11/12/2019

(AU) No More Room For Excuses On Climate

AFR - Ben Potter

Kenneth Hayne's blunt warning to company directors will register: directors can’t hide behind confused politics and “culture wars” to evade their duties to act on climate change because the law and the science are clear.


The message of Kenneth Hayne’s dramatic intervention in the climate debate is clear.
Company directors can no longer hide behind flaky excuses – such as the difficulty of shifting fossil fuel-heavy industries to clean energy, the lack of political consensus or an imaginary lack of scientific  consensus – for failing  to take account of climate risks and failing to tell investors what steps they are taking to reduce those risks.
Hayne pointedly attributes these bad habits to a state of “learned helplessness” – directors convincing themselves that it’s all too hard or that Australia’s small economy can’t shift the dial on a global problem – and “entrenched short-termism”.
He doesn’t single any company out, but examples abound. On Friday, Washington H Soul chairman Robert Milner shut down the annual meeting to duck questions on the climate risks facing the company’s coal mining subsidiary New Hope Corp.
Hayne’s blunt speaking and national profile ... will ensure the remarks reach a wide audience. Directors will sit up and take notice.
Last week, BlueScope Steel chief Mark Vasella declared there was no commercially viable alternative to using coking coal to make primary steel, focusing on the short term when he should have declared that BlueScope would embrace new low carbon steelmaking technologies being developed in Europe as soon as they became viable.
Rio Tinto and Fortescue Mining have made excuses for not matching BHP and Vale’s pledge to set goals or targets for customers’ carbon emissions, known as scope 3, as well as their own scope 1 and 2 emissions (though Rio is working with China's largest steelmaker on emissions reductions).
Hayne’s message is shared by a broad group of senior financial regulators, investors, bankers, top federal public servants, insurers and lawyers with whom he attended a business roundtable on climate risks organised by the Centre for Policy Development two weeks ago, and a similar event in February.
But Hayne’s blunt speaking and national profile as a former royal commissioner and High Court judge will ensure the remarks reach a wide audience. Directors will sit up and take notice.
Conclusions from the roundtable, prepared by the CPD and not signed off by participants, say directors can no longer afford to take action in their own sweet time because climate risks are “ratcheting” and the obligation to counter them is mounting.
The situation is especially hazardous for Australian businesses which are “at increasing risk of retaliatory action from other countries because of a perceived view that Australia is not pulling its weight when it comes to reducing emissions”.
Alcoa's plan to shut high-cost, high-emissions smelters such as Portland is one example.
There is a template for reporting climate risks – the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure – but compliance is patchy and insufficient.
Look no further than Whitehaven Coal or New Hope’s “with one leap he was free” reporting, which assumes rapid, long-term growth in thermal coal consumption in Southeast Asia.
TCFD reporting will eventually become mandatory, and directors will need to rigorously comply as part of their efforts to “pull forward the transition” to a zero carbon real economy.

The law and science are clear
Conclusions from the roundtable note that collaboration between the private sector and government “is happening globally ... but must also happen domestically” and helpfully suggests that this “could be co-ordinated by a central Commonwealth government department”. If only we had such a department!
Hayne’s final point is that directors can’t hide behind confused politics and “culture wars” to evade their duties to act on climate change, because the law and the science are clear.
They must recognise the nature and extent of their climate risks and the speed at which change must be made, develop a strategic plan and “report about what they have done, are doing and will do in response”.
The choice for the board is between “responding or having a response thrust upon the company”.
And the kicker? Look at the financial losses of banks whose boards put profit before risks that they mistakenly thought were “non-financial”.

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The World Has Reacted To Australia Being Swallowed By Flames

NEWS.com.au - Natalie Brown | Adrianna Zappavigna

The world has watched in horror as bushfires continue on their war path through Australia, saying the nation is “choking” as it burns.
Smoke haze from bushfires in New South Wales blankets the CBD in Sydney, Friday, December 6, 2019. Picture: AAP Image/Bianca De Marchi. Source: AAP


Media outlets around the world continue to react to the dozens of blazes burning across the country with the New York Times taking aim at Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
With 96 bush and grass fires still burning in NSW - 47 of which are not contained - photos of Sydney’s sepia-toned sky and blood red sun continue to dominate social media feeds.
Global publications and angered readers have shown no mercy, blaming the Australian government and their failure to address the current climate crisis while calling the nation “the indirect architect of its own demise”.
In the midst of loss and tragedy for many Australian families, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s leadership has been harshly spotlighted by international media. The thick grey smoke that has blanketed the city’s skyline and coast for days looks “as if the country were being devoured by a chemical reaction”, award-winning novelist Anna Funder described in The New York Times, writing that the failure of the government to acknowledge the current climate crisis “is literally choking our children”.
“The response has been to double down on denialism,” director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, David Schlosberg, told the publication.

The New York Times said that Sydney was choking as Australia burned. Source: Supplied
The author of the Times piece wrote that the government, in refusing to address the threat of climate change, is “favouring the country’s powerful fossil fuel industry over its largest city, as well as the rural areas where fires have already destroyed hundreds of homes”. As the New York Times wrote, the Prime Minister has avoided addressing his inaction on climate change and instead, “he recommended downloading an app that tracks the bush fires”.
The article was flooded with angry Twitter comments, from Australian and international users who couldn’t contain their frustration.
“I would like an app that gives instant polling so the Government can see what we think of them,” wrote one reader.
Another added, “We feel you, signed California.”
Many have even begun drawing links between the Australian fires and those in California, highlighting a disparity in world coverage.
Readers of The Guardian have echoed the sentiment, with one responding to footage of the NSW “megafire” with: “Oh look. Scott Morrison’s climate policy in glorious technicolour” and another saying, “This looks like hell.”
“Here we are in the worst bushfire season we’ve ever seen, the biggest drought we’ve ever had, Sydney surrounded by smoke, and we’ve not heard a boo out of a politician addressing climate change,” climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kilpatrick told the British publication.
“They’re burying their heads in the sand while the world is literally burning around them and that’s the scary thing. It’s only going to get worse.”
The Guardian's coverage of the bushfire crisis. Source: Supplied


The Guardian has reported Australia is 'literally' burning. Source: Supplied
Asian publications like the Straits Times and South China Morning Post have written extensively about Sydney’s poor air quality, drawing comparisons between the city and Shanghai.
“The Australian city of Sydney is world famous for its shimmering harbour and clear blue skies,” the Straits Times wrote.
“Not this summer.”

The Straits Times has compared Sydney's air quality to Shanghai's. Source: Supplied
According to health officials, the thick smoke haze has led to a 25 per cent increase in people presenting in emergency departments for asthma and breathing problems.
“Desperately sad,” commented one reader.
“The ‘lucky country’ no more.” America’s ABC News shared footage of Sydney’s hazy conditions, prompting angry reactions from followers, who demanded that the government take responsibility.
CNN documented the nation’s tragic transformation - from blue skies to shades of grey - in a before and after comparison piece. The photos painted a grim picture of the “longest and most widespread” period of air pollution NSW has ever seen. Desperate for people to understand a whole country is burning, a man posting under the name Nigel Lake on Twitter shared a stirring poem dedicated to our scorched country. The prose was titled “How good are 90 bushfires?!” - a play on the climax of ScoMo’s victory speech in which he declared ‘How good is Australia!’
“Brilliant!!! Can’t stop crying and mourning for our beautiful land,” said one reader.
In a sea of images being posted online - many showing the devastation of the fires and the wall of flames our fire crews are up against - one furious Twitter user wrote, “I don’t want the Prime Minister’s thoughts and prayers.” As one nation’s climate crisis burns bright, many have pointed to the potential damage caused in surrounding nations. As ash rained down on New Zealand’s glaciers - even turning some pink - many questioned whether the heat from ongoing fires would see “one climate disaster accelerate another”. Former Pime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s words hit home, as he shared a photo of a smog-covered city on a flight back home. “I have flown back into Sydney many times but never to a sight like this,” he shared on Instagram.
“The reality of climate change - hotter and drier means more fires.”
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(AU) 'National Security Issue': Turnbull tells Q&A Morrison Must Step Up Response To Bushfire Crisis

The Guardian - 

‘This is an issue that needs leadership,’ Malcolm Turnbull tells ABC panel show
Malcolm Turnbull on Q&A on Monday. He said Australia’s emergency response structure was no longer fit for purpose as bushfires worsened. Photograph: ABC TV


Malcolm Turnbull has called on Scott Morrison to step up his response to catastrophic bushfires fuelled by climate change, declaring that emergency management in Australia needs to be restructured because the threat is now a “national security issue”.
Before a speech to an energy conference on Tuesday where he is expected to lament that climate change has become “a political battlefield”, Turnbull told the ABC on Monday night the Morrison government had to provide hands-on leadership and coordinate a national response to a bushfire emergency, which has claimed six lives and destroyed more than 680 homes, and is expected to intensify in coming days as summer temperatures breach 40C.
“When Australians’ lives are at risk, when they are being threatened, when their families and their homes and their crops and properties and everything they hold dear is being put at threat – that’s a national security issue,” Turnbull said on Monday night.
“If it isn’t a national security issue, what is? The national government has to provide leadership. Obviously the federal government can’t do everything but the federal government’s job is to lead and this is an issue that needs leadership.”
The former prime minister said the management of bushfires in Australia was traditionally a matter for state and local governments, with the fire events managed by a largely volunteer workforce.
While paying tribute to the fire brigades working around the clock to manage the emergency, Turnbull said the current structure was no longer fit for purpose in an environment where global warming fundamentally changed the risk assessments; where the fires would get worse. “We can’t kid ourselves that we’re not going to face more and hotter fires. That’s the consequence of global warming.
“That is what you get if you have a hotter and drier climate, more fires and hotter fires. So we have to review the measures we’ve got to defend ourselves against fires and upgrade and improve them, because the challenge has changed. You can’t keep on responding in the same way you have in the past.”
Turnbull said Australians needed to understand the seriousness of the fires and the consequences of the changed environment. “These fires can be 1,000C. They will melt everything except steel.”
He recounted his experiences visiting the scene of the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria a decade ago. “We saw cars which had been caught up in the fire which people had been in, and there was nothing left except the steel,” he said. “The glass had melted and flowed down over the car, over what was left of the dashboard and the floor.
“The aluminium and the wheels had melted and it was left run out on the ground. That is what our firefighters and our communities in rural areas and areas around our cities are facing.”
Turnbull said when he was prime minister, and there were truck attacks launched in Europe by terrorists, he had thought it prudent to bring together state leaders, state police, local government and the private sector to develop a crowded places counterterrorism strategy to try to prevent copycat events in this country.
He said a similar adaptation was required for disaster management. “We can’t kid ourselves that we’re not going to face more and hotter fires. That’s the consequence of global warming.”
Turnbull continued to argue on Monday night, as he did in a broad-ranging interview with Guardian Australia late last month, that the Coalition struggled with the reality of climate change. He said the government roiled “because there is a group within the Liberal party and the National party who deny the reality of climate change”.
Asked if Morrison and other ministers had declined until recently to meet with a vocal group of retired fire chiefs because they styled themselves Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, Turnbull said he wasn’t there to “run the ruler over Scott Morrison’s appointments diary”. He said: “Whether you have the meeting or not, the bottom line is you’ve got to address the issue.
“We’ve got all the tools. What the problem is that people are treating, on the right, they are treating what should be a question of physics and science and economics and engineering as though it were an issue of religion and belief. And it’s nuts.”
The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, appearing on the same program, echoed Turnbull’s critique. Albanese said he had written to Morrison three weeks ago calling for a national response. “He wrote back to me saying it wasn’t required, and that everything was in hand, and quite clearly it’s not.”
Albanese said greater coordination was needed because wildfires like the ones Australia is now experiencing did not recognise state boundaries. “At the moment, there is a single fire that is burning from the Hawkesbury right up to Singleton, a single fire.
“This is connected with climate change. To say that is to not dismiss the need to deal with the immediate, which is keeping people safe, keeping property safe, the immediate response, but we need to accept that we need adaptation, we need mitigation and we also need a long-term plan to deal with climate change, because you have areas that are burning that have not burnt before, because they’re drier, because of what’s been happening on this continent in recent times – this is an emergency. It’s affecting our security.”
Labor has called for an urgent Council of Australian Governments meeting to ensure Australia has the water-bombing aircraft, volunteer incentives and other measures necessary for the future but, speaking to the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, the government’s leader in the Senate, Mathias Cormann, said the government was already responding as needed.
“If and when additional support is required, then, of course, we would consider that, but right now as we speak, you know, we obviously planned for this bushfire season and we have put significant measures in place and we have put significant measures in place for the future too, to better address, you know, these sort of emergencies into the future,” Cormann said.
Turnbull on Tuesday will address an energy conference in Sydney, and is expected to argue that southern Australia will face more heatwaves, fires, floods and droughts in the coming decades, with “a huge impact on our water and food security, ecosystems, transport, health and tourism”.
“We in Australia, more than many if not most countries, are facing the actual lived experience of climate change, and yet the debate, particularly in Australia, is stuck – with many, particularly on the right of politics and the rightwing political media, refusing to acknowledge the science, instead stubbornly – and blindly – holding to their political positions.”

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