Climate Analytics says that on current trends, emissions will race way past the Paris agreement target
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have risen 1.3% in the year to March.
Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, fuelled by the
expansion in gas exports and production, according to new figures
published by the Department of Environment and Energy.
The government quietly published its quarterly emissions figures on
Friday afternoon, a public holiday in Victoria and the day of the
release of the interim royal commission report into the banking sector.
The figures show that Australia’s policy vacuum on climate continues
to drive emissions upward and further away from the country’s Paris
targets.
The data show emissions climbed 1.3% in the year to March 2018.
The March quarter for which the data was published recorded a 0.3% increase.
Emissions were up across all sectors except electricity, which fell
4.3% in the year to March, and land use, which the government is
continuing to record as a 5.2% carbon sink.
Fugitive emissions in the energy sector rose 13.7% in the year to March.
The Climate Analytics director, Bill Hare, said the numbers showed
Australia was still not on track to meet its Paris commitment to reduce
emissions by between 26% and 28% by 2030 from its 2005 levels.
“While emissions from the national electricity market continue to
decrease due to increasing renewable electricity, Australian emissions
as a whole continue to increase,” he said.
“On present trends, with virtually no policies apart from the
renewable energy target, which will expire in 2020 and not be replaced,
emissions are set to gallop way past the Paris agreement target.”
He
said the figures also showed the decline in per capita emissions was
beginning to flatten out “at a time when this should be accelerating”.
Matt Drum, the managing director of NDEVR environmental, which tracks
emissions and publishes its own quarterly reports months ahead of the
government, said the absence of climate policy meant emissions were
going up.
“All the figures show emissions are increasing because they’ve got no policy,” he said.
“What I’m really interested in is what policy is Labor going to reveal in the coming weeks?
“The current government have made it very clear they’re not interested in doing anything about emissions.”
The chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Kelly
O’Shanassy, said it was “embarrassing” that climate pollution was
continuing to rise in a wealthy country like Australia.
“This latest pollution scorecard casts extreme doubt over the
Morrison government’s claim that Australia will meet our 2030 emissions
reduction targets ‘in a canter’ without strong new action.
“This latest result is also flattered by falling emissions from power
generation, driven by the construction of solar and wind energy under
our national renewable energy target.
“The Morrison government has declared it will not replace this target
after 2020, meaning Australian climate pollution is at risk of growing
even further.”
The environment minister, Melissa Price, did not respond to questions about the increase in emissions.
She said in a statement that emissions were currently 11.2% below 2005 levels.
The statement said the latest report on Australia’s national
greenhouse gas inventory clearly showed the country was on track to beat
its 2020 emissions target. Links
Buckled train tracks, grounded planes, melting bitumen
and massive blackouts: the dystopian vision of the 50-degree city is
closer to reality every day.
With wildfires raging around the
Arctic Circle, unprecedented heatwaves in the Northern Hemisphere and
record temperatures being set from Algeria to Canada, the world is
getting inexorably hotter.
And the combination of rising global temperatures with increasing urban density is proving deadly.
Now,
50 degrees Celsius, once only associated with places like California's
Death Valley or the desert wilderness of Oman and Iraq, is an
increasingly frequent occurrence.
A recent study, led by
Australian National University climate scientist Dr Sophie Lewis,
speculated that 50C days could occur in Sydney and Melbourne within the
next few decades.
Heading into 'unknown territory'
So,
what happens to urban populations when our cities get halfway to
boiling? Are they equipped for the impeding heat or are we heading
toward urban catastrophe?
It's an urgent question as we enter "unknown territory", according to Marco Amati from RMIT University.
"One
image that stuck out for me was, toward the end of the Millennium
drought, the picture of railway workers, in Melbourne, spraying railway
tracks to try to keep them cool because they were bending out of shape
from the heat," Professor Amati said.
"We have a number of systems
within cities that we rely on — things like air conditioning,
transport, even the asphalt is changed by extreme heat — and we don't
actually know how we can cope with that in large cities.
"The way
we are building cities, as higher density, highly engineered areas — you
have to wonder at what point are we going to exceed those engineering
constraints?"
That question is now a matter of life and death as heatwaves become increasingly common.
Heatwaves in Australia explained
(ABC News)
Associate Professor Camilo Mora, from the University of Hawaii, says
the threshold at which heat becomes deadly can vary, but a growing
percentage of the world's population is now exposed to conditions
exceeding that limit.
"Extreme heat is an abnormal condition for the body," he says.
"We
have an optimum temperature that is around 37 degrees so every time
that it's hot the body wants to activate mechanisms to cool down."
One
of those mechanisms, he says, sends blood to the skin so that through
the process of sweat evaporation, the blood can cool down.
"When
hot conditions last for too long you deprive certain organs of blood,
specifically the gut and the lining of the gut breaks... [causing] a
condition called blood poisoning," he says.
"The cells start
attacking these particles inside your body, creating coagulations that
eventually clog the kidneys and parts of the lungs."
Health, infrastructure and economic consequences
Professor
Mora says his research shows that by the end of the century over half
the world's population will be exposed to this kind of deadly heat for
at least 20 days a year.
In July this year a heatwave that swept across Quebec in Canada killed over 90 people in just over a week.
A
devastating mortality rate, according to Professor Mora, that pales in
comparison to the more than 60,000 heat-related deaths during Europe's
2003 heatwave.
But, he says, the health impact is only one of many consequences including crippling infrastructure and economic paralysis.
"We see not only damage to the railroads but concrete also cracks so then you have roads that need to be fixed," he says.
"In
some places the wires start melting because it just gets too hot at the
moment when everybody is turning on their air conditioners — as a
result they touch each other and create these massive blackouts.
"In
the US, for example, in any temperature that is above 110F, planes
cannot fly because ... the density of the air is not sufficient for
these planes to take off."
Adapting our cities to these new
extremes is a costly exercise, particularly in places like Europe with
very old infrastructure, Professor Amati believes.
"But even then
when you retrofit a warmer climate, the air conditioning that they use
in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi is different to the air conditioning
that [we] use in Australia," he says.
"They use different coolants
in those places to adapt to those circumstances; but it still becomes
an issue of cost, of retrofitting those areas and it is still a very
practical issue."
The effects of severe weather of course are not evenly distributed;
developing countries are particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.
Studies
have shown that race and class are key factors in susceptibility to the
worst effects of climate change, from the proximity to green spaces to
exposure to air pollution.
But even in developed nations, extreme heat reveals in the starkest terms some of our cities' deep inequalities.
Wealthy nations, Professor Mora says, are far from immune.
"For
instance, in Miami right now, to deal with the ... sea level rise that
is damaging the roads they have to invest [billions of] dollars," he
says.
"[That] money that could have gone towards education or health now has to be spent on raising the levels of the highways.
"The
same goes for electricity; I know that places in Australia are dealing
with a high demand of electricity during these heatwaves because
everyone turns on their air conditioning, so now you have to make
massive investments in improving the electrical grids."
Paint the houses' roofs white
Mitigating
against the worst effects of urban heat, however, does not always need
to be costly or involve massive infrastructure investments, Professor
Amati says.
"In Ahmedabad, in India, they have a wonderful program
to simply paint the roofs of informal houses white; there's no
engineering required, there's no air conditioning required," he says.
Likewise, greening cities is crucial in limiting harm from heat exposure.
"Places like New York, for example, are putting a lot of money into the restoration of gardens," Professor Mora says.
So
there are other environmental solutions that are good not only to
reduce the heat but also help to mitigate greenhouse gases as well."
The question of whether we are equipped to cope or not is a matter of
planning as much as anything else, according to Professor Amati.
"I
think it's really a question more ... about the building regulations
and about the way in which we array our suburbs and the density we live
at," he says.
"But [it's] also the timing and the way we do
things. We might have to adapt our work/life schedules more towards
taking siestas in the afternoon, for example.
"As it is, at the
moment, a heatwave strikes, everyone downs tools — people don't go to
work and there's a kind of a catastrophe.
"I wonder whether we shouldn't be adapting the way we work to fit this new reality better."
'It's going to be a nightmare'
But Professor Mora warns against adaptation as a substitute for real action on climate change.
"Let's try to prevent those heatwaves from happening in the first place rather than trying to live with those things," he says.
"It's going to be a nightmare. Every single summer we are going to be paralysed because these heatwaves can pose a danger to us.
"[But] it's not too late for us to fix this problem."
Dr Lewis agrees that despite the dire outlook, the nightmare is not yet inevitable.
"We
found that there are huge benefits to limiting global warming for
reducing the severity of future extremes in Australia," she says.
"We are currently on track to exceed 3 degrees of global warming, which would correspond to even more severe extremes.
"That means we have to be acting now to reduce this possibility and to prepare cities for high magnitude future extremes."
Firefighters from Brea, Calif., inspect and cut
fireline on Aug. 1, 2018, as the Ranch Fire burns near Upper Lake,
Calif. A day earlier, it and the River Fire totaled more than 74,000
acres. (Stuart W. Palley/For The Washington Post)
Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century.
A
rise of seven degrees Fahrenheit, or about four degrees Celsius,
compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to
scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic
oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly
coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts
of the globe.
But the administration did not
offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail
to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat
climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s
fate is already sealed.
The
draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s
decision to freeze federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light
trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse
gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a
very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.
“The
amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to
this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and
society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about
it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the
U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.
The
document projects that global temperature will rise by nearly 3.5
degrees Celsius above the average temperature between 1986 and 2005
regardless of whether Obama-era tailpipe standards take effect or are
frozen for six years, as the Trump administration has proposed. The
global average temperature rose more than 0.5 degrees Celsius between
1880, the start of industrialization, and 1986, so the analysis assumes a
roughly four degree Celsius or seven degree Fahrenheit increase from
preindustrial levels.
The
world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this
drastic warming, the analysis states. And that “would require
substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to
today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to
move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently
technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
World
leaders have pledged to keep the world from warming more than two
degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels, and agreed to try to
keep the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But the current
greenhouse gas cuts pledged under the 2015 Paris climate agreement are not steep enough to meet either goal.
Scientists predict a four degree Celsius rise by the century’s end if
countries take no meaningful actions to curb their carbon output.
Trump
has vowed to exit the Paris accord and called climate change a hoax. In
the past two months, the White House has pushed to dismantle nearly
half a dozen major rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases,
deregulatory moves intended to save companies hundreds of millions of
dollars.
If enacted, the administration’s proposals would give new life to aging coal plants; allow oil and gas operations to release more methane into the atmosphere; and prevent new curbs on greenhouse gases used in refrigerators and air-conditioning units. The vehicle rule
alone would put 8 billion additional tons of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere this century, more than a year’s worth of total U.S.
emissions, according to the government’s own analysis.
Administration
estimates acknowledge that the policies would release far more
greenhouse gas emissions from America’s energy and transportation
sectors than otherwise would have been allowed.
Florence from above: Aerial photos of flooding and damage from the hurricane. View Graphic
The statement is the latest evidence of deep contradictions in the Trump administration’s approach to climate change.
Despite
Trump’s skepticism, federal agencies conducting scientific research
have often reaffirmed that humans are causing climate change, including
in a major 2017 report that found “no convincing alternative
explanation.” In one internal White House memo, officials wondered
whether it would be best to simply “ignore” such analyses.
In
this context, the draft environmental impact statement from NHTSA —
which simultaneously outlines a scenario for very extreme climate
change, and yet offers it to support an environmental rollback — is
simply the latest apparent inconsistency.
David
Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who
testified against Trump’s freeze of car mileage standards Monday in
Fresno, Calif., said his organization is prepared to use the
administration’s own numbers to challenge its regulatory rollbacks. He
noted that NHTSA document projects that if the world takes no action to
curb emissions, current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide
would rise from 410 parts per million to 789 ppm by 2100.
“I was shocked when I saw it,” Pettit said in a phone interview. “These are their numbers. They aren’t our numbers.”
Conservatives
who condemned President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives as
regulatory overreach have defended the Trump administration’s approach,
calling it a more reasonable course.
Obama’s
climate policies were costly to industry and yet “mostly symbolic,”
because they would have made barely a dent in global carbon dioxide
emissions, said Heritage Foundation research fellow Nick Loris, adding:
“Frivolous is a good way to describe it.”
NHTSA
commissioned ICF International Inc., a consulting firm based in
Fairfax, Va., to help prepare the impact statement. An agency
spokeswoman said the Environmental Protection Agency “and NHTSA welcome
comments on all aspects of the environmental analysis” but declined to
provide additional information about the agency’s long-term temperature
forecast.
Federal agencies typically do not
include century-long climate projections in their environmental impact
statements. Instead, they tend to assess a regulation’s impact during
the life of the program — the years a coal plant would run, for example,
or the amount of time certain vehicles would be on the road.
Using
the no-action scenario “is a textbook example of how to lie with
statistics,” said MIT Sloan School of Management professor John Sterman.
“First, the administration proposes vehicle efficiency policies that
would do almost nothing [to fight climate change]. Then [the
administration] makes their impact seem even smaller by comparing their
proposals to what would happen if the entire world does nothing.”
This
week, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned leaders gathered
in New York, “If we do not change course in the next two years, we risk
runaway climate change . . . Our future is at stake.”
Yes, humans have made wildfires worse. Here's how. View Graphic
Federal and independent research — including
projections included in last month’s analysis of the revised
fuel-efficiency standards — echoes that theme. The environmental impact
statement cites “evidence of climate-induced changes,” such as more
frequent droughts, floods, severe storms and heat waves,
and estimates that seas could rise nearly three feet globally by 2100 if
the world does not decrease its carbon output.
Two
articles published in the journal Science since late July — both
co-authored by federal scientists — predicted that the global landscape could be transformed “without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” and declared that soaring temperatures worldwide bore humans’ “fingerprint.”
“With
this administration, it’s almost as if this science is happening in
another galaxy,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist
for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program.
“That feedback isn’t informing the policy.”
Administration
officials say they take federal scientific findings into account when
crafting energy policy — along with their interpretation of the law and
Trump’s agenda. The EPA’s acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, has been
among the Trump officials who have noted that U.S. emissions of carbon
dioxide and other pollutants have fallen over time.
But
the debate comes after a troubling summer of devastating wildfires,
record-breaking heat and a catastrophic hurricane — each of which,
federal scientists say, signals a warming world.
Some
Democratic elected officials, such as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, said
Americans are starting to recognize these events as evidence of climate
change. On Feb. 25, Inslee met privately with several Cabinet officials,
including then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt, and Western state governors.
Inslee accused them of engaging in “morally reprehensible” behavior that
threatened his children and grandchildren, according to four meeting
participants, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details
of the private conversation.
In an interview,
Inslee said that the ash from wildfires that covered Washington
residents’ car hoods this summer, and the acrid smoke that filled their
air, has made more voters of both parties grasp the real-world
implications of climate change.
“There is anger
in my state about the administration’s failure to protect us,” he said.
“When you taste it on your tongue, it’s a reality.”
A woman looks at rising floodwaters from the
garage of a home in Soddy-Daisy, Tenn., on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2018.
(Doug Strickland/Chattanooga Times Free Press/Associated Press)
Almost a quarter of corals at 40-metres down damaged by ocean heat spikes.
Being in deep water, researchers find, confers only limited protection against bleaching for corals. LYNNEBECLU / Getty Images
Even the deep-water corals of
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are not safe from the damaging effects of
rising ocean temperatures, a new study finds.
Living at depths
of between 30 and 150 metres below the surface, these “mesophotic” reefs
were thought to be protected from severe bleaching events, like those
that devastated the reef’s shallow-water corals in 2016 and 2017.
Now, an international team of marine scientists has discovered that the 2016 heat spike caused coral death up to 40 metres down.
“It
was a shock to see that the impacts extended to these dimly-lit reefs,”
said Pedro Frade of Portugal’s University of Algarve, lead author of
the study published in Nature Communications.
Using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to place sensors up to 100
metres deep, the researchers recorded water temperatures before and
after the bleaching occurred. They also scuba-dived to check the reefs
for signs of damage once the bleaching was underway.
Coral Bleaching Explained: The Story of Frank the Coral
By May 2016,
water temperatures at the mesophotic reefs were a whopping 1.4 degrees
Celsius higher than the monthly average for the previous three years.
Major bleaching and mortality were reported for almost a quarter of
these deep reefs.
The surveys also confirmed previous reports of damage to nearly half of shallow-water corals.
Remarkably,
reefs at 40 metres deep experienced the same heat exposure as those at
10 metres – a testament to the strong effects of the late-season
warming.
Local oceanographic conditions play a major role in
regulating water temperature at mesophotic reefs, the researchers say.
Deep-water currents bring cold water up the continental shelf, cooling
them.
However, “when this upwelling stopped towards the end of
summer, temperatures rose to record-high levels even at depth,” explains
co-author Pim Bongaerts of the California Academy of Sciences in the
US.
Temperatures at the deep-water reefs did not drop to 28 degrees Celsius until mid-April, nearly two months later than normal.
Despite
the damage to the deep water reefs, the severity of coral bleaching was
much greater in shallower ones — a sign that depth still does confer
some protection from thermal extremes.
For coral species that are more susceptible to bleaching, the authors predict a shift in abundance and distribution as water temperatures continue to rise.
“There
will be winners and losers as a result of long-term impacts of mass
bleaching events on coral reefs, and in the Great Barrier Reef in
particular,” they state.
People engaged in the climate debate are often bewildered by
society’s lack of response. How can we ignore such overwhelming evidence
of an existential threat to social and economic stability?
Given human history, we should never have expected anything else.
Humans have a consistent tendency that when change is uncomfortable we
delay action until a threat becomes a crisis. The scale of the threat or
the existence of powerful evidence makes little difference.
There are countless examples – personal health issues, a business’
declining success, or global financial and credit risks. Historically,
though, World War Two (WWII ) remains the best analogy.
The evidence of the threat posed by Hitler was overwhelming and the
case for action crystal clear. However, many were still deeply resistant
to acting. Only when the threat became overwhelming – until it was
accepted as an imminent crisis – was Britain triggered into action. When
it was, Winston Churchill led the critical shift in thinking, arguing
that no matter how uncomfortable, expensive or challenging to the status
quo, sometimes you just have to do what is necessary. Not your best, or what you can afford, or what’s “realistic” – but what is necessary. In his case, that was going to war and assuming victory was possible.
And so began one of the fastest and most dramatic economic
mobilisations and industrial transformations in history. As a result,
something that was rationally bordering on the impossible was achieved.
I would argue we are approaching a point where this same cycle will
play out on climate change – and we will get to the transformational
action stage.
Perhaps surprisingly given the global implications of what’s at
stake, a good indicator of this is the council of Darebin, in Melbourne,
where I am addressing a Climate Emergency conference this week.
Why is this an indicator? When we look back at history, like WWII, we
tend to simplify cause and effect. We say it was the invasion of
Poland, the arrival of Churchill, etc, that triggered the change. In
reality, complex systems like human society move in a distributed way,
reaching a critical mass or tipping point at a time that is hard to
predict and sometimes even hard to identify afterwards.
Comparing WWII to climate change, we should first acknowledge that
once again, the issue is not the evidence of the threat. That is clear
and accepted – in fact with hindsight it will be seen as blindingly
obvious.What is relatively new is that scientists and experts are
increasingly acknowledging that nothing less than a massive global
mobilisation on a WWII scale is required to address the catastrophic
risks posed. Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head
of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and a senior
advisor to Pope Francis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the
European Union recently argued that “Climate change is now reaching the
end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking
unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and
bear the consequences.”
All around us examples of what these consequences might be are
increasingly tangible. Whether it be wild fires in northern Sweden,
refugee crises, extreme ice melt in the Arctic, submerged airports in Japan or severe droughts, people are feeling climate change live.
My key argument is that this process – identified threats, resistance
and avoidance, stronger and stronger evidence, acceptance of crisis and
then dramatic response – is pretty much how these things always unfold.
And so it will most likely be on climate change.
Many argue we need a Churchill to lead us, that only a strong leader
can take charge in a crisis and show us the way forward. Or maybe we
need a climate “Pearl Harbour” – a major single event. This is not how
systems usually change, but especially not in a globalised and connected
world. Yes, we need leadership and across all sections of society. But
the “Churchills” emerge from a context and the context shift we need is
to accept we have a crisis. Critically, this acceptance is a distributed
social phenomenon, not a technical question of science or evidence.
This brings me back to Darebin in Melbourne. This local council
looked rationally at what the science told them – that we face a crisis
and the only logical response is to declare a climate emergency. And so
they did. In consultation with their community, they then developed the Darebin Climate Emergency Plan.
Why is this significant? Because this is how systems change.
Ideas take hold and spread. Darebin has since been followed in the US
with a small but growing list of elected bodies in regions and cities
also declaring a climate emergency. First came Montgomery County, Maryland ,
since joined by Richmond, Berkeley and Los Angeles in California, and
Hoboken, New Jersey. This is not emerging spontaneously, but through
active organising by groups dedicated to the task like The Climate Mobilisation.
Yes, it’s frustrating that these things take time. Therefore, knowing
we can still “win” is key. Towards this end I co-wrote nearly 10 years
ago a journal paper, The One Degree War Plan, with
Professor Jorgen Randers, showing how achieving 1 degree of warming was
surprisingly realistic with a WWII style mobilisation. Recently along
the same lines, The Climate Mobilisation developed a “Victory Plan” to show what a WWII style economic mobilisation across the USA could look like.
So on the surface, Darebin Council inviting a group of experts like
myself to suburban Melbourne to discuss what a climate emergency means
might not seem much. But it is a crucial part of a process whereby we
first normalise the idea that we face an existential crisis. Next we
will come to accept that the only rational response is a WWII-like
economic mobilisation to eliminate global net carbon dioxide emissions
within a decade or so.
Find this hard to imagine? It is. But as we learnt from Churchill in
1940, when we shift our thinking to “what is necessary”, what we can
achieve is quite extraordinary. Or as Nelson Mandela said: “It always
seems impossible, until it’s done.” Breaking News: Moreland Council (Victoria) became the second local council, after Darebin (Victoria), to recognise the climate emergency crisis, and passed an acknowledgement we are in a state of climate emergency. This will be embedded in next Council plan and Zero Carbon Evolution framework.
*Paul Gilding is a Fellow at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and senior advisor to Breakthrough: The National Centre for Climate Restoration.
Links
The US is second only to India when it comes to the economic cost of global warming.
The United States stands to pay the second-highest social cost of carbon in the world. Shutterstock
All efforts to fight climate change face the money test:
Are the benefits of stopping global warming — and avoiding sea level
rise, heat waves, and wildfires — greater than the costs?
The dollar balance we arrive at should be one of the
biggest factors in deciding what we’re willing to do to tackle the
problem, whether that’s shuttering all coal plants or building thousands
of nuclear reactors.
Some groups have taken a stab at calculating what climate
change will cost the world, or conversely, how much humanity would save
by becoming more sustainable. Earlier this month, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate tallied the number at a truly massive $26 trillion in savings by 2030.
Getting a slice of those savings requires figuring out
which actors stand to lose the most as the climate changes, whether
that’s countries, companies, or even individuals.
And this is where the idea of the social cost of carbon
comes in. It’s a policy tool that attaches a price tag to the long-term
economic damage caused by one ton of carbon dioxide, hence the cost to
society. It’s related to a carbon tax (more on that below), and it
serves as a way to distill the vast global consequences of climate
change down to a practical metric.
Critically, it’s also the foundation of US climate policies, including the Clean Power Plan. Revising this number down has been a key part of the Trump administration’s strategy to roll back environmental rules. Under Obama, the social cost of carbon was set at $45 per ton of carbon dioxide; under Trump, it’s as little as $1.
A new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change
calculates the social cost of carbon down to individual countries. This
adds an important bit of nuance because climate change is going to cost
some countries more than others, a fact that’s lost when you try to
tabulate a global average.
The
team found a global social cost of carbon vastly higher than many
previous estimates, drawing on more recent climate projections and more
robust macroeconomic models. The results also highlighted the
fundamental injustice of climate change: Many of those who contributed
the least to the problem stand to suffer the most. And the study has a
stark message for the United States: The economy stands to pay one of
the highest prices in the world for its emissions.
We’re drastically underestimating how much climate change will cost the global economy
Even if you’ve just skimmed climate policy discussions in recent years, you’ve likely come across the idea of a carbon tax.
In short, a carbon tax helps attach the consequences of climate change
to the greenhouse gas sources that are driving it. Ideally, it would
push economies toward sustainability by making dirtier energy sources
and industries more costly relative to their alternatives.
Though a tax is just one way to price emissions, most
economists and scientists agree that pricing in some form is the sine
qua non of fighting climate change. (My colleague David Roberts has
written extensively about the limits of a carbon tax and the recent Republican carbon tax proposals.)
How high you set your carbon tax is a function of how
aggressively you want to clean up your act and how much damage you’re
expecting if you don’t. The former is an objective that’s set by
policymakers, but the latter, in theory, has an empirical value. This is
the social cost of carbon.
The lead author of the NatureClimate Change
study, Katharine Ricke, an assistant professor at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego,
explained that calculating the social cost of carbon requires
coordinating several variables.
“You need to make assumptions about socioeconomic
progress and changes in the world that are going to happen out a century
in the future,” she said. “You need to contend with uncertainty about
how climate change is going to look.”
The social cost of carbon is an imperfect measure: It
focuses on broad changes in the economy rather than abrupt shifts from
extreme weather or disasters. It also requires making many arguable
assumptions. However, it’s still a useful tool in estimating the costs
and benefits of different ways to fight climate change.
To account for this variability, Ricke and her team
looked at a range of greenhouse gas emission scenarios, as well as
several different economic damage models and multiple social discount rates.
The results showed that the world has been drastically
undervaluing the potential economic damages from climate change. The
median global social cost of carbon came out to $417 per ton, an order
of magnitude more than prior estimates of $40 per ton.
India is poised to pay the highest social cost of carbon. Russia may not pay one at all.
Drilling down into individual countries, the researchers spotted disparities in the economic consequences of climate change.
The social cost of carbon for individual countries in dollars per ton of carbon dioxide emissions.Nature Climate Change
Countries at northern latitudes, like Russia, face a negative
social cost of carbon. This implies that the warming wrought by climate
change will actually boost the economies of these countries. Warming
can improve agriculture or reduce heating demands in the far north, for
example. However, Ricke cautioned that these costs were calculated based
on macroeconomic factors within countries; they don’t account for
things like international trade, which may suffer in a warming world.
The model also doesn’t account for direct consequences of
climate change, like sea level rise flooding coastal areas or thawing
permafrost causing roads to buckle. In fact, northern latitudes are
among the fastest warming regions in the world.
These effects will impact the economies of northern countries, but they
aren’t baked into the economic model used in this study.
“We recommend taking the negative social cost of carbon
values with a grain of salt,” Ricke said. “These estimates likely
represent a lower bound.”
On the other hand, the findings are especially alarming
for India. It has the highest social cost of carbon in the world, at $86
per ton. Coming in second is the United States at $48 per ton.
“The thing that drives the high social cost of carbon in
the US to a great extent is the fact that we just have such a big
economy, so we have a lot to lose,” Ricke said. This value
coincidentally aligns with the number the Obama administration came up
with, but there’s a crucial difference. Ricke explained that the
government’s numbers included social costs to the rest of the world from
US emissions; the number Ricke calculated does not. If the team were to
include everything in the Obama formula, then the social cost of carbon
for the United States would be even higher.
As journalist David Wallace-Wells pointed out on Twitter,
this shows that fighting climate change makes sense for the United
States, even for purely selfish reasons:
IMAGE
Calculating the social cost of carbon is merely the starting point for climate policy
Suppose every country in the world suddenly wakes up
tomorrow in ecstatic cahoots on climate change and decides to implement a
carbon tax at the level of their respective social costs of carbon.
Will that solve climate change?
Not even remotely.
“If countries were to price their own carbon emissions at
their own [country-level social cost of carbon], approximately 5
[percent], a small amount, of the global climate externality would be
internalized,” the researchers wrote.
That’s because there are some countries that emit very
little and will be hit hard by climate change, while others emit a lot
and won’t see as many damages. So for a country to set a meaningful
carbon tax, or any other price on carbon, it has to include damages
caused to other countries, as former Obama adviser Jason Bordoff wrote
in the Wall Street Journal:
Unlike other regulated pollutants that have
almost entirely domestic consequences, CO2 impacts are global, and
climate change is a “tragedy of the commons” problem. A ton of CO2
contributes equally to climate change regardless of where it comes from.
If all nations looked only at the impact of a ton of CO2 on their own
nations, the collective response would be vastly inadequate to address
the true damages from climate change.
This wonky chart (bear with me) from Ricke’s study explains the dilemma:
A figure comparing the social cost of carbon within a country to its share of global emissions. Nature Climate Change
The chart compares a country’s social cost of carbon to
its share of global emissions. The radiating lines show the ratios of a
country’s share of global emissions to its share of the damages.
The United States is almost balanced, with its high
social cost of carbon roughly proportional to how much carbon dioxide it
emits. But India pumps out just 6 percent of global greenhouse gases
and will bear more than 20 percent of the global economic burden from
climate change. In other words, India faces almost quadruple the damages
of global warming compared to its contribution to the problem. Zoom in
further and you’ll notice that many of the wealthiest countries in the
world stand to bear the lowest costs of climate change.
This is part of why the global social cost of carbon,
$417 per ton, is so much higher than it is for any individual country.
The costs of climate change are greater than the sum of their parts. Yet
it also shows that many of the wealthiest countries, which contributed
the most greenhouse gases, stand to be the best insulated from its
costs.
That makes climate change a global justice concern. In
limiting global warming, wealthy countries face a moral imperative to
look beyond their borders and GDPs, pushing even harder to cut their own
emissions. The social costs of carbon also show why climate change
really has to be tackled as a global problem rather than by individual
nations. But as long as countries like Russia, the United Kingdom, and
Germany face little financial fallout, that policy case becomes much
harder to make.
Researchers take part in a 2006 sampling expedition around Antarctica on the SA Agulhas. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart
Neil Swart had barely begun his master’s degree at the University of
Cape Town when he embarked on a three-month voyage to the South Pole.While aboard a ship meant to resupply South Africa’s research
facilities in Antarctica, enduring rocky waters and waves reaching 10
metres tall, Swart deployed instruments to record the Antarctic Ocean’s
temperature.
"We have to get to zero emissions at some point in the future if we were to stabilize the climate,” said Environment Canada scientist @Neil_C_Swart #climateaction #climatechange #oceans
At the time, Swart thought of himself as a volunteer helping further
“someone else’s science.” He didn’t expect that 13 years later, the data
he collected would allow him and a team of researchers to identify
human activity as the number one cause of rising water temperatures in
the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean.
“It’s kind of nice to see it come full circle,” Swart, now a researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told National Observer in an interview.
Along with other scientists from the department, and the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, Swart found that
changes seen in Southern Ocean temperature are directly tied to ozone
depletion and human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to
regular temperature variations or responses to natural climate changes,
such as volcanic eruptions or changes in the sun.
Their findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience on Monday.
Researchers on the SA agulhas (left to right) Mike Funke,
Sebastian Swart, Natalie Burls and Neil Swart hold an "Argo float,"
which Swart says is an instrument that dives 2,000 metres down while
measuring ocean temperature and salinity. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart
on Facebook
Serious consequences for the ocean
While the connection between human-made greenhouse gas emissions and
rising global ocean temperatures has long been understood, this is the
first time it has been proven specifically for the waters that surround
Antarctica, explained Swart.
Since industrialization, the ocean has absorbed
nearly 40 per cent of human-made greenhouse gas emissions. The Southern
Ocean, according to Swart, is responsible for absorbing the majority of
those emissions.
“The Southern Ocean is the single most important region globally
taking up the heat associated with global warming,” he said. As a
result, it plays a huge role in mitigating the effects of climate
change.
“If it weren’t providing these services, so to speak, we would be
experiencing far more CO2 increases in the atmosphere. So understanding
changes in this region is really critical.”
The consequences of human-induced warming in that region are not minor, he added.
"By driving an intense warming of these southern waters, we’re
increasingly destabilizing the Antarctic ice sheet,” he said. That
contributes to well-documented increases in sea level,
affecting coastal populations, he explained, and “the warmer ocean
water becomes, the less effective it becomes at absorbing CO2.”
Swart explained that as the ocean’s ability to absorb climate-warming
carbon dioxide decreases, global temperatures stand to increase, all of
which could lead to greater weather extremes, such as more heat waves
and changes in or stronger precipitation events.
To attribute the rise in ocean water temperature in the region to
human activity, Swart and his team used simulations based off historical
data and recent observations. By removing contributing factors from
their simulation, the researchers were able to pinpoint the the cause as
being man-made greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion.
Fossil fuel production and consumption are some of the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases. In 2015, 26 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions came from the oil and gas industry.
In a 2012, Swart and Andrew Weaver – then a climate scientist, now an
MLA in British Columbia and head of the province’s Green Party —
published a controversial article in the journal Nature Climate Change. The pair suggested
coal was a bigger threat to climate change than oilsands, while
stressing that there was a need to move toward non-greenhouse gas
emitting sources of energy and avoiding new fossil fuel infrastructure.
After their research was used by pro-oilsands advocates to justify calls
for expansion, the two scientists later reiterated that all fossil fuel
use needs to be regulated to reduce global warming.
An Antarctic
Ocean ice shelf is captured during a 2006 sampling expedition and
resupply mission, during which Neil Swart and his colleagues collected
the data that was eventually published in the Nature Geoscience report on Sept 24, 2018. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart
‘Zero emissions’ only way to stabilize climate
“It is very clear that to limit warming to any given (global
temperature) target…there’s a finite amount of CO2 emissions that we’re
allowed to make, kind of like a budget we’re allowed to spend,” said
Swart.
“If we go above that, we will exceed that target threshold. We have
to get to zero emissions at some point in the future if we were to
stabilize the climate.”
While it’s a lofty goal, Swart said ozone depletion is a good example
of a climate problem tackled by policy. The Montreal Protocol, which
took effect in 1989, helped eliminate the production of
chlorofluorcarbons, a chemical that contributed the depletion of the
ozone layer and was once commonly found in refrigerators and aerosol
sprays. In the decades since, there has been significant decrease in ozone depletion.
Last November, an amendment was added to the protocol to reduce
production of hydrofluorocarbons, which are used similarly to
chlorofluorcarbons. Titled the Kigali Amendment, it will come into
effect on Jan. 1, 2019.
“As a result, the consequences of (ozone depletion) are not going to
be as severe as they would have been if we hadn’t taken action,” said
Swart.
“I think that provides a good model for the case with CO2 – that we
also have to take some kind of similar action which ultimately deals
with the problem.”
The Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change is one
of the federal government’s attempts to take such action. The strategy,
which was introduced in December 2016, is meant to significantly reduce
Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It intends to do so, in part,
through a carbon tax scheme, which Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta have all opposed.
Canada has also committed to the Paris Agreement, along with 194
other countries in December 2015. Though not legally binding, in doing
so, Canada also pledged to take action to limit a global temperature
increase of 2 degrees this century.
Exclusive: Author of key UN climate report says limiting temperature rise would require enormous, immediate transformation in human activity
Avoiding a temperature increase of more than 1.5C will be ‘extraordinarily challenging’, says the report’s author.
Photograph: Matt Brown/AP
The world’s governments are “nowhere near on track” to meet their
commitment to avoid global warming of more than 1.5C above the
pre-industrial period, according to an author of a key UN report that
will outline the dangers of breaching this limit.
A massive, immediate transformation in the way the world’s population
generates energy, uses transportation and grows food will be required
to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C and the forthcoming
analysis is set to lay bare how remote this possibility is.
“It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5C target and we
are nowhere near on track to doing that,” said Drew Shindell, a Duke
University climate scientist and a co-author of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change report, which will be unveiled in South Korea next month.
“While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a
real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.”
In the 2015 Paris climate pact, international leaders agreed
to curb the global temperature rise to 2C above the era prior to mass
industrialization, with an aspiration to limit this to 1.5C. The world
has already warmed by around 1C over the past century, fueling sea level
rises, heatwaves, storms and the decline of vulnerable ecosystems such
as coral reefs.
Shindell would not share exact details of the IPCC report, but he
said that the more ambitious 1.5C goal would require a precipitous drop
in greenhouse emissions triggered by a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels,
particularly coal, mass deployment of solar and wind energy and the
eradication of emissions from cars, trucks and airplanes.
Even then, emerging technology will be required on a global scale to
capture emissions at the source and bury them in the ground or remove
carbon directly from the air.
“The penetration rate of new technology historically takes a long
time,” Shindell said. “It’s not simple to change these things. There
aren’t good examples in history of such rapid, far-reaching
transitions.”
The fading prospect of keeping the global temperature rise to below
1.5C has provoked alarm among leaders of low-lying island nations that
risk being inundated should the world warm beyond this point.
“Every
country must increase the ambition of their existing targets,” said
Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, which announced a plan
to reach net zero emissions by 2050 at the UN general assembly in New
York this week. “If we can do it, so can everyone else.”
The UN general assembly has again pitted the world’s countries
against Donald Trump when it comes to climate change, with the US
president using his keynote speech to praise “clean coal”. Trump has
vowed to exit the Paris accord, a stance that Emmanuel Macron, the
French president, told the UN should be met with consequences such as a
refusal by countries to enter into trade deals with the US.
“It’s a lot more difficult without the US as a leader in climate
change negotiations,” Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s environment minister, told
the Guardian. “We have to find solutions even though the US isn’t
there.”
Elvestuen said countries, including Norway, which is one of the
world’s largest oil and gas producers, need to transition away from
fossil fuels, embrace electric cars and halt deforestation.
He admitted these changes had not happened quickly enough since the
Paris deal. Last year, global greenhouse gas emissions rose slightly
again after a short period of stasis.
“We are moving way too slowly,” Elvestuen said. “We have to do more
of everything, faster. We need to deliver on policies at every level.
Governments normally move slowly but we don’t have the time.”
“The 1.5C target is difficult, but it’s possible. The next four to 12
years are crucial ones, where we will set the path to how the world
will develop in the decades ahead. The responsibility in doing this is
impossible to overestimate. To reach the goals of the Paris agreement we
need large structural changes.”
A difference of 0.5C in temperature may appear small but the IPCC
report, which is a summary of leading climate science, is expected to
warn there will be major impacts if warming reaches 2C.
“Even 1.5C is no picnic, really,” said Dr Tabea Lissner, head of adaptation and vulnerability at Climate Analytics.
Lissner said a world beyond 1.5C warming meant the Arctic would be
ice-free in summer, around half of land-based creatures would be
severely affected and deadly heatwaves would become far more common.
“0.5C makes quite a big difference,” she said.
As extreme weather events, like Hurricane Florence, become
more common it is time to ask what it will take for the world to finally
tackle climate change. Encouragingly, there may be a historical
precedent: Victoria London’s handling of the ‘Great Stink’, where growth
had turned the River Thames into an open sewer.
EPA/JIM LO SCALZO
In the late 19th century, the irrepressible Mark Twain is reputed to have said in a speech:
Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.
He’s said to have borrowed that quote from a friend, but if Twain
were alive today he would no doubt have more to say on the subject. In a
time when we are becoming increasingly accustomed to extremes in the
climate system, the events of this year have risen above the background
noise of political turmoil to dominate the global headlines.
While global leadership in dealing with climate change may be
depressingly limited, I can’t help but wonder if 2018 will be the year
our global tribe feels threatened enough to act.
Encouragingly, there may be a historical (and largely unknown)
precedent for tackling climate change: Victoria London’s handling of the
“Great Stink”, where growth had turned the River Thames into an open
sewer. Climate system extremes
2018 is breaking all manner of records.
In January, the eastern USA and western Europe fell under persistent
frigid Arctic conditions brought about by a weakening of the polar
vortex.
Six months later, the north has been experiencing exceptional hemispheric-wide summer warming and drought, most likely amplified by a weakening of Atlantic Ocean circulation – the latter (ironically) being expressed by unusually cool surface ocean waters.
In recent weeks, Florence, Mangkhut and Helene have become the latest household names to mark a succession of storms battering the USA, Asia and Europe this year.
A pastoralist stands at the bottom
of one of his empty dams on his property at Langawirra Station north of
Broken Hill, New South Wales in 2018.AAP Image/David Mariuz
Closer to home, New South Wales is now suffering a state-wide drought, along with other regions in Australia. Early wildfires and the threat of more to come has resulted in the earliest government total fire ban on record.
As the crisis deepens, it’s worth reflecting on Victorian London’s
“Great Stink” sewage problem - where things finally got so bad that
authorities were forced to accept evidence, reject sceptics, and act.
A ‘deadly sewer’
In the Victorian age, London’s growth had turned the River Thames
into an open sewer. Conditions were so bad they inspired many to write
on the risks to public health.
‘The silent highwayman’, an 1858 cartoon from Punch magazine, commenting on the deadly levels of pollution in the River Thames.Wikimedia, CC BY
Charles Dickens provided a lurid description in Little Dorrit, describing the Thames as a “deadly sewer” while the scientist Michael Faraday wrote to The Times of London that:
if we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a hot season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.
An 1855 cartoon from Punch Magazine
in which Michael Faraday gives his card to ‘Father Thames’, commenting
on Faraday gauging the river’s ‘degree of opacity’.Wikimedia
In 1854, medic John Snow demonstrated the source of cholera in the London suburb of Soho was a local water pump. To test his ideas, officials removed the handle on the pump, and the number of cases all but disappeared.
Sewage sceptics
But there was an intransigence about meeting the threat. Ignoring
scientific evidence, “sewage sceptics” held the view that poor air
quality – so called “miasma”– was the cause of the frequent outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.
They convinced the government to reject the evidence, considering
there to be “no reason to adopt this belief”. The scale of the sewage
problem in London was considered too large to be solved, possibly
encouraged by political pressure from the thriving water industry that
delivered direct to those who could afford it. For several more years,
this view persisted.
That was until the year of the “Great Stink”.
The ‘Great Stink’ arrives
In the summer heatwave of 1858, the Thames’ sewage turned noses across London.
Conditions were so bad, teams of men were employed to shovel lime at
the many sewage outlets into the capital’s river in a vain attempt to
stop the smell.
Even the national legislators were not spared, with the windows of
the Houses of Parliament covered in lime-soaked sack cloths. Serious
thought was even given to relocating government outside London, at least
until the air had cleared. The conditions created a heady stench that
cut through the politically charged rhetoric of the day, and forced a
rethink.
Within nine years of the “Great Stink”, the 900-kilometre London
Sewage Network was constructed - an engineering marvel of the Victorian
age. The politicians at the time weren’t immediately convinced the new
infrastructure would help public health but the disappearance of disease
accepted as the norm for the capital convinced even the most ardent of
sceptics. No one talks about miasma as a real thing anymore.
The Great Stink of 1858 overturned beliefs founded on misinformation. A challenge considered impossible, was solved.
Our generation’s ‘Great Stink’
Fast forward 160 years and the recent spate of climate headlines is
on the back of an increasing trend towards greater extremes, with all
the associated human, environmental, and financial costs.
In August of this year, the Actuaries Climate Index
– which monitors changes in sea level rise and climate extremes for the
North American insurance industry since the 1960s – reported that the
five-year moving average reached a new high in 2017. This year promises
to continue the trend and is no single outlier.
Will 2018 be the year when the world does something about climate change?
Will 2018 be our generation’s “Great Stink”? Links
