Lethal Heating: 10/17/19

17/10/2019

Companies Expect Climate Change To Cost Them $1 Trillion In 5 Years

WIRED - Sara Harrison

Many corporations see climate change posing a significant threat to their business within the decade, according to a new report.

In 2018 the US sustained $91 billion in damages from climate-related disasters, including tropical cyclones, severe storms, inland floods, droughts, and wildfires. Scott Olson/Getty Images

In January, climate change claimed its first corporate victim. Facing billions in liabilities after contributing to some of California’s deadliest and most devastating wildfires, PG&E filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This spring, flooding in the Midwest ruined fields, grain silos, and infrastructure. The agriculture conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland reported that the floods would cost it between $50 and $60 million in the first quarter of the year.

The costs of a disturbed climate are becoming increasingly burdensome and apparent. In 2018 the US sustained $91 billion in damages from climate-related disasters, including tropical cyclones, severe storms, inland floods, droughts, and wildfires.
“Climate change is no longer a distant threat but something that is impacting economies now,” says Bruno Sarda, president of CDP North America, a nonprofit that encourages companies to report how climate change might affect them.
A growing number of companies are recognizing that fact and are now publicly reporting the effects of climate change on their businesses. A new report published Tuesday by CDP shows that 215 of the world’s biggest companies, including giants like Apple, JPMorgan Chase, Nestlé, and 3M, see climate change as a threat likely to affect their business within the next five years, with a cumulative cost of a trillion dollars.
Companies identified a range of physical risks, such as the impact of flooding or rising sea levels on distribution centers and warehouses. They also enumerated the costs of transitioning to a lower-carbon, more climate-ravaged world, including updating facilities to withstand stronger storms or use less water, and complying with potential policies that would likely raise the cost of fossil fuels. Companies also recognized an image issue. In the report, Google's parent company, Alphabet, writes, “Not addressing climate change risks and impacts head on could result in a reduced demand for our goods and services because of negative reputation impact.”CDP also found, however, that companies saw some opportunities in adapting to climate change.
The report found that companies estimated opportunities related to climate change could bring in $2.1 trillion. Most companies pegged those benefits to the growth of low-emissions products and the creation of new products, such as new fuel sources or energy-efficient cars, which might appeal to a customer base that is increasingly climate-conscious.The CDP report is part of a growing effort to encourage companies to be open about how climate change will affect their financial well being.
In 2015 the Financial Stability Board, an international organization that studies the global financial system, formed the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures (TCFD). Led by Michael Bloomberg, the Task Force has released recommendations to help companies accurately assess and disclose their climate-related risks. The TCFD also wants to help standardize how companies think about and report those risks. Similarly, a coalition of investment groups including State Street Global Advisors, BlackRock, and Vanguard are backing the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, which helps companies report accurately on these issues.
“US companies are definitely putting out more information on how they are addressing climate change. They don’t look at an election cycle. They address this from a shareholder perspective,” says Rakhi Kumar, who leads State Street Global Advisors’ efforts on environmental investment. She says companies are hearing from investors who are worried. “That’s what they are reacting and responding to.”
Disclosure is meant to work like an x-ray, allowing customers and investors to look inside a company, see where it is vulnerable, and help it improve. By making their predictions and analyses public, companies can also learn from each other about how to become more resilient in the face of climate threats.
“Climate change is right now a very much under-priced risk in financial disclosures,” says Sarda, who believes both companies and investors need to prioritize climate-related accounting more. He suggests that better disclosure could fundamentally transform the markets. It could change how publicly traded companies are valued. Those that are more prepared or resilient would be viewed as better investments than their more vulnerable counterparts.Sarda is confident that companies can do a lot to help combat climate change, but he and Kumar say governments also play an important role in enacting policies that will stabilize markets.
“Putting a price on carbon or even a better price on water or on pollution in general is something that would create a lot of certainty for business,” says Sarda. But that’s unlikely in the current moment, with the Trump administration rolling back federal efforts to combat climate change. Last week, The New York Times reported that US Geological Survey director James Reilly ordered the agency to stop modeling climate scenarios that predict the effects of climate change beyond 2040.
Aside from a carbon tax, Sarda suggests governments could also help standardize climate disclosures the same way they standardize traditional financial reporting, guiding companies on how to assess and evaluate potential risks.
Right now, these disclosures are also somewhat limited in that they are self-assessments and aren’t subject to any in-depth, formal audit. So far, companies’ reporting practices have also varied a lot.
Some of that variation can be attributed to the nature of the risks themselves. Companies can pretty accurately predict how much it will cost to close down a factory for two weeks because of flooding, for example. But some risks are harder to calculate. How much will changing weather patterns in the midwest alter crop yields or harm pollinators? And how will that ultimately figure into the bottom line?
Companies also have blind spots. A corporation might do a good job of assessing risks to its own physical infrastructure, but might not apply that same scrutiny to its supply chain. Kumar also notes that companies typically only plan for the short term, while investors are on the lookout for future complications. Those different time lines create a “impasse” between companies and their investors. Kumar gives the example of coal energy plants, which may be profitable in the short term but which represent a long term risk that investors want “phased out.”
Christopher Wright, a professor at the University of Sydney who has written about corporate responses to climate change, says that while efforts like the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures have been garnering lots of attention, some of the predictions that companies make are “somewhat fanciful.”
Many companies model what the world will look like if our climate warms by 3 or even 4 degrees Celsius. But, Wright argues, warming of that magnitude would fundamentally disrupt society, not just supply chains. Those costs can’t be modeled so easily. “What of course is missing from all of this is a serious focus on implementing dramatic emissions reduction now!” he wrote in an email.The next step, says Sarda, is for investors and customers to examine the data and start demanding accountability from companies. He says that in order to make real progress confronting climate change, we can’t wait for government-sponsored policies and regulations. For things to truly change, he says, business needs to play a key role too.

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Revealed: The 20 Firms Behind A Third Of All Carbon Emissions

The Guardian - Matthew Taylor | Jonathan Watts

New data shows how fossil fuel companies have driven climate crisis despite industry knowing dangers

Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline

Why we need political action to tackle the oil, coal and gas companies - video explainer

Chevron’s Kern River oil field in Bakersfield, California. Photograph: Guardian Design

The Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.
New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the industry’s devastating impact on the planet.
The analysis, by Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, the world’s leading authority on big oil’s role in the escalating climate emergency, evaluates what the global corporations have extracted from the ground, and the subsequent emissions these fossil fuels are responsible for since 1965 – the point at which experts say the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by both industry leaders and politicians.
The top 20 companies on the list have contributed to 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide, totalling 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO₂e) since 1965.
Those identified range from investor-owned firms – household names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell – to state-owned companies including Saudi Aramco and Gazprom.
Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.

Why we need political action to tackle the oil, coal and gas companies - video explainer
Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, said the findings shone a light on the role of fossil fuel companies and called on politicians at the forthcoming climate talks in Chile in December to take urgent measures to rein in their activities.

The top 20 companies have contributed to 480bn tonnes

of carbon dioxide equivalent since 1965

Billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent

“The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven and a half billion people must pay the price – in the form of a degraded planet – so that a couple of dozen polluting interests can continue to make record profits. It is a great moral failing of our political system that we have allowed this to happen.”
The global polluters list uses company-reported annual production of oil, natural gas, and coal and then calculates how much of the carbon and methane in the produced fuels is emitted to the atmosphere throughout the supply chain, from extraction to end use.
It found that 90% of the emissions attributed to the top 20 climate culprits was from use of their products, such as petrol, jet fuel, natural gas, and thermal coal. One-tenth came from extracting, refining, and delivering the finished fuels.
The Guardian approached the 20 companies named in the polluters list. Eight of them have replied. Some argued that they were not directly responsible for how the oil, gas or coal they extracted were used by consumers. Several disputed claims that the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known as far back as the late 1950s or that the industry collectively had worked to delay action.
Most explicitly said they accepted the climate science and some claimed to support the targets set out in the Paris agreement to reduce emissions and keep global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
All pointed out efforts they were making to invest in renewable or low carbon energy sources and said fossil fuel companies had an important role to play in addressing the climate crisis. PetroChina said it was a separate company from its predecessor, China National Petroleum, so had no influence over, or responsibility for, its historical emissions. The companies’ replies can be read in full here.

The top 20 companies have contributed to 35%
of all carbon dioxide and methane since 1965
Billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent

Guardian graphic | Source: Richard Heede, Climate Accountability Institute

The latest study builds on previous work by Heede and his team that has looked at the historical role of fossil fuel companies in the escalating climate crisis.The impact of emissions from coal, oil and gas produced by fossil fuel companies has been huge. According to research published in 2017 by Peter Frumhoff at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US and colleagues, CO₂ and methane emissions from the 90 biggest industrial carbon producers were responsible for almost half the rise in global temperature and close to a third of the sea level rise between 1880 and 2010. The scientists said such work furthered the “consideration of [companies’] historical responsibilities for climate change”.
Heede said: “These companies and their products are substantially responsible for the climate emergency, have collectively delayed national and global action for decades, and can no longer hide behind the smokescreen that consumers are the responsible parties.
“Oil, gas, and coal executives derail progress and offer platitudes when their vast capital, technical expertise, and moral obligation should enable rather than thwart the shift to a low-carbon future.”
Heede said 1965 was chosen as the start point for this new data because recent research had revealed that by that stage the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by industry leaders and politicians, particularly in the US.
In November 1965, the president, Lyndon Johnson, released a report authored by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which set out the
likely impact of continued fossil fuel production on global heating.
In the same year, the president of the American Petroleum Institute told its annual gathering: “One of the most important predictions of the [president’s report] is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at such a rate by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.”

The leading state-owned polluter, Saudi Aramco, is behind 4.38%
of all carbon dioxide and methane since 1965
Billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent

Guardian graphic | Source: Richard Heede, Climate Accountability Institute

Heede added: “Leading companies and industry associations were aware of, or wilfully ignored, the threat of climate change from continued use of their products since the late 1950s.”
The research aims to hold to account those companies most responsible for carbon emissions, and shift public and political debate away from a focus just on individual responsibility. It follows a warning from the UN in 2018 that the world has just 12 years to avoid the worst consequences of runaway global heating and restrict temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

An activist outside the Houses of Parliament in London, 2015. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty

The study shows that many of the worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.
A study earlier this year found that the largest five stock-market-listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m each year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change.
Heede said the companies had a “significant moral, financial, and legal responsibility for the climate crisis, and a commensurate burden to help address the problem”.
He added: “Even though global consumers from individuals to corporations are the ultimate emitters of carbon dioxide, the Climate Accountability Institute focuses its work on the fossil fuel companies that, in our view, have their collective hand on the throttle and the tiller determining the rate of carbon emissions and the shift to non-carbon fuels.”

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Proving Climate Change: The Keeling Curve - AUDIO

BBC - Louise Hidalgo

Thick black smoke blowing out of an industrial chimney. Credit: John Giles/PA

How a young American scientist began the work that would show how our climate is changing. His name was Charles Keeling and he meticulously recorded levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. His wife Louise and son Ralph spoke to Louise Hidalgo about him in 2013.

BBC WITNESS HISTORY
Proving Climate Change: The Keeling Curve
8m 59sec

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