26/10/2018

We Have So Many Ways To Pursue A Healthy Climate – It’s Insane To Wait Any Longer

The Conversation - 

Opportunities to help drive the energy transition are everywhere - even in Western Australia’s remote salt pans. Peter C. Doherty, Author provided
As a broadly trained life scientist, my concern about climate change isn’t the health of the planet. The rocks will be just fine! What worries me is a whole spectrum of “wicked” challenges, from sustaining food production, to providing clean water, to maintaining wildlife diversity and the green environments that ensure the survival of complex life on Earth.
What’s more, as a disease and death researcher, I think of climate change as equivalent to lead poisoning: slow, cumulative, progressive and initially silent but, if not treated in time, causing irreversible, catastrophic damage.
The link between climate change and human health is obvious. The likely success of Dr Kerryn Phelps in the Wentworth byelection also suggests the informed public gets it. More broadly, Doctors for the Environment Australia has campaigned vigorously against Adani’s proposed Queensland coal mine, and has very strong student chapters. Young people are energised and, as they mature and take power, the political and legal situation regarding energy generation could change very quickly.
The world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet, has a high-profile commission that will report every two years until 2030 on the broad-ranging issue of climate and human health. The journal has just published a letter from just about every leading Australian medical scientist working in a relevant area that protests the federal government’s contemptuous dismissal of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Astronauts have shown us how incredibly fragile the atmosphere looks from space. The idea that we should wait for things to get worse before taking action to protect it seems insane.
Apollo 8 gave us a valuable perspective on our planet. NASA
We need legislators who can think and act for the long term. This issue is simply too big for individuals or volunteer groups. Unless politicians are prepared to put a substantial price on greenhouse emissions, it’s difficult to see how a capitalist economic system can move us forward. Clean coal? The US 45Q tax reform, which offers credits for carbon capture and storage projects, suggests we would need a carbon price of at least US$50 a tonne to make this technology economically feasible.
Australia’s governments at every level could be acting now to promote the planting of vegetation, including less readily combustible tree species. We could be embracing, and funding, energy efficiency while constructing all new buildings – especially hospitals and large apartment complexes – in ways that protect their inhabitants. A realistic carbon tax could pay for some of that, while also stimulating jobs and growth and providing investment certainty.
Some moves are already being made in the right direction. The Gorgon gas project is planning to extend its strategy to inject carbon dioxide into the ground rather than releasing it to the atmosphere. CSIRO’s new hydrogen economy roadmap shows how (with the endorsement of Chief Scientist Alan Finkel) we can develop gas exports based on hydrogen rather than natural gas, to supply emerging markets in countries such as Japan.
A more familiar export product is wood. Planting and harvesting trees mimics nature’s mechanism for storing carbon. Perhaps it’s time for CSIRO and the universities to reinvest in developing wood technologies that displace concrete for at least some forms of construction. Modular wooden houses could also easily be moved away from low-lying areas hit by river flooding and sea level rise.
My wife Penny and I recently joined a small organised tour that took us more than 5,000km around Western Australia. That made us very aware of competing realities. On one hand, we have the human constructs of community, politics and economy. On the other is the reality of nature, imposed by the laws of physics and the fact that all life systems have evolved to live within defined environmental “envelopes”.
Apart from the glorious WA wildflowers and extensive wheat fields, the prominence of mining was very clear. Metals are essential for just about any renewable energy strategy, although the massive amounts of diesel burned in the extraction process are clearly an issue. Could that transition to carbon-neutral biodiesel?
WA also has extensive coastal salt pans: might they be used, perhaps with pumped seawater, to cultivate algae for biofuel production? And, in the face of a global obesity pandemic, the best thing we could do with sugar cane is to convert it to biofuels.
If ethanol is bad for internal combustion engines, perhaps we should revisit external combustion? In WA, we went to the HMAS Sydney memorial in Geraldton. Like all big ships of her time, the Sydney was powered by steam turbines. Turbine power generation could be part of a mix driving electric/wind ships of the future.
Our WA trip also made us very conscious of the complex ecosystems that, in the end analysis, sustain all life. Plants use chemical signals (plant pheromones) to “talk” among themselves, to other species, and to the insects they attract for pollination. Some plants rely for reproduction on a single insect species. If the insects die, they die. We’re currently in the sixth mass extinction – this one caused by humans. As temperatures ramp up, rainfall patterns change, and firestorms grow stronger and more frequent, the effects will be terminal for many species.
With much of our land unsuited to agriculture, Australia is the biggest solar collector on Earth. Visiting WA also made us very aware of the enormous, untapped wind potential on the west coast. Apart from battery storage, making hydrogen from seawater offers an obvious strategy for dealing with both the remoteness of generation sites and the variability of supply from renewables, while also returning oxygen to the atmosphere. We could be the clean energy giants!
None of this will happen without the help of major corporations that have the wealth and power to influence governments, along with the globalised structure that facilitates the development and implementation of solutions. What’s very encouraging is that many of the multinationals are now moving forward to develop strategies for supplying global energy needs while minimising greenhouse gas emissions. There’s no way they want to be the “tobacco villains” of the 21st century!

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New York Sues Exxon Mobil, Saying It Deceived Shareholders On Climate Change

New York Times - John Schwartz

The lawsuit says Exxon engaged in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” to deceive investors and analysts. Credit Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg, via Getty Images
New York’s attorney general sued Exxon Mobil on Wednesday, claiming the company defrauded shareholders by downplaying the expected risks of climate change to its business.
The litigation, which follows more than three years of investigation, represents the most significant legal effort yet to establish that a fossil fuel company misled the public on climate change and to hold it responsible.
Not only does it pose a financial threat to Exxon that could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars or more, but it could also strike a blow to the reputation of a company that has worked to rehabilitate its image, framing itself as a leader on global warming.
The suit does not charge Exxon with playing a role in creating climate change, though the burning of fossil fuels is a major contributor to human-driven warming. Rather, it is a fairly straightforward shareholder fraud suit, the kind that New York attorneys general have long brought and successfully prosecuted under state law.
It says the company engaged in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” to deceive investors, analysts and underwriters “concerning the company’s management of the risks posed to its business by climate change regulation.”
New York Attorney General’s
Lawsuit Against Exxon Mobil
“Exxon provided false and misleading assurances that it is effectively managing the economic risks posed to its business by the increasingly stringent policies and regulations that it expects governments to adopt to address climate change.” (96 pages, 0.79 MB)
Exxon essentially kept two sets of books when accounting for the effects of climate change, prosecutors said. The company told the world that it was prepared for the more stringent regulations that would inevitably be required to combat global warming. But in reality, according to the complaint, Exxon’s internal estimates discounted the potential future costs of climate policies, even though the threat of government action “exposed the company to greater risk from climate change regulation than investors were led to believe.”
The investigation has spanned the tenures of two New York attorneys general and has also involved attorneys general from other states. Exxon has attempted to block the inquiry in courts in three states, and has painted it as an attempt by bullies to restrict the company’s First Amendment rights and as part of an anti-fossil-fuel conspiracy backed by, among others, the Rockefeller family.
Scott J. Silvestri, an Exxon Mobil spokesman, said Wednesday that the New York attorney general’s office had “doubled down on its tainted, meritless investigation by filing a complaint against Exxon Mobil.”
The “baseless allegations,” Mr. Silvestri said, “are a product of closed-door lobbying by special interests, political opportunism and the attorney general’s inability to admit that a three-year investigation has uncovered no wrongdoing. The company looks forward to refuting these claims as soon as possible and getting this meritless civil lawsuit dismissed.”
Barbara D. Underwood, the New York attorney general, brought the lawsuit under the Martin Act, a state law that gives her sweeping powers to investigate and prosecute securities fraud. The suit demands that Exxon turn over all the money it made through the alleged fraud and make restitution to investors.
Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood of New York. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
“Investors put their money and their trust in Exxon, which assured them of the long-term value of their shares, as the company claimed to be factoring the risk of increasing climate change regulation into its business decisions,” Ms. Underwood said. “Yet as our investigation found, Exxon often did no such thing.”
The investigation first came to light in November 2015, about a year after it was begun by former Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman. Before long, other state attorneys general announced their support for Mr. Schneiderman’s efforts; some, notably Maura Healey of Massachusetts, started investigations of their own.
The lawsuit says that Exxon told investors that when it was planning for its oil and gas reserves, its investments and its estimates of demand for its products, it applied an added cost, or “proxy cost,” that represented the likely effects of future climate regulations. But in many cases, the suit says, the company “applied much lower proxy costs than it represented or no proxy costs at all,” which exposed Exxon to greater regulatory risk.
Prosecutors added that “Exxon’s fraud was sanctioned at the highest levels of the company,” including by its former chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson. Mr. Tillerson, who went on to serve as President Trump’s first secretary of state, “knew for years that the company’s representations concerning proxy costs were misleading,” according to the complaint.
Exxon has been the focus of other legal actions and inquiries over its past statements and its role in the public debate over climate change. Echoing the New York case, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation in 2016 over the company’s practice of not writing down the value of oil reserves in light of the risk of climate change regulations, as other energy companies do. The commission dropped that inquiry in August.
Also, several cities, counties and the state of Rhode Island have sued the fossil fuel industry to recoup the costs of dealing with sea level rise and other effects of a warming world. Those cases rely on creative and relatively untested legal theories, however, and some of the suits, including one filed by New York City, have been dismissed, though the plaintiffs have said they will appeal.
Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family fund, which supports holding fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damages, said of Ms. Underwood’s lawsuit: “Apparently, Exxon has deceived the investing public about the economic consequences of climate change, just as they deceived the general public about the ‘catastrophic’ harm they knew their products would cause. It’s past time for Exxon to make their investors whole and to pay its fair share of the massive damages communities across the nation now face.”
Internally, Exxon has acknowledged climate change’s effects on its operations and planned accordingly. The company has long conducted research into climate change, much of it published in the scientific literature. In 2015, Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times reported that Exxon was well aware of the risks of climate change and used that research in its long-term planning for activities like drilling in the Arctic, even as it funded groups from the 1990s to the mid-2000s that denied serious climate risks.
The company pledged to stop funding groups that directly challenged the science of climate change in the mid-2000s, and says today that it accepts the science and the need for action to blunt the worst effects. The company supported the Paris climate deal and opposed the decision by Mr. Trump to withdraw from the agreement. It also publicizes its development of renewable energy technologies such as biofuels.
In addition, Exxon recently announced it would spend $1 million over the next two years to finance a group promoting “carbon dividend” legislation that would tax carbon dioxide emissions and then return the money that is collected back to taxpayers. (The proposal that the company supports would also protect companies that emit fossil fuels from lawsuits over the effects of climate change.)
The New York lawsuit poses “a real risk to Exxon’s reputation,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. He said it was especially concerning for investors, who rely on the company’s statements.
“If Exxon has been misleading on this,” Mr. Burger said, “what else has it been misleading about?”

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Coal Is Killing The Planet. Trump Loves It.

New York Times - Editorial

Scientists issued a new alarm on the devastating impacts of continued burning of fossil fuels. But the Trump E.P.A. keeps propping up coal.
Celia Jacobs
If we keep burning coal and petroleum to power our society, we’re cooked — and a lot faster than we thought. The United Nations scientific panel on climate change issued a terrifying new warning last week that continued emissions of greenhouse gases from power plants and vehicles will bring dire and irreversible changes by 2040, years earlier than previously forecast. The cost will be measured in trillions of dollars and in sweeping societal and environmental damage, including mass die-off of coral reefs and animal species, flooded coastlines, intensified droughts, food shortages, mass migrations and deeper poverty.
The worst impacts can be avoided only by a “far-reaching and unprecedented” transformation of the global energy system, including virtually eliminating the use of coal as a source of electricity, the panel warned.
Yet President Trump, who has questioned the accepted scientific consensus on climate change, continues to praise “clean beautiful coal” and has directed his Environmental Protection Agency to reverse major strides undertaken by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. This is unbelievably reckless.
In addition to undermining the fight against climate change, the president's efforts to prop up the dirtiest of all fuels will also exact a significant toll on public health, on the hearts and lungs of ordinary Americans.
The E.P.A.’s bedrock mission is to protect public health and welfare. Its basic tools are 50 years of federal clean air and water laws meant to limit Americans’ exposure to environmental poisons and pollutants.
Every so often an administration comes along that seems to forget this mission. We have one now. Andrew Wheeler, the agency’s acting administrator, is clearly a great improvement in moral terms over his ethically challenged and thankfully departed predecessor, Scott Pruitt. Mr. Wheeler’s ideology and policies, however, are much the same, weighted in favor of the industries Mr. Wheeler once represented as a handsomely paid lobbyist, and against the health needs of Americans. Like the president he serves, Mr. Wheeler displays little concern for climate change and its epochal challenges.
The latest example is a proposal his agency sent to the White House for review and approval that would, in broadest terms, greatly devalue the public health benefits of reducing air pollution. The proposal is specifically aimed at a 2011 finding by the Obama administration that when the agency devises rules to control a particular pollutant — mercury, in this case — it must take into account not only the compliance costs to industry but the additional health benefits that arise from the reduction in other harmful gases like soot and smog that occur as a side effect. Though the health benefits of controlling mercury alone were quite small, and the costs to industry large, those costs were outweighed by savings to the country in annual health costs and lost workdays when the co-benefits were factored in.
The Wheeler proposal would disallow any calculation of these side benefits and allow only those associated with the regulated pollutant. Mr. Wheeler promises that existing mercury emissions limits will remain in place. He also acknowledges that industry has already invested billions of dollars on new technology to comply with the mercury rule, and that many companies have done so. But weakening the foundation on which that rule was promulgated could invite lawsuits to overturn it entirely, and — even more ominously — could make it easier for the Trump administration or a like-minded one to ignore important ancillary public health benefits when devising other environmental regulations in the future.
So chalk up another win for Robert Murray, the far-right Trump confidante and chief executive of the Murray Energy Corporation, a big coal producer for which Mr. Wheeler served as an attorney and lobbyist. Mr. Murray requested the mercury rollback as one of 16 items on a wish list he presented last year to the Trump administration. He is one of several coal barons who lobbied the administration to revisit the cost-benefit rules to set a precedent for future regulations.
Near the top of Mr. Murray’s to-do list, higher even than mercury, was the repeal and replacement of the Clean Power Plan, a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s strategy to fight global warming. Here, too, Mr. Wheeler has faithfully delivered, and here, too, he and his agency have given short shrift to human health.
The Clean Power Plan was aimed mainly at reducing carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, from coal-fired power plants. But like the mercury rule, it would also, as a collateral benefit, have reduced other dangerous pollutants like smog and soot. In so doing, the Obama administration calculated, it would prevent 1,500 to 3,600 premature deaths per year by 2030 and would provide other beneficial health effects. By contrast, as Lisa Friedman of The Times discovered, the Trump administration’s laughably weak replacement plan would cause (by the Trump E.P.A.’s own calculations) as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030, as well as 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory disease and billions of dollars in new health care costs, mainly from an increase in fine particulate matter linked to heart and lung disease.
At the time, Mr. Wheeler’s lieutenants told everyone not to worry, that the agency had other rules to control these and other life-threatening pollutants. Among the optimists was William Wehrum, the agency’s chief air pollution officer, who is glad to have another chance to undermine the nation’s clean air laws after failing to do so during his previous stint in the George W. Bush administration. “We have abundant legal authority to deal with those other pollutants directly,” he declared.
As it happens, however, these other legal authorities are also at risk. As The Times’s Eric Lipton reported, the Trump replacement plan would also have greatly weakened another E.P.A. program known as the New Source Review, a plan that has had an enormously beneficial effect on air quality in this country and whose demise would allow many of the nation’s dirtiest power plants to keep running without installing new pollution controls.
What we are dealing with here, in other words, is a bit of a shell game — hard to follow, costly to the public, satisfying to those who are running it. We are also dealing with people who won’t let inconvenient forecasts about death and disease deter them from their appointed goal of satisfying Mr. Trump’s pro-coal agenda, and who also seem eager to keep such forecasts hidden. Late last month we learned that the E.P.A. planned to dissolve its Office of the Science Advisor, the latest of several steps beginning under Mr. Pruitt to diminish the role of scientific research in policymaking.
Nobody really expected a new policy direction from Mr. Wheeler, who was once consigliere to Senator James Inhofe, Congress’s most outspoken climate change denier. But in Mr. Wheeler’s insistence on a narrow, even cramped, reading of the nation’s landmark environmental laws, he is ignoring science and threatening the public health and welfare.

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Great Barrier Reef Likely To Be Hit With Another Mass Bleaching This Summer, Forecast Shows

ABC - Michael Slezak

 Key points:
  • NOAA forecast predicts entire reef has 60pc chance of being subject to coral bleaching by March next year
  • If widespread bleaching happens in 2019, it would be third event in four years
  • Predictions still very uncertain, NOAA says, as major weather patterns can change probabilities over next three months
The Great Barrier Reef could be hit with severe coral bleaching and death this summer as the result of another large underwater heatwave, according to a tentative long-term forecast by one of the world's most-respected science agencies.
A leading coral-reef expert said if that eventuated, it could mean the beginning of the end of the Great Barrier Reef as a coral-dominated system.
According to the forecast by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), by March next year the entire reef has a 60 per cent chance of being subject to "bleaching alert level one", where bleaching is likely.
And worryingly, the southern half of the reef has a 60 per cent chance of seeing the highest "bleaching alert level 2", where coral death is likely.
The NOAA predicts the entire Great Barrier Reef is at risk of another bleaching event by early 2019
About 50 per cent of shallow-water coral was killed in 2016 and 2017, when the reef experienced back-to-back bleaching events for the first time in recorded history.
Underwater heatwaves stress coral, causing them to expel the colourful algae that live inside them, leaving them a brilliant white.
That algae provides coral with most of their energy, and if the temperatures don't quickly return to normal, the coral starves and dies.
Some recovery was seen through 2018, but scientists say proper recovery on badly hit reefs takes about a decade, and bleaching again this summer will set that recovery back.
The main areas of coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017. (Supplied: ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies)
Another mass bleaching would be unprecedented
If widespread bleaching happens in 2019, it would be the third event in four years.
A situation like that wasn't predicted to happen regularly until the second half of this century.
Another mass bleaching could foreshadow the decline of the reef towards a system no longer dominated by coral, according to marine biologist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland.
"It would be very serious," he said.
Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said the bleaching in 2016 and 2017 had reduced the ability of the reef to recover.
By killing so much of the coral, there is less larvae being produced and fewer stable surfaces for it to grow on.
"Killing coral has really reduced the ability of the reef to produce offspring," he said.
Back-to-back bleaching in 2016 and 2017 had reduced the ability of the reef to recover. (Justin Marshall/coralwatch.org)
"The idea that these large remaining stocks of coral also get whacked at the same time as we're losing the ability for the reef to regenerate … It's really serious."
The now very regular bleaching, driven by climate change, puts the entire reef at risk, according to Professor Hoegh-Guldberg.
He said the continued existence of the Great Barrier Reef as a coral-dominated system depended on a balance between two factors: the events that damage coral, and its rate of recovery.
Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said they've been well-balanced in the past.
"Look forward to today where we're driving underwater heatwaves that are more and more regular on almost an annual basis. And at the same time we have acidification and pollution that are slowing the ability for corals to grow back," he said.
"When you put the two together you have impacts that are dominating recovery — and you will no longer have a reef that is coral-dominated.
"And without the coral you don't have all the fish and other wonderful animals that live there."
The existence of the reef as a coral-dominated system depends on two factors: the events that damage coral and its rate of recovery. (Supplied: Reef and Rainforest Research Centre)
But lots of things could happen, including cyclones
The NOAA predictions to March, when the bleaching risk appears highest, were still very uncertain, said Dr Mark Eakin, head of the agency's Coral Reef Watch.
'Last warning' before 1.5C
warming inevitable
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns the world must virtually eliminate coal power stations by 2040, or face dire consequences — including complete loss of the Great Barrier Reef.
"Lots of things, including major weather patterns, can change the probabilities over the next three months," Dr Eakin said.
"I wouldn't say dire yet, but it is concerning."
In 2016, the southern half of the Great Barrier Reef avoided severe bleaching, mostly because of Cyclone Winston, which devastated Fiji.
As it approached Australia it petered out, but cooled the surface water, stopping a lot of bleaching.
"If we had cyclones move through, which have their own impacts on reefs and people, but they have one benefit: they can cool the surface water," Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.
"It's pretty serious but we can cross our fingers and hope things won't be as bad as projected."
Professor Terry Hughes, head of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, also said cyclones could change what happens.
"We won't know for sure until January or early February, and even then a well-timed cyclone could cool things down," Professor Hughes said.
Experts are ready to monitor for any bleaching
In 2016, scientists conducted detailed surveys of the entire Great Barrier Reef to examine the severity and impacts of the bleaching, led by Professor Hughes.
In response to questioning at Senate Estimates earlier this week, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said it hadn't yet budgeted to support monitoring of bleaching if it occurred this summer.
They said decisions about that would be made after a meeting at the end of November.


But scientists said regardless of support from government, they would be doing everything they could to monitor any bleaching.
"If bleaching does occur, we are on standby to respond by re-doing our aerial surveys, and by deploying teams of scientists underwater at bleached locations," Professor Hughes said.
Professor Hoegh-Guldberg added: "All of us have research sites that we've been working on.
"With or without funding, many of us will be … jumping in the water and trying to figure out how bad this is."
He said a focus of his research would be identifying reefs that survived bleaching better than others, since those could represent an "opportunity".

It's not just the Great Barrier Reef at risk
Dr Eakin from the NOAA warned the risk of bleaching was not just on the Great Barrier Reef, but extended right around the world.
Whether that materialises will partly depend on whether an El Nino emerges.
The irregular weather phenomenon results in warm water rising to the surface across the Pacific, and heats up much of the globe.
"The model also shows a potential for bleaching more broadly in the South Pacific and southern Indian Oceans," Dr Eakin said.
"Depending on what happens with the El Nino, we could see another global bleaching event in 2019. However, it's much too early to predict that with any certainty."

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