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)
