29/04/2018

Hiroshima, Kyoto, And The Bombs Of Climate Change

The New Yorker - *

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, which commemorates the first use of a nuclear weapon in war. Photograph by Thomas Hoepker / Magnum Photos
I spent Earth Day in Kyoto, the next day in Hiroshima, and the time since pondering the difference between the two.
Hiroshima has a special grip on the planet’s consciousness. To see the remains of the great explosion is moving, and it’s equally powerful to realize that basically every building you drive by was constructed after 1945. Millions of people come here to tour the museum—its exhibits all the more chastening for their dry and almost clinical precision. Hiroshima has become symbolic shorthand for the nuclear horror that still haunts humanity; when we think about weapons of mass destruction, it’s the mushroom cloud above the Japanese city that we see in our mind’s eye.
Kyoto, in a different way, could have become shorthand for another, equally huge problem—global warming, which is producing changes even more far-reaching than a nuclear standoff. It was in Kyoto, twenty-one years ago, that the world first came together to try to address the climate crisis, reaching a small but useful agreement to begin limiting carbon emissions. Yet the pact accomplished little, and has slipped into history.
I saw no sign in Kyoto that the conference ever took place—no shrine or statue, and, what’s more, no discernible change in the way that the city operates. (Japan met its obligations to the treaty by using offset techniques, such as planting trees and purchasing carbon credits, while emissions rose.) In what is a race against time, time has largely stood still here, as it has in most places.
It’s not as if we have solved the nuclear issue, but at least we understand that it is a crisis. The entire act of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, depends on the collective understanding that these weapons are uniquely, intolerably awful. Even Donald Trump dimly groks that denuclearization is good. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is filled with the texts of treaties that have brought the number of warheads slowly, steadily down; we could see that mushroom cloud and understand its danger in our gut. With climate change, it’s different.
The explosion of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders every minute of every day just doesn’t induce the same tremble. True, Trump is alone among world leaders in dismissing global warming, but most of his peers might as well agree: they’ve done very little of what’s required even to begin addressing this issue. As a result, the explosions go off constantly. Scientists estimate that, each day, our added emissions trap the heat equivalent of four hundred thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs, which is why the Arctic has half as much ice as it did in the nineteen-eighties, why the great ocean currents have begun to slow, why we see floods and storms and fires in such sad proportion. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only atomic bombs we ever dropped; climate bombs rain down daily, and the death toll mounts unstoppably.
I can think of several explanations for this difference in attitude. The most important, probably, lies in the power of the fossil-fuel industry, which has spent billions of dollars defending the precise practices now wrecking the planet. The industry’s disinformation and lobbying campaigns—the details of which have slowly come to light, though the broad outlines have been clear for decades—have been spectacularly effective.
I remember watching the closing moments of the Kyoto conference, in 1997, as delegates congratulated themselves on what President Bill Clinton called “a huge first step.” I was standing next to a lobbyist for the energy industry, who had spent much of the week trying to water down and derail the agreement. He took in my tired pleasure and said, “I’m glad we’re going back to D.C., where we’ve got this under control.” That turned out to be accurate, though even he could not have predicted the ultimate success of his work: an American President who insists that the entire thing is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese.
Still, global warming doesn’t haunt even the uncorrupted imagination in quite the same way as the bomb, perhaps because it unfolds more slowly. On a geologic time scale, a day and a century are roughly the same unit, but for the purposes of a news cycle, the difference is crucial. Every single day, climate change is the most important thing happening on the planet—there’s nothing even remotely close.
But, on any single day, there’s always something more dramatic, more urgent. It feels as if we have time to deal with global warming, whereas deportations or assault rifles or lunatics in white vans mowing down women must be dealt with now. (In fact, climate change is the one problem that the planet has ever faced that comes with an absolute time limit; past a certain point, it won’t be a problem anymore, because it won’t have a solution.)
And the fact that it’s happening everywhere, which should mean that it engages us more deeply, seems in some ways to do just the opposite. Hiroshima was an obvious, hideous breach of the ordinary. (The curators of the museum at ground zero understand this: you enter through a room filled with pictures of normal life in the months leading up to the bombing, and these pictures of smiling schoolchildren are at least as powerful as the images of charred bodies by the exit.) But the sheer repetition of flood and firestorm ratchets down the terror some; we’re in the process now of routinizing global warming and the destruction it wreaks. It’s becoming the baseline. Hurricane Katrina was shocking; Harvey and Irma and Maria, less so.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps the free-falling price of solar and wind power will be enough to spur the necessary transition. But I doubt it. Inertia is such a strong force that, without a decisive push from a motivated human population, we won’t make the change in time to defuse the climate bomb. That was my sense watching normal, unchanged life in Kyoto and reading the editorial in Monday’s Yomiuri Shimbun, which called for balancing economic and environmental interests. Climate change would be helped, the editors said, by the advent of new technologies that turned off lights when people weren’t in the room.
Between the power of an amoral industry willing to lie and the particular tricks of human psychology that make us willing to overlook our greatest threat, it’s possible that as a species we’ll slide straight into a new, hotter, more desperate world without quite recognizing it—without a Hiroshima moment at which, at the very least, we finally acknowledge reality.

*Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, is the founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College.

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Not So Fast: Why The Electric Vehicle Revolution Will Bring Problems Of Its Own

The Conversation - 

Electric cars are taking over – but they really as green as they look? Jack Amick / flickr, CC BY-NC
After years of being derided as a joke by car manufacturers and the public, interest in electric vehicles has increased sharply as governments around the world move to ban petrol and diesel cars.
We have seen a tremendous rise in availability, especially at the premium end of the market, where Tesla is giving established brands a run for their money. Electric cars are likely to penetrate the rest of the market quickly too. Prices should be on par with conventional cars by 2025.
Electric cars are praised as the answer to questions of green and clean mobility. But the overall sustainability of electric vehicles is far from clear. On closer examination, our entire transport paradigm may need to be rethought.
Compared with combustion engines, electric transport has obvious advantages for emissions and human health. Transport is responsible for around 23% of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions globally. This is expected to double by 2050.
Motor vehicles also put a burden on society, especially in urban environments where they are chiefly responsible for noise and air pollution. Avoiding these issues is why electric vehicles are considered a key technology in cleaning up the transport sector. However, electric cars come with problems of their own.

Dirt in the supply chain
For one, electric vehicles have a concerning supply chain. Cobalt, a key component of the lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, is linked to reports of child labour. The nickel used in those same batteries is toxic to extract from the ground. And there are environmental concerns and land use conflicts connected with lithium mining in countries like Tibet and Bolivia.
The elements used in battery production are finite and in limited supply. This makes it impossible to electrify all of the world’s transport with current battery technology. Meanwhile, there is still no environmentally safe way of recycling lithium-ion batteries.
While electric cars produce no exhaust, there is concern about fine particle emissions. Electric cars are often heavier than conventional cars, and heavier vehicles are often accompanied by higher levels of non-exhaust emissions. The large torque of electric vehicles further adds to the fine dust problem, as it causes greater tyre wear and dispersion of dust particles.

Different motor, same problem
Electric vehicles share many other issues with conventional cars too. Both require roads, parking areas and other infrastructure, which is especially a problem in cities. Roads divide communities and make access to essential services difficult for those without cars.
A shift in people’s reliance on combustion cars to electric cars also does little to address sedentary urban lifestyles, as it perpetuates our lack of physical activity.
Other problems relate to congestion. In Australia, the avoidable social cost of traffic congestion in 2015 was estimated at A$16.5 billion. This is expected to increase by 2% every year until 2030. Given trends in population growth and urbanisation globally and in Australia, electric cars – despite obvious advantages over fossil fuels – are unlikely to solve urban mobility and infrastructure-related problems.
Technology or regulation may solve these technical and environmental headaches. Improvements in recycling, innovation, and the greening of battery factories can go a long way towards reducing the impacts of battery production. Certification schemes, such as the one proposed in Sweden, could help deliver low-impact battery value chains and avoid conflict minerals and human rights violations in the industry.

A new transport paradigm
Yet, while climate change concerns alone seem to warrant a speedy transition towards electric mobility, it may prove to be merely a transition technology. Electric cars will do little for urban mobility and liveability in the years to come. Established car makers such as Porsche are working on new modes of transportation, especially for congested and growing markets such as China.
Nevertheless, their vision is still one of personal vehicles – relying on electric cars coupled with smart traffic guidance systems to avoid urban road congestion. Instead of having fewer cars, as called for by transport experts, car makers continue to promote individualised transport, albeit a greener version.
With a growing population, a paradigm shift in transport may be needed – one that looks to urban design to solve transportation problems.
In Copenhagen, for example, bikes now outnumber cars in the city’s centre, which is primed to be car-free within the next ten years. Many other cities, including Oslo in Norway and Chengdu in China, are also on their way to being free of cars.
Experts are already devising new ways to design cities. They combine efficient public transport, as found in Curitiba, Brazil, with principles of walkability, as seen in Vauben, Germany. They feature mixed-use, mixed-income and transit-oriented developments, as seen in places like Fruitvale Village in Oakland, California.
These developments don’t just address transport-related environmental problems. They enhance liveability by reclaiming urban space for green developments. They reduce the cost of living by cutting commuting cost and time. They deliver health benefits, thanks to reduced pollution and more active lifestyles. They improve social cohesion, by fostering human interaction in urban streetscapes, and help to reduce crime. And of course, they improve economic performance by reducing the loss of productivity caused by congestion.
Electric cars are a quick-to-deploy technology fix that helps tackle climate change and improve urban air quality – at least to a point. But the sustainability endgame is to eliminate many of our daily travel needs altogether through smart design, while improving the parts of our lives we lost sight of during our decades-long dependence on cars.

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Budget Earmarks $500m To Mitigate Great Barrier Reef Climate Change

The Guardian  - 

Labor and the Coalition are battling for marginal seats in Queensland where voters are concerned about the reef. Photograph: Richard Fitzpatrick 
The Turnbull government will allocate $500m to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef.
The funding, to be unveiled on Sunday and confirmed in the May budget, follows a recent study finding that 30% of the reef’s corals died in a catastrophic nine-month marine heatwave in 2016.


Great Barrier Reef: 30% of coral died in catastrophic 2016 heatwave.

 The government will partner with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation in a $444m agreement to tackle crown-of-thorns starfish, reduce pollution and mitigate the impacts of climate change.
The government will increase funding for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Department of the Environment and Energy by $56m to expand environmental management and compliance operations.
Both of the major parties are currently focused on winning hearts and minds in Queensland, with the state’s marginal seats likely to determine the outcome of the next federal election.
The Coalition has been criticised by environment groups for not acting fast enough to protect the reef, and the government’s support for the Adani coalmine has also been controversial both locally and nationally because of its potential impact on the reef.
In January Guardian Australia revealed that millions of dollars of commonwealth money was being handed to tourism-linked groups for reef protection, despite official advice recommending against the projects, or repeatedly finding them to be failing.
Earlier this year, the head of the United Nations environment program warned the battle to save the world’s coral reefs was at “make-or-break point”. Erik Solheim said governments needed to intensify concrete actions including limiting greenhouse gas emissions, plastic pollution and impacts from agriculture.
In a statement issued in advance of Sunday’s announcement, the prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the new funding was an investment in the health of the reef and the tourism jobs dependent on it.
“Like reefs all over the world, the Great Barrier Reef is under pressure,” Turnbull said. “A big challenge demands a big investment – and this investment gives our reef the best chance.”
Turnbull said the reef restoration science associated with the funding would be shared internationally and with Pacific neighbours.
“As a highly respected philanthropic organisation, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation has a strong fundraising track record, and will seek corporate contributions to further enhance this work,” the prime minister said.
The funding package includes $201m for improving water quality with changed farming practices such as reduced fertiliser use, $100m for reef restoration science, $58m to combat the crown-of-thorns starfish, $45m for community engagement, including drawing on Indigenous traditional knowledge for sea country management, and $40m for monitoring reef health.
The study on coral mass mortality, published in Nature and led by Terry Hughes, the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies – published in April – examined the link between the level of heat exposure, subsequent coral bleaching and ultimately coral death.
It found that 29% of the 3,863 reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef lost two-thirds or more of their corals. It said “initially, at the peak of temperature extremes in March 2016, many millions of corals died quickly in the northern third of the Great Barrier Reef over a period of only two to three weeks”.
“These widespread losses were not due to the attrition of corals that slowly starved because they failed to regain their symbionts. Rather, temperature-sensitive species of corals began to die almost immediately in locations that were exposed to heat stress.”

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