The Carbon Brief Profile: Australia

Carbon Brief - Jocelyn Timperley

In this article on how key emitters are responding to climate change, Carbon Brief looks at Australia’s complex climate politics and rising fossil fuel exports.

Carbon Brief Profile Australia Politics Paris pledge Climate policy Coal Renewables Oil and gas Agriculture and forestry Climate laws Impacts and adaptation

Climate change is a top tier political issue in Australia. Debates over climate and energy policy have triggered several of the numerous changes of prime minister in recent years.
Australia had the world’s 15th largest greenhouse gas emissions in 2015 and its citizens’ per-capita contribution is around three times the global average.
It is the world’s second largest coal exporter and recently became the top exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG). Its electricity system remains heavily reliant on coal, despite ramping up the use of gas and renewables, especially rooftop solar.
It is also highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including extreme heat, drought, bushfires and agricultural impacts.
Based on its current trajectory, Australia is off track on its international pledge to cut emissions 26-28% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.
Opinion polls suggest the opposition Labor party will win the upcoming federal election, expected in May.

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Australia’s economy ranks 13th globally in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), just after Russia and South Korea. Its population sits at 25 million – 53rd in the world – and is projected to increase to 33 million by 2050.
The country has recently witnessed political turbulence, with five changes of prime minister over the past decade. The current government has been in power since 2013 and is formed of a longtime alliance between the right-leaning Liberal and National parties (L/NP), together known as the “Coalition”.
The Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison has held office since August 2018. He was preceded by Malcolm Turnbull from 2015-2018 and Tony Abbott from 2013-2015, both Liberals. The left-leaning Labor party (ALP) was in power from 2007 to 2013 under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
The country will return to the polls this year. The date is flexible, but widely expected to be in May. Opinion polls generally show a projected win for Labor, now led by Bill Shorten.
Climate change policy has a long and complex history in Australia and has been highly politicised. Some polls show it as a top issue among voters in the federal election. Tens of thousands of Australian schoolchildren recently joined the global school climate strikes.
Around 58% of Australians consider climate change a “major threat” to their country, second only to the 59% who considered ISIS a major threat, according to a 2017 poll from the Pew Research Centre. Another 2018 survey from the Australia Institute thinktank found 60% want coal-fired power to be phased out within 20 years. The same survey found 73% of people are concerned about climate change, a five-year high.

Stop the Adani Carmichael coal mine protest outside Bill Shorten’s Moonee Ponds office, 3 October 2017. Credit: Julian Meehan / (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Lobbyists and the media are also strong political players in Australia. The mining lobby spent around AUS$5m (£2.7m) last year on political campaigning, compared to AUS$183k (£99k) by environmental NGOs. Australia’s media landscape is among the most concentrated in the world. The two main newspaper firms – the more conservative News Corp and more progressive Fairfax Media – are strongly polarised politically, according to the 2018 Digital News Report, including on climate.
Australia has never hosted a meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In 1998 it signed the Kyoto Protocol, which committed developed country signatories to emission reduction targets. But Australia did not ratify this until 2007, following the election of a Labor government. It ratified the Paris Agreement on 9 November 2016.

Paris pledge
Australia’s annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stood at 550m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2015 including land-use and forestry (LULUCF), according to data compiled by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). (See “note on infographic” at the end of this article for details of this data. Note that LULUCF emissions were negative in 2015).
Emissions excluding LULUCF have almost doubled since 1970. They peaked at 700MtCO2e in 2011 and stood at 630MtCO2e in 2016.
In August 2015, Australia submitted its climate pledge towards the Paris climate talks. This “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) came under Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott.
The pledge promised a 26-28% emissions reduction by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, including land use. This is equivalent to a 22–25% cut below 1990 levels including land use, but a 3-6% rise when land-use emissions are excluded. This sector is a net sink in Australia.
The pledge says the target is “comparable to the targets of other advanced economies” and that Australia will achieve the upper 28% of its target “should circumstances allow”. It adds:

“This effort takes account of Australia’s unique national circumstances, including a growing population and economy, role as a leading global resources provider, our current energy infrastructure, and higher than average abatement costs.”

The government’s independent advisors, the Climate Change Authority (CCA), had previously recommended a target of a 40-60% cut in emissions by 2030 compared to 2000 levels. Australia’s pledge represents only a 19-22% cut on emissions in 2000.
The main policy outlined in Australia’s climate pledge was its Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) (see more in the next section) and a scheme to source 23% of electricity from renewables by 2020.
Several post-2020 policies were under development, it said, including a plan for a 40% improvement in energy productivity – the amount of energy needed to generate each unit of GDP – between 2015 and 2030.
Australia’s per-capita emissions stood at 23tCO2e in 2015, according to PIK and World Bank data, around nine times those of India and more than three times the world average of 7tCO2e.
Australia says its pledge represents a 50-52% cut in per-capita emissions by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. The 28% by 2030 pledge would see per-capita emissions fall to 16tCO2e in 2030, from 31tCO2e in 2005, according to PIK data and UN population projections.
The pledge is rated as “insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent analysis by three research organisations. “If all government targets were within this range, warming would reach over 2C and up to 3C,” it says.
There is disagreement over whether Australia is on track to meet its climate targets.
According to CAT, a current lack of policies means it will not meet the targets within its pledge and is actually on a trajectory in line with 3-4C warming. CAT adds:

“To meet its ‘insufficient’ 2030 emissions targets, Australian emissions should decrease by an annual rate of 1.5-1.7% until 2030; instead, with current policies, they are set to increase by an annual rate of around 0.3% per year.”

Climate Transparency, a research and NGO partnership, also says Australia’s GHG trajectory and NDC target are not compatible with the Paris goals. Policy is failing to address the need for structural change, with effective policies missing in every sector, it says.
In contrast, a recent analysis from the Australian National University finds the Paris target will be met five years early, though its findings are disputed. In December 2017, a government review said Australia was “on track” to meet its target.

Scott Morrison (right), Australia’s prime minister, arrives at the G20 in Argentina in 2018. Credit: G20 Argentina Flickr.

Critics say these assessments use “creative accounting” and take credit for a large decline in deforestation that happened before the Paris Agreement was signed. Australia is also trying to carry forward credit for overachieving on its Kyoto targets, using the surplus to meet its Paris goals. The final rules on whether this should be allowed have yet to be decided.
Similar issues cloud Australia’s progress on its earlier climate pledges and goals.
As part of the 2009 Copenhagen accord, the country pledged a voluntary 5% reduction on 2000 levels by 2020, rising to a 15-25% reduction, if the world struck a strong climate deal. The CCA has said these stronger conditions have been met and recommended a 15% target, saying a 5% target is not “a credible start”. The government has stuck to the 5% pledge.
In 2010, the country pledged to reduce emissions 0.5% below 1990 levels by 2020 as part of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. The 5% Copenhagen pledge was used to calculate this legally binding target, which takes the form of a cumulative emissions budget. Australia is on track to meet the target, helped by the use of “flexibility mechanisms” and carry-over from the first Kyoto commitment period.
Australia is part of the Umbrella Group informal negotiating bloc at international climate talks, which is mainly made up of rich countries from several continents. The group has often been characterised as less enthusiastic towards international climate cooperation than other developed countries.
Australia is also part of the Cartagena Dialogue, an informal discussion group of countries that say they are committed to becoming low-carbon.
It is one of the worst-performing countries both for national climate policy and for hindering progress in international negotiations, according to a recent NGO performance index. This ranked Australia 55th out of 60 countries.

Climate policy
Over  the past decade, several flagship climate policies have been announced and then adjusted or cancelled, including a scrapped economy-wide carbon tax. The current policy void means the next government could make a large difference to Australia’s emissions.
In August 2018, Malcolm Turnbull removed an emissions reduction target for the power industry from his main proposed energy policy – the national energy guarantee (NEG) – due to pressure from his party’s rightwing. This same group later ousted him as prime minister, with Scott Morrison taking the helm and dropping the NEG altogether.

Greenpeace protesters suspend a banner from Parliament House, depicting prime minister Scott Morrison, holding a piece of coal. Canberra, Australia, 10 September 2018. Credit: Sam Nerrie / Alamy Stock Photo.

The “centrepiece” of government emissions reduction efforts is now the ERF, previously called the Direct Action Plan. This uses a reverse auction to award contracts for emissions cuts. Contracts go to the cheapest bids from businesses, local councils, state governments and farmers.
There are ongoing concerns over the ERF, including its cost to the taxpayer, ability to deliver promised emissions cuts and the additionality and permanence of any reductions.
Most ERF projects are in the land sector, though funding has also gone to new fossil fuel projects considered cleaner than the activities they replace. The Clean Energy Regulator, which runs the fund, last year cancelled AUS$24m (£13m) of contracts that had failed to deliver.
The scheme will need to contribute “less of Australia’s emissions reduction task over time”, according to a 2017 review by the CCA. “[O]ther policies will need to take up the challenge of decarbonising Australia’s economy and deliver structural change”, it said, though the ERF should be “built on as part of the policy tool kit” to meet Australia’s Paris goals.
Morrison has rebranded the ERF as the “Climate Solutions Fund” and promised it an extra AUS$2bn (£1.1bn), as part of a AUS$3.5bn (£1.9bn) “Climate Solutions Package”. The pledge has been criticised for falling far short of what is needed to tackle Australia’s emissions, particularly due to the shortage of projects in the emissions-intensive power and industry sectors. Announcing the funding in February, Morrison said:

“Our government will take, and is taking, meaningful, practical, sensible, responsible action on climate change without damaging our economy or your family budget.”

In its latest budget, published earlier this month, the Morrison government said this new AUS$2bn of funding would need to last for 15 years, instead of 10 as initially proposed.
The opposition Labor party’s climate change plan would raise Australia’s emissions reduction target for 2030 from a 26-28% to a 45% cut on 2005 levels. Labor leader Bill Shorten has called climate change “a disaster”. His party would bring in a new emissions trading scheme and target “net zero pollution” by 2050.
In an effort to create cross-party consensus, Labor still supports the NEG and its emissions reduction mechanism, both dropped by the Liberals. The party would also raise the emissions reduction target.
In the event this compromise fails, Labor has outlined a AUS$15bn (£8bn) plan to cut emissions in the energy system. Of this, AUS$10bn (£5.4bn) will go to the government-owned green bank Labor established in 2012, including for a AUS$1bn (£540m) plan to begin exporting hydrogen. It recently ruled out taxpayer support for new coal power plants.
Australia’s Green party – which could hold the balance of power in the senate after the elections – has also announced a host of climate policies. These include 100% renewable electricity by 2030, bans on new fossil fuel extraction and a phaseout of coal exports by 2030, in favour of renewable exports such as “solar fuels”.
Regional climate ambition in Australia is generally far stronger than at the federal level. All states and territories, bar Western Australia, have strong renewable energy targets, net-zero emissions targets, or both. South Australia is targeting net-zero emissions by 2050.

Coal
In 2017, 61% of Australia’s electricity came from coal, as the chart below shows. However, coal power output has fallen from a peak in 2006, due to the rising use of gas and renewables. Around a third of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the power sector.

Electricity generation in Australia by fuel, 1985-2017 (terawatt hours).
Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018. Chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts. 

As of January 2019, Australia has 24 gigawatts (GW) of operating coal plants, the world’s 11th largest fleet, according to the Global Coal Plant Tracker. It has been 10 years since a new coal power plant was commissioned and 9GW of planned capacity has been shelved or cancelled since 2010. There are currently no new coal plants in the pipeline. Nine coal power stations have been retired over the past five years in Australia, says CAT.
Much of Australia’s coal fleet is ageing, posing questions over where the country will source its electricity in future. The risk of summer blackouts – a major political issue – could grow as old coal plants become less reliable and higher temperatures increase peak demand.
The government is considering committing support for new coal power investment before the election, urged on by some factions of the ruling party. According to one assessment, Australia already has some of the world’s highest fossil fuel subsidies per capita.
Natural resources, including coal and metals such as iron ore, uranium and gold, are a major part of Australia’s economy. They account for 8% of GDP and 70% of exports.
Australia mined 500m tonnes of coal in 2017, making it the world’s fourth largest producer after China, India and the US, and just ahead of Indonesia. Mines are located mainly in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

Aerial view of an open-cut coal mine in Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia. Credit: redbrickstock.com / Alamy Stock Photo.

 The Australian government expects its coal-mining activities to increase, leading to a rise in emissions in the sector. In particular, this is due to several “gassy” coal mines returning to full production after temporary declines, leading to increased fugitive methane emissions.
There has been widespread opposition to a new thermal coal mine in Queensland proposed by Indian energy giant Adani, including a series of legal challenges. Adani is now self-financing a smaller version of the project after numerous banks ruled out funding.
Last year, a New South Wales judge cited climate change impacts when ruling out another planned coal mine in the Hunter Valley.
Coal is this year set to become Australia’s most valuable export. The country only consumes a quarter of the coal it produces and is the world’s second largest exporter after Indonesia.
Coal exports were 379m tonnes in 2017-18, worth some US$64bn in earnings, and expected to grow. Japan, China and India are all significant destinations.

Renewables
Australia’s renewable capacity has increased rapidly over the past decade. By 2017, production from renewables other than hydro had more than tripled on 2007 levels, providing 10% of electricity.
Australia has one of the highest rooftop solar rates in the world: a fifth of all households have it installed, rising to a third in some states. It provides around 4% of Australia’s electricity.
Solar farms are also on the rise from an almost non-existent base five years ago. The country currently has more solar farms under construction than its total solar farm capacity. More than a million solar water heaters are installed on around an eighth of homes, while South Australia is set to build the world’s largest solar thermal plant.

Rooftop solar panels in South Australia. Credit: Andrey Moisseyev / Alamy Stock Photo.

Onshore wind capacity was 4.6GW in 2017, more than a third of which is in South Australia. This compares to 7.2GW for solar, of which 6.6GW is rooftop solar. Significantly more additions are planned for both. Australia has yet to approve its first offshore wind farm.
Australian renewable capacity had a record-breaking year in 2018. Around 10GW of new solar and wind capacity is expected to be installed during 2018 and 2019.
Hydropower provides around 5% of electricity generation, bringing the renewable total to 15%. Its output has remained relatively constant for decades, with its share in the electricity mix falling as other sources increase.
Australia’s largest hydro scheme, Snowy Hydro located in the south-east of the country, has a total capacity of 4GW, most of which was completed 45 years ago or more. A 2GW expansion, known as Snowy 2.0, was approved in December.

Gordon Dam, Southwest National Park, Tasmania. Credit: Tasmanian.Kris via Flickr.

The island state Tasmania produces around 90% of its electricity from hydro and exports to the mainland during peak demand via an interconnector. Hydro Tasmania has major plans for new pumped hydro storage and a second interconnector, as part of its “battery of the nation” scheme to double its renewable capacity to 5GW.
In 2009, Australia set a target for 20% of electricity to come from renewables by 2020, expanding an earlier renewables goal. Its scheme to achieve this requires high energy users to source a fixed proportion of electricity from renewable sources by buying certificates, with the value of the certificates decreasing each year.
A large-scale generation sub-target alone means 23.5% of generation will come from renewables in 2020, according to the government. Analysis indicates the overall 20% target has already been surpassed.
The current government has no plans to set a post-2020 target, however, despite being advised to do so by its chief scientist Alan Finkel in a 2017 review.
Around 70% of Australians back a higher renewable electricity target, according to a recent poll. Australia could reach 50% renewables in 2025 and 100% by the early 2030s if its current rate of expansion continued, analysis has found. The Labor party has promised to deliver 50% renewables by 2030, if it gets into power.
Several states have far stronger renewable targets. South Australia is on track to its goal of 75% renewable electricity by 2025 and there is public support for setting a “100% by 2030” target. Victoria and the Northern Territory are targeting 50% renewable electricity by 2030. Tasmania already regularly reaches 100% renewables generation.
In 2017, South Australia made headlines after Tesla built the world’s then-largest lithium ion battery in the state. The battery is expected to pay for itself within a few years and has been widely praised for boosting grid stability.
The battery was built after tornadoes caused statewide blackouts in 2016 by downing power lines and triggering overly-sensitive windfarm protections, which have since been modified.
Australia has never had any nuclear power due to longstanding bipartisan opposition. However, it has the world’s largest known uranium resources and is the third largest exporter of the material.

Oil and gas
Australia has widespread gas resources both on and offshore, particularly off the north-west coast. It also has high onshore unconventional gas resources.

A liquified natural gas carrier off the coast of Karratha, Western Australia. Credit: Jack Picone / Alamy Stock Photo.

It is one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG), alongside Qatar, with seven operating LNG terminals and three more under construction. Western Australia alone accounts for 11% of global LNG capacity.
Domestic gas use has also risen in recent years. It met a quarter of the country’s energy needs in 2017, up from 16% in 1997. Some analysts say eastern states will need to start importing LNG to meet demand, even as other parts of the country increase exports.
The country aims to export 80Mt of LNG per year by 2020, up from 24Mt in 2013-14. This is expected to lead to a rise in Australia’s emissions due to electricity use in the plants that liquify LNG, as well as fugitive methane emissions during extraction.
Fugitive emissions from oil, gas and coal have risen 41% since 2005 and are expected to rise further by 2030. There are also concerns that these emissions could be underreported.
LNG production is currently the biggest driver of overall emissions growth in the country and is projected to offset all the savings achieved through Australia’s 2020 renewables target.
The current government and industry argue LNG exports cut emissions abroad by displacing coal, although the extent of this effect is disputed.
Oil use has increased by a quarter since 1997, though its proportion in the energy mix has stayed level at around a third. Australia’s oil reserves are an estimated 0.3% of the world total.
Petroleum production peaked in 2000, although exports are now increasing. Australia imports nearly all its oil and exports 75% of its own crude production. Last year, the government ordered a fuel security review after it was warned the country had only a few weeks of petrol, diesel and aviation fuel in its reserves.

Duke Energy lowering a pipeline as part of the Tasmania Natural Gas Project. Credit: Bill Bachman / Alamy Stock Photo.

Norwegian oil firm Equinor has plans for experimental oil drilling in the Great Australian Bight, a huge bay off the south coast of Australia. Critics argue the deepwater project would put pristine coastline and marine life at risk of an oil spill.
Australia’s export credit agency, Efic, has been criticised by NGOs for supporting fossil-fuel projects around the world. A bill to expand Efic’s powers is expected to pass in early April, potentially opening the door to even more fossil-fuel support.

Transport
Transport accounts for 14% of Australia’s emissions. The government expects the sector’s emissions to increase over the next decade. Unlike 80% of the global market, Australia has no mandatory fuel-efficiency standards. Previous proposals were cut down by the ruling coalition after lobbying from industry.
It also lags behind other countries in the rollout of electric vehicles (EVs). Just 2,300 were sold in 2017, according to Australia’s EV trade body, or 0.2% of total motor sales. There are small incentives for lower emissions cars.
A recent senate select committee report outlined options to increase EV uptake, including consideration of a national target. In February, the government released a one-page EV strategy that still lacks support measures, according to critics.
Labor recently proposed a national EV target of 50% new car sales by 2030, as well as fuel emissions standards for conventional vehicles.



Agriculture and forestry
Australia has large agricultural emissions, principally due to methane released from its large livestock population. The country has around 26m cows, 2.2m pigs and 65m sheep. Nitrous oxide released from fertilised soils is also a large contributor.

A herd of sheep on the Tin Horse Highway in Western Australia. Credit: Julie Mowbray / Alamy Stock Photo.

Agricultural emissions have remained relatively steady for several decades, but a 2013 government-commissioned report said this was likely to change. It projected an annual 1.2% increase up to 2050, driven by rising meat and crop exports. By 2030, emissions would have risen 10% on 2018 levels, the report said.
Australia’s land sector is a large net emissions sink, with the latest climate projections pointing to “historical lows” in recent years. On balance, 22MtCO2e was absorbed by the land sector in 2018, the report says, but this is set to shrink to 14MtCO2 in 2020 and 1MtCO2e in 2030.
The current lows are due to forest cover increases that are not expected to continue, the report says. This declining carbon sink is one of the main drivers of Australia’s emissions “growth” up to 2020.

Climate laws
Australia’s CCA is a statutory body established in 2011 to advise the government on climate targets and policy. It is modelled closely on the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
All its proposals need to meet certain criteria, including being economically “efficient”, equitable and consistent with Australia’s trade objectives. Former prime minister Tony Abbott tried but failed to get rid of the CCA, though he did remove its advisory role on emission targets. The body has since shrunk significantly.
In 2013, Abbot closed the Climate Commission, an independent science and public education body established by the government in 2011. However, it was resurrected as the Climate Council, a non-profit organisation, just days later.
Meanwhile, a 2007 greenhouse and energy reporting act introduced a single national framework for reporting on emissions, in part to underpin any future emissions trading scheme.
Australia’s renewable electricity target and ERF are also set in law, while a 2010 act obliges commercial buildings to disclose their energy efficiency when sold or leased.

Impacts and adaptation
Australia is experiencing higher temperatures, more frequent and intense extreme heat events, and higher fire risk and drought conditions due to climate change, says the country’s 2017 national communication to the UNFCCC. “These changes in climate are expected to continue,” it adds.
Annual mean temperatures in the country have already risen by around 1.1C since the late 1800s. They are expected to reach to 1.6-5.3C, depending on future emissions.
This year, Australia experienced its hottest summer on record, with the national average temperature around 2.1C above the long-term average, as well as multiple other heat records broken. Long-term climate trends played a role in the heatwaves, its Bureau of Meteorology says.
Drought is seen as a particularly serious issue in Australia. There are strong concerns about the Murray-Darling Basin in the southeastern interior, one of Australia’s most significant agricultural areas, which is already being affected by climate change. Rainfall patterns are changing and extreme storms, droughts and floods are becoming more frequent and intense, according to a recent paper by the region’s authority.
The report came in response to three mass fish deaths at lakes within the basin, which a scientific panel concluded were caused by drought as well as over-extraction.
A 2015 report from University of Melbourne researchers outlined how many of Australia’s major food commodities could be affected by climate change, from beef and dairy production to wheat and barley. Up to 70% of Australia’s winegrowing regions with a Mediterranean climate will be less suitable for grape growing by 2050, the report said.

Black Kite flee a bushfire in Northern Territory, Australia on 9 December 2016. Credit: Brad Leue / Alamy Stock Photo.

Climate change has also been linked to an increased risk of bushfires and length of the fire season. However, overall effects are complex since climate change can impact the various risk factors of wildfires in different ways.
There is also concern about sea-level rise, which is likely to be close to the expected global average of up to a metre by 2100. The country has already seen increased rates of extreme sea levels. Around half of Australia’s population lives within 7km of the coast.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is already being severely damaged by coral bleaching due to  marine heatwaves and ocean acidification. Two major bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 affected 93% and 83% of coral in the reef respectively. The government has opposed – and lobbied against – efforts to add the Great Barrier Reef to Unesco’s “in danger” list.

Coral off the coast of Townsville, Australia, November 2018. Credit: Daisy Dunne / Carbon Brief.

The country first set out its approach to adaptation in its 2007 national adaptation framework. It also has a national research facility to support management of climate risks with reports on “priority themes”. In 2015, it released a climate adaptation strategy towards climate resilience in Australia.
In 2015, Australia committed to giving at least AUS$1bn (£540m) in international climate finance to vulnerable countries over five years. This was redirected from the existing foreign aid budget and included $187m previously pledged to the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Government budget papers published this month imply Australia has ruled out contributions to GCF’s replenishment round this year.
Australia does also give significant bilateral climate funding. Overall, it was the 10th largest international climate finance donor in 2015 and 2016, according to Carbon Brief analysis. The highest transfer to a single country went to Indonesia.

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Climate Change Could Destroy His Home In Peru. So He Sued An Energy Company In Germany.

New York Times - Brooke Jarvis

Local communities are taking the world’s largest polluters to court. And they’re using the legal strategy that got tobacco companies to pay up.

Saúl Luciano Lliuya, who filed a lawsuit against a German utility company, in the mountains around, Huaraz, Peru. Felipe Fittipaldi for The New York Times

In the mountains far above the red-brick city, behind a locked gate, there is a great, green valley. Its high stone walls are streaked by waterfalls; its floor dotted with flowers and grazed by horses and cows. Six boulder-strewn miles beyond the gate, the valley ends abruptly at an enormous wall of rock and ice. Beneath it lies a stretch of calm, bright water in milky turquoise — Lake Palcacocha. Though few of its residents have ever seen this lake, the city below lives in fear of it.On Dec. 13, 1941, a piece broke off a hanging glacier and fell into Palcacocha, creating a great wave that overwhelmed a natural dam and sent a flood surging toward Huaraz, a provincial capital in the Peruvian Andes, about 14 miles below. A third of the city was destroyed and at least 1,800 people were killed. In response, the government reinforced the natural dam and installed drainage tubes to lower the level of the lake. Huaraz boomed to 130,000 inhabitants from 20,000. Occasionally there was a scare — a rock slide into the lake in 2003 sloshed a smaller amount of water over the edge, causing panic — but to many people in Huaraz the danger began to seem remote. Until it became clear that the lake was getting bigger.
In 2009, glaciologists found that amid the widespread melting of Andean ice, the amount of water held in Palcacocha had increased by 3,400 percent over just a couple of decades. Even more worrying, this melt associated with climate change was destabilizing the glaciers hanging above it, making major avalanches more likely. The regional government declared a state of emergency and began posting guardians to watch the lake around the clock.
The guardians of the lake live above Palcacocha, in a little stone house with a tin roof. It was built by hand from nearby rocks and has no insulation, though at 15,000 feet the air is thin and the cold brutal, even in summer. There is no heat apart from a cook fire, and few supplies: raincoats, warm blankets, flashlights for working at night, snowshoes for working in winter.
On a cold summer day in February, I looked up from the lake to see a man descending a zigzagging trail. He walked lightly across loose boulders to the water’s edge, where a large ruler pierced the surface. He read it, and then turned to climb the switchbacks back to the hut, where a radio was wired to what looked like a car battery. It was his job, shared with two other men, to report on the status of the water levels every two hours, day and night.

Lake Palcacocha in the Peruvian Andes. Felipe Fittipaldi for The New York Times

The man introduced himself as Víctor Morales, one of the guardians. I followed him up to the hut, where we listened to the rumble of falling ice echoing repeatedly off the high walls around the lake. Seeing me jump as yet another distant waterfall of white tumbled down, Morales laughed and said in Spanish: “Little! Just a little avalanche.” He would mark the activity on his next report, he said, as “minimal,” far less than the fall two weeks before, which raised 12-foot waves in the placid lake. That one he described, with a shrug, as “regularcito.” Should a more substantial avalanche happen, something that researchers consider a significant risk, the resulting flood would careen down the valley, overwhelming houses and farms until it arrived in Huaraz. According to the best available estimates, even without a collapse of the glacial moraine, a wall of rock that serves as the lake’s natural dam, which is considered unlikely, a large avalanche could lead to the inundation of 154 city blocks and more than 6,000 deaths. The regional government has considered various solutions: lowering the lake level by another 60 to 100 feet; creating a more technologically advanced early-warning system with sensors and sirens; plastering the city with evacuation maps. “We want a map in every schoolchild’s notebook,” César Portocarrero Rodríguez, an engineer and glaciologist in Huaraz, says.One of the first neighborhoods to be flooded would be Nueva Florida, blocks of brick-and-adobe homes that edge the stream from the canyon. Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a soft-spoken, 39-year-old farmer and father of two who also works as a mountain guide during the tourist season, lives there in a bright yellow house, across the street from Morales’s parents; the families have known each other for decades. Many people in Huaraz, Luciano Lliuya told me, don’t fully appreciate the sacrifices that the guardians make to do their jobs — in part because they don’t fully realize the dangers of deglaciation. Over the years, Luciano Lliuya has seen lakes expanding and avalanches increasing and ice retreating with every climb; he has seen farmers begin to argue over diminishing clean water. The loss of ice, it is clear to him, means a future that’s more uncertain in all kinds of ways. “I depend, in every sense, on the mountain,” he told me. “It is everything.”
One day, five years ago, Luciano Lliuya sat talking with a friend about the many changes and costs that climate change is bringing to the Andes, whose residents have, by global standards, done very little to contribute to the problem. “We wondered,” he said, “whether we could find los responsables” — the responsible ones — and somehow persuade them to change their behavior. He wanted, fervently, to find a way to stop the ice from melting even more.
Luciano Lliuya’s friend introduced him to a contact at a nongovernment organization called Germanwatch, based in Bonn, that works to promote equity between developed and less-developed countries. In 2015, with the group’s support, Luciano Lliuya, who had never left his country, traveled 6,500 miles to file a lawsuit against RWE, Germany’s largest energy utility. The lawsuit claimed that the company, though it does not operate in Peru, had contributed about half of 1 percent of the emissions that are causing the global climate to change and that it should therefore be responsible for half of 1 percent of the cost of containing the lake that might destroy Luciano Lliuya’s house. His claim entered the courts in the form of a demand for $19,000.
“There weren’t high hopes,” Luciano Lliuya said — either that a lawsuit would have any real effect on how quickly the glaciers were melting or that he would actually be able to make the case, in court, that Huaraz’s woes were the fault of a company an ocean away. But he didn’t know what else to do, and he felt he had to do something: “It was like ... a shout.”

Luciano Lliuya at home with his daughter Gleysi. Felipe Fittipaldi for The New York Times

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Legal systems have long struggled with the best way to respond when individuals have been harmed by others. Who qualifies as a victim, and what counts as a misdeed? How can harm be traced and measured? If it can’t be undone, what might make things right? Nearly 4,000 years ago, the Code of Hammurabi decreed harsh restitution for dozens of situations. If, for example, someone failed to maintain his dam and it failed, flooding a neighbor’s fields, the negligent dam owner should “be sold for money, and the money shall replace the corn which he has caused to be ruined.” Anglo-Saxon law offered wergild, set amounts to be paid by offenders to the families of their victims, in atonement for murder or adultery. In seventh-century Kent, the lives of freemen were valued at 100 shillings, noblemen at 300.
In the modern era, common-law countries such as the United States have turned to the courts to sift through the complexities of injury, causation and remedy. Common law, as distinct from statutory law, applies in situations where no legislative guidelines have been set and courts instead respond to cases as they happen — leaning on, and adding to, centuries of accumulated decisions interpreting the basic legal idea that individuals have uninfringible rights. Modern cases that take on environmental damage rest on a heritage that includes, for example, William Aldred’s complaint, in the early 1600s, that the stench from a pigsty built by his neighbor Thomas Benton made his home unbearable.
Today, Benton’s action would be considered a tort, a harm or an infringement of a legal right that requires redress. To sue, plaintiffs in tort cases must show they have sufficient connection to a specific harm (what’s called standing); that the defendant owed them some duty of care and breached it; that the harm was particular to the plaintiff and that the defendant’s action was a direct cause of that harm; and that they, the plaintiff, suffered an actual injury or damage — including, perhaps, a future one. First-year law students are initiated into how fraught these seemingly simple questions can become when they study an infamous 1928 lawsuit involving a package that exploded on a train platform in Brooklyn and a woman, Helen Palsgraf, who was injured in the ensuing confusion. That’s the short version; the single injury claim involves, as the Wake Forest law professor Jonathan Cardi has noted, “a series of bizarre twists so curious and mesmerizing that one has trouble averting one’s gaze.” The case, whose details and lessons are still being argued, was repeatedly appealed. Some of the great jurists of the day weighed in, eloquently debating the responsibilities that humans have toward one another, especially when they harm one another indirectly, in ways that are difficult to foresee. If an act “has a tendency to harm someone, it harms him a mile away as surely as it does those on the scene,” wrote one of the judges. “We draw an uncertain and wavering line, but draw it we must as best we can.”
Tort law has, of course, weighed injuries far trickier than Helen Palsgraf’s. State courts in particular have a history of offering remedies to complex and evolving claims. Mesothelioma patients and their families routinely win monetary relief despite not being able to trace precisely which product was the source of decades-old asbestos exposure (and despite the fact that more than 100 companies tied to the asbestos industry have declared bankruptcy, leaving trusts behind to deal with the continuing suits). Oil companies have paid hundreds of millions of dollars since the mid-2000s in recompense to states and local governments for using a gasoline additive that, while employed to help meet clean-air standards, turned out to pollute groundwater (a fact the companies kept to themselves). Beginning in the 1990s, courts began to find tobacco companies liable for the health effects of cigarette smoking, even though smokers used their products willingly and even though the first 800 or so lawsuits against the companies failed. In recent years, more than a thousand lawsuits have sought to make pharmaceutical companies pay for the sprawling costs of the opioid-addiction crisis, including the costs of hospital visits, overwhelmed foster-care systems and overburdened coroner’s offices. (In March, Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, agreed to a $270 million settlement in just one of those cases, avoiding going to trial in state court in Oklahoma.)
Now a new wave of lawsuits is testing whether fossil-fuel companies can be made to pay for the costs of climate change. Since 2017, eight United States cities, including New York and San Francisco, six counties, one state and the West Coast’s largest association of fishermen have brought suit against a host of corporations — Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, Peabody Energy, among others — for selling products that caused the world to warm while misleading the public about the damage they knew would result. The suits demand compensation for a variety of expenses: in California, sea walls and infrastructure to cope with rising waters; in Colorado, the costs of combating wildfires, floods, pine beetle infestations, agricultural losses and heat waves.

In the event of a flood from Lake Palcacocha above Huaraz, Peru, the waters would inundate the Nueva Florida neighborhood (center). Felipe Fittipaldi for The New York Times

A separate legal argument underpins a parallel set of new cases, the most famous of which was brought in 2015 by a group of American children, which target governments for failing to adequately tackle climate change and uphold what one judge called “the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” Another track is to sue companies for misleading their shareholders, in violation of securities law. In November, Ralph Regenvanu, the foreign minister of the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, offered a glimpse of what may become a new reality: “My government is now exploring all avenues to utilize the judicial system in various jurisdictions, including under international law, to shift the costs of climate protection back onto the fossil-fuel companies, the financial institutions and the governments that actively and knowingly created this existential threat to my country.”
Ann Carlson, faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at U.C.L.A. School of Law, says that lawsuits linking fossil-fuel companies to the climate impacts of their products could set significant legal precedents. “If one of these cases succeeds,” she says, “even if all the others are dismissed, that’s a really big deal. That’s why companies will fight tooth and nail.” But while Luciano Lliuya’s suit was accepted by a regional appeals court in Germany in late 2017 and is now moving into the evidentiary phase, none of the recent United States lawsuits has moved beyond preliminary consideration and into discovery, never mind an actual trial. The question remains whether the American tort system is prepared to litigate a problem of the enormous scale and complexity of global climate change. “Diffuse and disparate in origin, lagged and latticed in effect, anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions represent the paradigmatic anti-tort,” Douglas A. Kysar, a professor at Yale Law School, wrote in a 2011 paper, “a collective-action problem so pervasive and so complicated as to render at once both all of us and none of us responsible.”

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We are still learning what dangers will arise from our altered atmosphere. Some changes, such as warmer ocean water taking up more space and pushing into cities, have a direct, calculable cause. Others, like powerful tropical cyclones or abnormally heavy flood-producing rains, are more indirect products of the ways in which humans are affecting the climate. The largest challenge to adjudicating responsibility for these damages is proving attribution: of specific damages or disasters to climate change; of climate change to specific emissions; of emissions to those responsible for them. In an early test case filed in 2008, an Alaska Native village sought to make energy companies pay for its relocation, which the disappearance of its protective barrier of sea ice necessitated. A United States District Court judge, dismissing the case, wrote, “There is no realistic possibility of tracing any particular alleged effect of global warming to any particular emissions by any specific person, entity, group at any particular point in time.”
But eight years after calling climate change “the paradigmatic anti-tort,” Kysar recently told me that “a fair number of things have changed.” Scientists have gotten better at quantifying the links between emissions and impacts. When the links are indirect, they calculate what’s known in epidemiology as “fraction of attributable risk”: how much more likely it was that an extreme event would occur because of an altered climate. Plaintiffs also argue that they don’t need to prove that specific disasters were directly caused by climate change, because climate change makes future disasters more likely and governments must take expensive steps to adapt now. We also know more about the ways fossil-fuel companies misdirected the public about the risks associated with their products and about how much companies actually emitted. “What I see right now are well-pled complaints that should get beyond a dismissal motion and proceed to discovery,” Kysar says. “For better or for worse, that’s been our process in determining wrongdoing.”
To implicate specific companies, the new lawsuits have turned to data collected by Richard Heede, director of the Climate Accountability Institute in Snowmass, Colo., who has spent much of the past 16 years searching through archives to find reports about how much fossil-fuel companies extracted during their sometimes long histories. He then estimates how much fossil fuel was used for a company’s own operations, how much diverted for things like asphalt or petrochemical production, how much volatilized into the atmosphere. The work is tedious, involving hundreds of thousands of data points and a basement full of dusty reports. Still, Heede told me, “we needed that kind of leverage in order to talk turkey with oil and gas companies.”

Glacial Lake Palcacocha poses significant flood hazard downstream to communities in Huaraz. Siphons installed in 2011 lowered the level of the lake by 7 to 16 feet in an attempt to reduce the flood hazard. Felipe Fittipaldi for The New York Times

Heede’s work reveals that, if you include all the carbon extracted and supplied, just 90 companies are responsible for two-thirds of all the greenhouse gases emitted between 1751 and 2016. Even more startling, more than half those emissions have occurred since 1988, the year that the climate scientist James Hansen, then at NASA, appeared before Congress to urge that “it is time to stop waffling” and recognize the clear link between the emission of greenhouse gases and the warming of the planet.
Heede’s data underpins many of the new United States lawsuits, as well as Luciano Lliuya’s claim about RWE’s share of climate emissions. Plaintiffs believe that they can establish fault that meets the required standard of substantially contributing to a harm by combining these estimates with recent revelations that oil companies had knowledge of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as the 1960s but actively worked to undermine the public’s trust in climate science. (Even as they privately prepared for climate impacts on their operations, companies followed a public strategy of emphasizing doubts about the growing scientific consensus that their products would lead to climate change.) According to Carlson, in the first test cases of climate liability (the Alaska village lawsuit and a case brought by eight states, New York City and three environmental groups in 2005 against five power companies, including the Tennessee Valley Authority), “the courts seemed to be worried, like: ‘Oh, did these people really cause the problem? Some power plants, maybe 2 percent?’ ” Now, she says, “it feels like you have the big contributors right in front of you.” Roda Verheyen, the lawyer representing Luciano Lliuya, concurs. “I long to present Heede in court,” she said. “Just because it’s a complex issue doesn’t mean that you can’t prove liability.”

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The year before Luciano Lliuya was born, his father decided to move his six children — Saúl was the seventh and last — from the countryside above Huaraz to the Nueva Florida house, where they could be close to school and he to his job as a watchman. (The family also kept a house and land in the hills for raising crops and animals, which Luciano Lliuya and his wife, Lidia, still maintain. They have seven cows and raise corn, potatoes, quinoa and mint.) Land in Nueva Florida was relatively cheap; when people dig into the soil, Luciano Lliuya told me when I visited, they regularly find huge boulders, reminders of the 1941 flood.
It wasn’t guiding season, but Luciano Lliuya was dressed in hiking gear; Lidia wore the tall bowler hat and wide woolen skirt that is common to the mountains. She spoke mostly in Quechua, which is also Luciano Lliuya’s first language, while he translated to Spanish. Luciano Lliuya is currently renovating the house, replacing adobe walls with concrete, so everyone sat on the floor or on overturned buckets. “If I said, ‘It’s a flood zone, I won’t fix the house,’ that would look crazy,” Luciano Lliuya mused. “But it’s also crazy to do it knowing the danger, no? From both sides, it’s crazy.”
The technical term for the disaster that threatens Huaraz is glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF, a fairly obscure offender in a lineup of climate impacts that includes famine-inducing droughts, the acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans and the inundation of cities like New York and Jakarta. But GLOFs are a growing concern not just in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, the mountain region where Huaraz is — hundreds of square kilometers of ice have melted in recent decades, creating at least 100 new lakes and more risk of flooding from existing ones — but also in the Himalayas and the Alps.

Víctor Morales, guard at Lake Palcachoca Glacier, Cordillera Blanca. He and other guards report on the status of the water levels every two hours, day and night. Felipe Fittipaldi for The New York Times

As Luciano Lliuya’s case makes its way through the German court system, court-appointed experts have been assigned to investigate his claims against RWE. First, hydrologists and other scientists will study how much danger the house in Nueva Florida faces. If they confirm the danger exists, the court will consider how much, if any, of the responsibility lies with RWE. The company, for its part, has objected to the entire premise of the case. “It is simply not allowed to pick one out of a million and say, ‘You are guilty, I put the blame on you,’ ” Guido Steffen, a spokesman for RWE, told me. Should such lawsuits be allowed, he continued, a person might be sued for flying in planes or driving a car. “It would mean the war of everybody against everybody,” he said.
German courts do not use common law, but the statute under which Luciano Lliuya sued is similar to the nuisance principle invoked in many of the United States lawsuits: the legal category of “nuisance,” one of the oldest torts. It has played a role in innumerable public health, pollution and injury cases since the dispute over Thomas Benton’s stinky pigsty. Companies targeted by lawsuits in the United States also put forward arguments similar to the one made by RWE: Climate change is simply too vast an issue for courts to be able to respond adequately to the injuries it causes. There are too many contributors, too many tangled chains linking emitters to harms, too many benefits to be weighed against costs and too many consequences for national and international policy if demands for redress are actually met. They argue that responding to greenhouse-gas emissions should fall to the legislative and executive branches (though those branches have in fact failed to regulate emissions) and that cases should be moved to federal court, where judges, including the justices of the Supreme Court, have found that common-law climate claims are superseded by federal law (including the Clean Air Act, under which a 2007 Supreme Court decision determined that the E.P.A. must treat greenhouse gases as a pollutant).
These arguments have helped persuade judges to dismiss climate lawsuits before they can move on to document discovery or the testimony of experts. “The dangers raised in the complaints are very real,” wrote Judge William Alsup, when dismissing suits brought against five oil companies by Oakland, Calif., and San Francisco last year. “But those dangers are worldwide. Their causes are worldwide. The benefits of fossil fuels are worldwide. The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public-nuisance case.” Indeed, the sheer vastness of the climate problem has been a boon to defendants. “If I were the fossil-fuel company,” says William Ruskin, who has spent his career defending large companies in environmental litigation, “I’d open this up as broadly as possible. I’d talk about the industrial revolution. I would basically create a historical tableau and put civilization on trial.”
For plaintiffs in the new wave of cases, however, such defenses represent a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the lawsuits are claiming but also of what the law is capable of handling. Kate Sears is a supervisor of Marin County, which is suing to recoup the costs of combating more extreme and more persistent flooding; she is also a lawyer and was part of California’s suit against banks for deceptive mortgage practice that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, which resulted in the state’s receiving a multibillion-dollar settlement in 2012. “These are accepted and established and sort of tried-and-true claims in state courts,” Sears says. “We’re not trying to create new law here,” adding, “We’re just trying to get damages for injuries caused.” Last year a federal judge agreed, sending the case, now joined with others filed by California cities and counties, back to the court. Vic Sher, whose firm is handling that case as well as suits brought by Baltimore and Rhode Island, says that the lawsuits pose a simple question: “Should those costs be paid for by the taxpayers or by the companies who knew what they were doing and caused the impacts?”
San Francisco, New York and Oakland are all appealing the federal dismissals of their cases, and the two sides continue to wrangle over where the suits belong. In an amicus brief in the New York case, eight states and the District of Columbia argued that the refusal to hear the lawsuit in state court “would lead to the extraordinary conclusion that no law at all applies to the environmental harms caused by defendants’ allegedly tortious activities.” In another brief in the San Francisco and Oakland case, a group of Democratic United States senators noted that fossil-fuel companies’ insistence that curbing climate change is the responsibility of the legislative and executive branches seemed to be in conflict with the same companies’ past efforts to prevent those branches from actually curbing emissions. “It becomes apparent,” the senators wrote, “that Defendants’ real position is that no one should address climate change, the cataclysmic effects it is already having and particularly the real injuries that Defendants have proximately caused.”

The city of Huaraz in the Peruvian Andes. Felipe Fittipaldi for The New York Times

If courts are persuaded to allow any of the United States cases to follow Luciano Lliuya’s to the evidentiary phase and onward to a full hearing, they will still have to find satisfactory answers to a long list of difficult questions. Where on the chain of causality — from coal extraction to power generation, for example — does responsibility lie? How do we put a dollar amount on the degree of liability? How do we account for nonclimate variables, such as whether a city magnified its exposure to damages from wildfire or rising seas by permitting development in risky places? How should other contributors to climate change, from deforestation to population growth, be considered?
Defendants know they benefit from complicating the question of fault. They could theoretically seek to name co-defendants — the auto industry, perhaps, or chemical refineries or cement manufacturers — that they argue should shoulder or share in the blame. Chevron filed a third-party complaint to include Equinor, the Norwegian state oil company, as a fellow defendant in the cases brought by California cities and counties. And when New York City filed suit against BP and others, the companies responded that the city, because of its use of the oil industry’s products in its own police cars and garbage trucks and so on, shouldn’t be able to sue because it had what’s known as “unclean hands.” If everyone is at fault, the argument goes, no one can be held responsible — or, if courts decide they can be, it will create a legal free-for-all, “the war of everybody against everybody” that RWE’s spokesman described.
It might be good political theater to “name John and Jane Does One through Eight Billion,” says Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, who has written amicus briefs in support of the new suits. But if “companies are arguing that they, individually, are too small to be held legally responsible, it would be absurd to think that an individual human being would be responsible enough to haul into court.” Complicity is not the same as liability.
Proponents of lawsuits against fossil-fuel companies have studied the cases against tobacco companies carefully. For decades, the suits failed by the hundreds as tobacco companies argued that ultimate responsibility fell not on them but on the people who chose to use their products — an argument akin to oil companies contending that they can’t be held responsible for what comes out of consumers’ tail pipes. The tide began to turn against the tobacco industry once subpoenaed documents showed a longstanding conspiracy to cover up the harms of smoking. But the parallels aren’t perfect. Unlike tobacco, energy companies have argued, the existence of the fossil-fuel economy has provided considerable advantages to society. If we had understood the perils of climate change sooner, would we have stopped driving cars or using electricity from polluting sources? Most likely not, at least not on an individual level. So plaintiffs offer a different narrative: That companies actively prevented the development of alternative energy sources and the regulation of carbon-intensive ones, thus politically and economically propping up a polluting system. “It’s incorrect to say that there’s a strong public demand for fossil fuels,” Sher, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, told me. “What we have is a desire for energy.” In February, at a hearing in Rhode Island’s lawsuit against 21 oil and gas companies, Sher argued that “emissions magnify the harm, but the tort is the deception.”
Lawsuits themselves have sometimes led to novel attempts at untangling the Gordian knot of responsibility. Settling the tobacco lawsuits eventually involved attorneys general from 46 states, the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories, more than $125 billion and dozens of companies — all but four of which asked to sign on after a settlement was reached. The Superfund law of 1980 imposes strict, retroactive liability on companies that create hazardous pollution and holds that any companies with even potential responsibility may be held liable for the entire cleanup of a site. Some observers imagine a future in which fossil-fuel companies support carbon regulation because it includes a provision shielding them from a morass of liability. Others point to disgorgement, a legal remedy most associated with securities fraud that compels surrendering profits gained through wrongful acts. Still other scenarios include companies’ offloading liability onto shell corporations or lawsuits continuing to lead nowhere, with climate change remaining a problem that is too large to litigate. Or the law may one day come to see things as straightforwardly as Luciano Lliuya does. “They have polluted,” he said, “and now there are consequences. They have to be responsible.”

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One morning in Huaraz I woke up to the sound of tubas, part of an early celebration of carnival. People from the countryside streamed into the city, carrying enormous crosses decorated with leaves and flowers, and the streets filled with people dancing, food stalls selling fried guinea pigs and the cacophony of more brass bands than might reasonably be expected from the region’s population. As people swayed to the music, passing bottles of beer, the guardians of Lake Palcacocha were by the radio up at their cold hut, filing their latest report about the safety of the dancers below.
Luciano Lliuya also missed the day’s festivities. He was at a meeting in Llupa, the small village above Huaraz where he and Lidia raise their crops. The community was debating whether to share its water source with a neighboring village, whose drinking water, Luciano Lliuya explained, came from a stream that was becoming polluted. “The children have been getting sick,” he said. The water had become contaminated by another of climate change’s lesser-known impacts: what’s called acid rock drainage, which occurs when melting glaciers expose sulfur-bearing minerals to air and water, creating sulfuric acid. Like GLOFs, it’s only the beginning of the problems that the people of Peru will face as glaciers melt. The country has depended on consistent runoff from its rapidly disappearing ice to irrigate its fields, to run its power plants and to support the growth of Lima, a city of almost 10 million, in a desert. After a long debate, the people of Llupa agreed to share their water. It was impossible to say no to their neighbors, though they knew it would make the coming dry season even harder.
In Huaraz, above the street party, the sky darkened. Lightning flashed, but the thunder was inaudible over the noise of the crowd. The brass bands kept playing as the rain began to fall.

Links

• Climate Accountability Institute
• Legal Protections Urged As Science Gears Up To Aid Great Barrier Reef
• Environmental Groups To Sue Shell Over Climate Change
• Climate Change: Top Lawyer Says Councils May Soon Be Liable For Climate Damage
• Environmental Groups Take France To Court Over Climate Change Inaction
• Trump’s Climate Policies Face 6 Big Legal Battles This Year
• Support Is Surging For Teens’ Climate Change Lawsuit
• Climate Change In Court
• Climate Change-Related Litigation Was Once Seen As A Joke, But It Could Soon Become Business Reality
• These Residents Stopped A Coal Mine, Made History And Sent Ripples Through Boardrooms Around The World
• David Leonhardt on the economics of climate change.
• One storied American institution is ready for the coming climate chaos: the Pinkertons.
• Wall Street is hedging against the apocalypse.