Lethal Heating: 12/09/18

09/12/2018

We Are Not All Doomed. Not Yet

The Guardian - Ammar Kalia

This week’s Upside digest looks at the ways to tackle climate change and rediscover our natural spaces

Lost country ... Ramblers mapping old pathways in England. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

As the world’s leaders converged on Katowice, Poland, for this year’s UN climate change conference, the mood was sombre. How could it be anything other, when in the opening keynote one of the world’s foremost naturalists said we were all pretty much doomed?
While the numbers do not make for happy reading, there are plenty of people trying to do something about them. Our reporter Leyland Cecco writes this week from the Canadian west, where the province of British Columbia has come up with an innovative response to the global carbon splurge.

The Trans Canada Highway in British Columbia. Photograph: Bert Klassen/Alamy

Luxembourg, meanwhile, has come up with a different idea for tackling greenhouse gas emissions (and city tailbacks), following an example set two years ago by Tallinn, as our Europe correspondent Daniel Boffey found out.
Pioneering startups are playing their part in using technology to combat environmental degradation. In France, Morphosis aims to reduce e-waste – discarded old electronics – by making sure their rare metals are recycled and reused. In Cameroon, Save Our Agriculture improves food security through aquaponics, a farming method where fish nourish the plants that in turn filter their water.
And in the UK, a small army of ramblers is determined to push back against human incursions into the countryside by rediscovering long-lost footpaths buried under decades of manmade eyesores.
Just what we need: new ways to get lost.

What we liked
In Greece, marine divers are volunteering to clear the surrounding oceans from plastic litter. With the longest coastline in the EU, they are slowly but surely reclaiming their natural habitat, NPR reports.
The charity Beam is trying to get the UK’s homeless population back into employment through crowdfunding. Candidates are referred by homelessness charities, and Beam then mentors each one to develop a career plan, which the public can fund via their website, receiving updates on their training and progress.
Finally, a US-based startup, Ecovative, is harnessing the power of the humble mushroom to create natural, biodegradable packaging and materials for potential use in industry.

What we heard

"Carbon taxes are really the only way forward; it’s simple economics,” one reader commenting on our carbon tax story.

"I love the public footpaths in Britain and I used to love the public rights of way in London, but those have almost all disappeared,” one reader says about our lost footpaths.

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Why 2019 Could Be The Warmest Yet

NEWS.com.au - Stephanie Bedo

Extreme weather and warming temperatures are putting us on track to face the hottest year in human history.

Heatwaves - Natures Silent Killer

Heatwaves, tropical cyclones, a high fire risk and what scientists are warning to be the hottest year in human history.
This is what Australia is in for in the new year — and it looks like the severe weather system that will cause all of that is already taking hold now.
The Climate Prediction Centre in the US says there is an 80 per cent chance a full-fledged El Nino has already started.
But while the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has us on “alert” for El Nino, it says the system that brings with it hot temperatures hasn’t formed just yet.
As a result of global warming, weather experts are predicting 2019 could be the hottest year ever as temperatures continue to climb.
The 20 warmest years have all been in the past 22 years, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), with the top four in the past four years.
It’s recent “State of the Global Climate” report warns if El Nino develops, 2019 is likely to be warmer than 2018.
Across the world 1600 people died from heatwaves this year.
And no one under the age of 32 has ever experienced a cooler-than-average month.
“Every fraction of a degree of warming makes a difference to human health and access to food and fresh water, to the extinction of animals and plants, to the survival of coral reefs and marine life,’’ WMO deputy secretary-general Elena Manaenkova said.
BOM’s latest “El Nino — Southern Oscillation” report has said we don’t have an El Nino yet.

Australia is on El Nino alert.
Picture: BOM

2019 could be the hottest year yet.
Picture: John Grainger Source: News Corp Australia

“Trade winds weakened in the last fortnight, leading to further warming in the tropical Pacific Ocean, but collectively, the atmosphere has yet to show a consistent El Nino signal,” it said.
“This suggests that the tropical Pacific atmosphere and ocean have yet to couple (reinforce each other), a process that would sustain an El Nino, and result in widespread global impacts.
“El Nino effects in Australia over summer typically include higher fire risk, greater chance of heatwaves and fewer tropical cyclones.”
A recent report on El Nino’s impacts on temperature, rain and fire in a warming climate suggests these will get worse as the climate continues to get warmer.
There have been 27 El Nino events since 1900, with seven of Australia’s 10 driest years on record during one of those events.
Events can last for as little as six months or as long as two years, occurring every three to five years.
A recent report in the Medical Journal of Australia highlighted how the climate was threatening Australian lives, with heat stress alone costing $616 per employed person per year.
“The first 10 months of 2018 could be described as the world’s climate on steroids, wreaking havoc across the world, continuing the relentless march of setting new temperature extremes, rainfall records, increases in severe tropical cyclones, droughts, fires and sea level rise,” report co-author Dr Liz Hanna said.
“Climate change can be linked to the deepening consequences, the rising human toll, loss of human lives and livelihoods, and further erosion of our children’s future.
“Australia’s climate mayhem, which saw last summer’s extreme heat and drought conditions across NSW and QLD, or the current wild weather stretching form Cairns down to the NSW mid coast, are not isolated events. This pattern is occurring all over the globe. No one can continue to pretend this is ‘normal variability’.”

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Morrison's Big Stick On Energy Defies What A True Liberal Believes In

Fairfax - John Hewson*

A fundamental element of the collapse in the electoral standing of the Liberal Party, perhaps even more important than the disunity, disloyalty, and factionalism, certainly of greater longer-term significance, is how it has completely lost sight of what a Liberal stands for, what a Liberal believes in.
It is fashionable, of course, in Liberal circles, to attempt to draw some “authenticity” by reference to Menzies. Let me suggest that Menzies would be turning in his grave with the policy drift of the current lot of politicians presenting under the Liberal banner.

An abuse of power ... and an anti-Liberal intervention in the market. Credit: James Davies

Liberals have traditionally believed in small government, low regulation, and reliance on markets and market processes. It is therefore most concerning that these defining beliefs have been so easily jettisoned, as a short-term political expedient, in what is just the last manifestation, but just one of many, of what they claim as an “energy policy”.

The “true” Liberal response to the climate challenge would and should be – and has been on a couple of previous, but opportunistic, occasions, under the likes of Howard and Turnbull – to put a price on carbon via a “pure” emissions-trading scheme. This would be the most cost-effective response by charging, in simple terms, polluters for their pollution.
It is a particular, and indefensible, inequity in our present system to see those who pollute our rivers, or dump asbestos on a vacant lot, and so on, charged, fined, even jailed, for such activities, yet a coal-fired power plant can pump alarming quantities of CO2 into our atmosphere and be “protected” in doing so.

The two key elements of the Morrison government’s so-called energy policy are very anti-Liberal, indeed, socialist – leaning on, bullying, intimidating, otherwise attempting to regulate power prices, and the “Big Stick” of threatening forced divestiture of some of the assets of the “gentailers” (principally AGL, Energy Australia and Origin) if they “fail to comply”.
In the minds of some in the government, a parallel is being drawn between the activities and abuses of the Big Three power companies and the Big Four banks, not just in terms of their electoral unpopularity, but also particularly in the sense of their exercise of oligopolistic market power, and abuses of their “social licences”.
However, this may work in crude, point-scoring, electoral terms, but it is probably unwise to exaggerate, as more detailed analysis of their actual relative price-fixing activities and profitability (against assets and equity) may suggest some caution.

Morrison’s short-term difficulty, having sold Energy Minister Angus Taylor as “minister for getting electricity prices down”, is that, even at their “toughest”, they are unlikely to have much discernible impact on power bills by the time of the next election. But they will have sold out on their traditional beliefs and standing to do so.
The concept of forced “divestiture” not only burns their credibility as traditional Liberals, but would represent a significant and, to most, an indefensible abuse of executive government power.This issue has been floated before and formally assessed by parliamentary committees considering the Misuse of Market Power Bill in 2014, by the Harper Review of Competition Policy, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Law Council, and others – and generally rejected.

The parliamentary committee referred to “disadvantages outweighing potential advantages”, risking “significant disruption and economic damage, with unpredictable consequences for competition”.

The Harper Review, building on the earlier Hilmer and Dawson reviews, expressed concern about the likely impact on the efficiency of the businesses and potential harm to consumers. More recently, Harper has criticised the “hasty” introduction of the divestiture power in relation to the energy sector, "arguing that the aim of market intervention should be to block anti-competitive conduct, not to restructure the industry”.
The ACCC described it as “an extreme measure”, preferring other “means to restore competition to a level which serves consumers well”. The Law Council has described it a “truly draconian”, carrying a “serious risk that it will create several less efficient businesses”. Lawyers Ashurst have described it as “an extraordinary and invasive power”.

Overseas evidence suggests that such a power has only ever been used sparingly in the US, and not yet in the EU and Canada, even though the power exists.

All this would lead you to conclude that this latest manifestation of an “energy policy” by a Liberal-controlled government, dumping virtually all that it once believed in, and advocated for, and adopting all that it once abhorred, has been simply proffered out of political desperation, risking very serious potential consequences for the power sector, that is of such fundamental significance to our broader industrial base and to households.
All this also seems so inconsistent with Morrison’s recent speech dubbed his “Sermon on the Murray”, apparently built in the Menzies tradition. Has he really lost all sense of what it means to be a Liberal? Or will he say or do anything, including jettisoning all previous beliefs, just to win?

Voters will probably ensure that he forfeits his right to govern.

*John Hewson is a professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, and a former federal Liberal leader.

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