Gulf and now Florida homes blasted by Irma, the largest of three hurricanes churning in the Atlantic basin. It seems almost certain that man-made climate change has a role in such events. Scientists used to be circumspect at attributing any single extreme event to global warming. No longer. Now scientists make the link between climate change and droughts in Kenya, record winter sun in Britain and torrential downpours in south-west China.
The unmistakeable fingerprint of extreme weather at the crime scene of global warming seems intuitively obvious: consider that Houston is reckoned to have been hit by three “500-year floods” in three years. A 500-year flood does not have to happen only twice a millennium. But a run of three indicates that past climate is no longer a reliable guide to the present weather. The explanation is that the climate itself is changing.
Such thinking should be a wake up call for the world, which has to understand how profoundly we must make a shift in the way we produce, distribute and consume energy, and how disruptive this will be for the real economy. While governments have, via the Paris agreement, signalled the end of the fossil-fuel era, the political processes by which states will decide how to meet their mitigation targets have been hijacked and influenced by Big Carbon.
Fossil-fuel companies, hydrocarbon billionaires and their allies, particularly in the west, have for years now been funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead voters about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution. They have good reason to: a landmark study released earlier this year revealed 50 corporations account for more than one-fifth of all carbon released into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began. The groundbreaking research not only helps establish legal accountability for climate change, it also weakens any corporate defence of wilful blindness. A major polluter cannot say it was going ahead with its activities because it was unaware its products caused great harm. Corporations have made handsome profits as the globe ended up a degree warmer than it should be. These polluters privatised the fossil-fuel profits and socialised the cost to the world’s poor, global taxpayers and future generations. Big Carbon entities and individuals who claim their lobbying activities are just an expression of their democratic rights sound a lot like Big Tobacco when it was denying the health dangers of smoking.
Three major legal actions will test such thinking. First in the Philippines, where it is being determined whether polluters violated the human rights of Filipinos for their role in creating the conditions for Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest ever tropical storm to make landfall, which left more than 7,000 dead. Second in Germany, where a German utility company is being sued for costs associated with glacial lake flooding in Peru. Last in the US, where two California counties are suing 37 oil, gas and coal companies, claiming they knew their products would cause sea-level rise and coastal flooding, but failed to reduce their greenhouse gases.
Fossil-fuel companies should be held accountable for the effects of climate change. Legal warfare has a two-fold aim: to overhaul transgressors’ business models so that they are in line with the global commitment to phase out fossil fuels and limit temperature rises to 1.5°C; and to get them to pay for damages resulting from global warming. Climate litigation is the inevitable result of a failure of two decades of talks. But it is also an important way of reframing the climate crisis as a human rights emergency.

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Stop Talking Right Now About The Threat Of Climate Change. It’s Here; It’s Happening

The Guardian - Bill McKibben

Stop talking right now about the threat of climate change. It’s here; it’s happening. Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, flash fires, droughts: all of them tell us one thing – we need to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and fast.

Flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey, southeast Texas 31 August 2017. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

For the sake of keeping things manageable, let’s confine the discussion to a single continent and a single week: North America over the last seven days.
In Houston they got down to the hard and unromantic work of recovery from what economists announced was probably the most expensive storm in US history, and which weather analysts confirmed was certainly the greatest rainfall event ever measured in the country – across much of its spread it was a once-in-25,000-years storm, meaning 12 times past the birth of Christ; in isolated spots it was a once-in-500,000-years storm, which means back when we lived in trees. Meanwhile, San Francisco not only beat its all-time high temperature record, it crushed it by 3F, which should be pretty much statistically impossible in a place with 150 years (that’s 55,000 days) of record-keeping.
That same hot weather broke records up and down the west coast, except in those places where a pall of smoke from immense forest fires kept the sun shaded – after a forest fire somehow managed to jump the mighty Columbia river from Oregon into Washington, residents of the Pacific Northwest reported that the ash was falling so thickly from the skies that it reminded them of the day Mount St Helens erupted in 1980.
That same heat, just a little farther inland, was causing a “flash drought” across the country’s wheat belt of North Dakota and Montana – the evaporation from record temperatures had shrivelled grain on the stalk to the point where some farmers weren’t bothering to harvest at all. In the Atlantic, of course, Irma was barrelling across the islands of the Caribbean (“It’s like someone with a lawnmower from the sky has gone over the island,” said one astounded resident of St Maarten). The storm, the first category five to hit Cuba in a hundred years, is currently battering the west coast of Florida after setting a record for the lowest barometric pressure ever measured in the Keys, and could easily break the 10-day-old record for economic catastrophe set by Harvey; it’s definitely changed the psychology of life in Florida for decades to come.
Oh, and while Irma spun, Hurricane Jose followed in its wake as a major hurricane, while in the Gulf of Mexico, Katia spun up into a frightening storm of her own, before crashing into the Mexican mainland almost directly across the peninsula from the spot where the strongest earthquake in 100 years had taken dozens of lives.
Leaving aside the earthquake, every one of these events jibes with what scientists and environmentalists have spent 30 fruitless years telling us to expect from global warming. (There’s actually fairly convincing evidence that climate change is triggering more seismic activity, but there’s no need to egg the pudding.)
That one long screed of news from one continent in one week (which could be written about many other continents and many other weeks – just check out the recent flooding in south Asia for instance) is a precise, pixelated portrait of a heating world. Because we have burned so much oil and gas and coal, we have put huge clouds of CO₂ and methane in the air; because the structure of those molecules traps heat the planet has warmed; because the planet has warmed we can get heavier rainfalls, stronger winds, drier forests and fields. It’s not mysterious, not in any way. It’s not a run of bad luck. It’s not Donald Trump (though he’s obviously not helping). It’s not hellfire sent to punish us. It’s physics.
Maybe it was too much to expect that scientists’ warnings would really move people. (I mean, I wrote The End of Nature, the first book about all this 28 years ago this week, when I was 28 – and when my theory was still: “People will read my book, and then they will change.”) Maybe it’s like all the health warnings that you should eat fewer chips and drink less soda, which, to judge by belt-size, not many of us pay much mind. Until, maybe, you go to the doctor and he says: “Whoa, you’re in trouble.” Not “keep eating junk and some day you’ll be in trouble”, but: “You’re in trouble right now, today. As in, it looks to me like you’ve already had a small stroke or two.” Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are the equivalent of one of those transient ischaemic attacks – yeah, your face is drooping oddly on the left, but you can continue. Maybe. If you start taking your pills, eating right, exercising, getting your act together.

Hurricane Irma's path of destruction - video report

That’s the stage we’re at now – not the warning on the side of the pack, but the hacking cough that brings up blood. But what happens if you keep smoking? You get worse, till past a certain point you’re not continuing. We’ve increased the temperature of the Earth a little more than 1C so far, which has been enough extra heat to account for the horrors we’re currently witnessing. And with the momentum built into the system, we’re going to go somewhere near 2C, no matter what we do. That will be considerably worse than where we are now, but maybe it will be expensively endurable.
The problem is, our current business-as-usual trajectory takes us to a world that’s about 3.5C warmer. That is to say, even if we kept the promises we made at Paris (which Trump has already, of course, repudiated) we’re going to build a planet so hot that we can’t have civilisations. We have to seize the moment we’re in right now – the moment when we’re scared and vulnerable – and use it to dramatically reorient ourselves. The last three years have each broken the record for the hottest year ever measured – they’re a red flashing sign that says: “Snap out of it.” Not bend the trajectory somewhat, as the Paris accords envisioned, but simultaneously jam on the fossil fuel brakes and stand on the solar accelerator (and also find some metaphors that don’t rely on internal combustion).

This is a race against time. Global warming is a crisis that comes with a limit – solve it soon or don’t solve it

We could do it. It’s not technologically impossible – study after study has shown we can get to 100% renewables at a manageable cost, more manageable all the time, since the price of solar panels and windmills keeps plummeting. Elon Musk is showing you can churn out electric cars with ever-lower sticker shock. In remote corners of Africa and Asia, peasants have begun leapfrogging past fossil fuel and going straight to the sun. The Danes just sold their last oil company and used the cash to build more windmills. There are just enough examples to make despair seem like the cowardly dodge it is. But everyone everywhere would have to move with similar speed, because this is in fact a race against time. Global warming is the first crisis that comes with a limit – solve it soon or don’t solve it. Winning slowly is just a different way of losing.
Winning fast enough to matter would mean, above all, standing up to the fossil fuel industry, so far the most powerful force on Earth. It would mean postponing other human enterprises and diverting other spending. That is, it would mean going on a war-like footing: not shooting at enemies, but focusing in the way that peoples and nations usually only focus when someone’s shooting at them. And something is. What do you think it means when your forests are on fire, your streets are underwater, and your buildings are collapsing?

*Bill McKibben is a writer and the founder of the climate campaign 350.org

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Ignore Mt Piper's Tune: NSW Isn't About To Lose Its Newest Coal-Fired Plant

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

In Australia's self-induced and largely imagined energy crisis, it seems any ambit claim - particularly if it encourages coal - can generate immediate and unwarranted media and political attention.
For the past week or so, we have witnessed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's ill-considered elevation to national urgency the closure of the decrepit Liddell coal-fired power station in the Hunter Valley in 2022. Owners AGL had given all of seven years' notice.

MPs clash over Liddell power plant closure

No sign of cheaper energy bills as the war of words continue to dominate in federal parliament over Liddell power station closure.

Now, a News Corp publication has tossed into the debate furnace the "real risk" NSW's newest power station Mt Piper faces closure because of a "green activist" group that had the temerity of asking courts (at great financial risk) to uphold NSW law.
Time for a few facts before our leadership lemmings are panicked into, say, banning renewable energy, ditching Australia's Paris climate goals, or other nefarious scheme dreamed up in some coal lobbyist's backroom.
Back in August, the NSW government was posed a dilemma after the state's appeals court deemed a coal mine in Sydney's catchment was operating without an invalid licence, as Fairfax Media reported at the time.
In short, any development - and that includes coal - can only operate in the region if it has a neutral or beneficial effect on water quality. Makes sense if you care about the water supplied to five million people.
So Centennial Coal's Springvale mine should not pump millions of litres a day of untreated mine water into the Coxs River, the second largest supply of water to Sydney's main dam, the court found.
But as Springvale, near Lithgow, happens to be the only current source of coal to EnergyAustralia's Mt Piper plant, the judges in their wisdom said, in effect, go and sort out what you need to do to everybody's satisfaction.

For the past week or so, we have witnessed the PM's ill-considered elevation to national urgency the closure of the decrepit Liddell coal-fired power station in the Hunter Valley in 2022. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Satisfaction, though, will come at a cost for somebody. Submissions are due from this Friday in the NSW Land & Environment Court.
Hence, some early public lobbying is now underway, dovetailing nicely with our contrived energy frenzy.

Mt Piper power station. Photo: Supplied by Centennial Coal

The options at this stage are: Mt Piper looks for alternative coal supplies and builds a rail loader to access it; Springvale accelerates plans to pipe the waste water to a yet-to-built treatment plant; the government changes the legislation that would harm Sydney's water supplies and open the door wider to similar projects in the future.
Naturally, most money is betting on the latter outcome, with the cost borne by a largely unwitting public.
The NSW government is rightly watching the outcome of the submissions in the Land & Environment and not keen to comment. But even if it were to pursue that last option, it won't be able to do so a vacuum.
As Fairfax Media has revealed this week, a new study commissioned by the state government has found underground coal mining is having a more detrimental impact on the catchment than previously thought.
Cracks were likely reaching from the surface all the way down to the coal seam 400 metres below, permanently diverting flows to who knows where, and killing endangered wetlands above.
Indeed, WaterNSW, the government agency, is understood to be very unhappy with the findings. They confirm many of its fears about the wisdom of allowing mining in the catchment at all.
Nobody knows of another major city that allows it.
Sue Higginson is chief executive of the NSW Environmental Defender's Office which led the successful appeal against Springvale on behalf of the 4nature group. She says those seeking a quick corporate fix for Mt Piper would prefer to ignore the rule of law.
"It's as if environmental law doesn't matter," Higginson says.
In the intense heat of the wider energy debate, it's plausible that result sits happily with those keen to promote coal at any cost.

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