Lethal Heating: May 2020

31/05/2020

(AU) Bushfire Hearings Spotlight Climate Change

Saturday Paper - Mike Seccombe

Experts called during the opening week of the bushfires royal commission warned the Black Summer will not be an isolated event.

Ian Livingston and his son Sydney, 6, among the ruins of their family home, lost to the New Year’s Day bushfires in Cobargo. Credit: Brook Mitchell / Getty Images

It was February 18, and Scott Morrison was being pressed for government action in response to a growing emergency.

The prime minister justified his refusal to act with these words: “No one can tell me that going down that path won’t cost jobs.”

The emergency at hand was not the coronavirus; Australia was almost two weeks away from recording its first death from Covid-19.

The focus then was the summer of bushfires and the role climate change had played in the devastation. Morrison had been asked why his government, unlike many others around the world, and all Australian states and territories, had refused to commit to a target of net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

His answer – that it would cost jobs and money – rang hollow in light of the lived, breathed experience of Australians during the summer. Climate change already was costing jobs, thousands of them. And vast sums of money. And lives.

But it looks even more hollow now, not least because his inertia in the face of that crisis so sharply contrasted with his urgency on the next.

Within a month of dismissing the need for an emissions target, Morrison and his emergency cabinet of state and territory leaders responded to the threat posed by Covid-19 with a national lockdown.

While the decisive action was driven by the states, Morrison went along, enthusiastically serving as chief marketer for their collective decision. At no point did he cavil on the basis that jobs might be lost. Instead, he followed the advice of the experts and did what had to be done in order to avoid a greater catastrophe.

Then this week, the bushfires royal commission – more properly, the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements – began its public hearings. And the evidence given by a succession of expert witnesses served to remind us there was a bigger crisis that preceded Covid-19, one that will persist long after it.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate monitoring, Karl Braganza, gave a PowerPoint presentation filled with alarming graphs and maps, showing the extent to which carbon pollution had altered Australia’s climate, and how much worse things will get in the absence of action.

Already, he told the commission, the fire season is starting three months earlier in much of south-eastern Australia. Fire danger index readings that would typically have occurred at the start of summer in the 1950s are now recorded at the start of spring.

Temperatures are higher, rainfall and humidity lower, soils and vegetation drier, and westerly winds, blowing from the arid centre of the continent, are more frequent.

Indeed, Braganza said, referring to one of his frightening maps, “almost over all of Australia we’re seeing a longer fire season with more fire danger days during that season, and the severity of the worst fire danger days is becoming more severe”.

He was clear: the tragedy of the so-called Black Summer was not a “one-off event”.

“Since the Canberra 2003 fires, every jurisdiction in Australia has seen some really significant fire events … [that] have really challenged what we thought fire weather looked like.”

In the first two decades of this century, there were only four wet years, Braganza said. The 10-year period from 2009 to 2019 was the hottest decade this country had seen, with 2019 the hottest and driest year on record.

Not every coming year will be so bad, of course.

It seems the coming season will be less severe, assuming the good rains so far this year persist as forecast. But the longer-term trends, Braganza said, “probably load the dice towards worse fire seasons in general”.

Karl Braganza and the other experts who followed him – not only climate scientists but also insurers and actuaries whose businesses depend on accurately assessing risk – provided a comprehensive and dark picture of increasing threats from climate change.

They spoke of rising sea levels; more intense cyclones that would strike further south, if less frequently; worse storms and floods; many more days of extreme heat.

Ryan Crompton of Risk Frontiers, an outfit that provides risk-assessment services, including what it calls “catastrophe modelling”, told the commission that between 1900 and 2015, heatwaves were “Australia’s deadliest natural hazard”.

“They account for almost half of the total number and almost five times the number of fatalities than do bushfires,” he said.

The two phenomena – heatwaves and fires – often coincide. Crompton pointed to the example of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, during which 173 people died as a direct result of the fires, while a further 374 deaths were attributed to the preceding heatwave. Melbourne saw three days above 43 degrees the week of that tragic Saturday.

A study undertaken by a team at the Australian National University medical school – published last week in The Lancet Planetary Health – re-examined the causes of more than 1.7 million deaths in Australia between 2006 and 2017 and found that heat was likely to have contributed to at least 37,000 of them.

In the case of last summer’s bushfires, there was another peril, too. Smoke.

Associate Professor Fay Johnston, of the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania, said about 80 per cent of Australians were affected by bushfire smoke at some point during last year’s fire season.

On the basis of analysis carried out by her team, Johnston said, there were 445 “excess deaths” attributable to smoke, along with 3340 admissions to hospital for heart- and lung-related problems and 1373 additional presentations to an emergency department for asthma.

She estimated the cost associated with premature loss of life and admissions to hospitals at $2 billion.

This did not include a range of other health impacts that her team had not modelled, including, among other things, “loss of work time, missing school, needing medications, impacts on diabetes, impacts on ambulance callouts”.

“Covid showed that people’s attitudes and behaviours can change. We had leadership, crafting a sense of who we are and what we should do and how we should act in the interests of ourselves and our communities.”

There is also the cost, unquantifiable in dollar figures, to the mental health of the tens of thousands of people who lost loved ones or homes in the fires.

Professor Lisa Gibbs, of the University of Melbourne, an expert in disaster recovery and community resilience, and child health and wellbeing, told the hearings that advancing climate change introduced a worrying new element for mental health, in that such disasters were “no longer perceived as rare events”.

She expressed concern the perception of a “new reality”, wherein devastating fire seasons keep happening, could undermine the sense of hope that those affected need to get their lives back on track.

The commission was provided with a long list of other costs, too: 3117 homes and 6310 outbuildings destroyed; 89,000 kilometres of fencing and 880 kilometres of roads burnt.

Some $2.2 billion of insurance claims have already been lodged, says the Insurance Council of Australia.

The loss of economic output is “in the order of $3.6 billion”, according to the consultancy group EY. Hundreds of millions in welfare payments have been made by the federal government, hundreds of millions more for clean-up and recovery from state and local authorities. The average cost of removing the debris from one destroyed home is more than $50,000.

There are dollar costs, but there are also intrinsic values that are harder to assess.

How do you value 8.27 million burnt hectares of land, an estimate that doesn’t even include Western Australia and the Northern Territory, when most of it is covered by bush? Or the deaths of a billion native animals?

How do you calculate the impact of habitat loss on 300-odd plant and animal species already considered endangered or threatened, or the many others that were considered “secure” before the fires but now are not?

The entire range of some species was burnt, according to evidence Threatened Species Commissioner Dr Sally Box gave the commission this week. Extinctions could follow, perhaps even the end of species not yet known to science.

It is difficult, of course, to compare the impacts of the Black Summer with those of the coronavirus. The toll of Covid-19 could have been orders of magnitude larger, if swift action wasn’t taken. The chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, says the nation’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has avoided about 14,000 deaths.

But timely action was taken and, as of Thursday, the federal Health Department has recorded 103 Covid-19 fatalities in this country. This is a little more than one-fifth of the number of deaths attributed to the fires – 33 direct and another 445 from smoke.

Yet in response to the health emergency, our leaders were prepared to shut down large sections of our economy, tolerate the loss of maybe a million jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars, and enforce major changes to the way all members of society live and work.

To the question of why our government was prepared to do all this in response to one crisis, while doing so little in response to the greater threat, Professor Warwick McKibbin, economist, specialist in public policy at the ANU’s Crawford School and an expert in both pandemics and climate issues, offers some insight.

With pandemics, he says, the cost of the response always vastly exceeds the cost of the disease itself. It’s par for the course. Even without a government-mandated domestic lockdown, much of the economic loss would have happened anyway as people self-isolated for fear of infection.

“I haven’t got the final numbers yet, but my guess is that about 10 per cent of the lost economic activity – that’s 10 per cent of the total loss – is probably due to government [lockdown],” he says.

The rest was largely attributable to other factors, including the impact on international trade and the spontaneous behavioural change by the populace.

McKibbin cites a real-time case study in the differing responses of two otherwise similar nations: Denmark and Sweden. The former imposed a tight lockdown; the latter didn’t. While the Swedes hoped their response would keep their economy humming, it didn’t.

“The death rate in Sweden is orders of magnitude bigger than Denmark, and the economic costs are about the same,” says McKibbin. “The Swedish central bank is forecasting a contraction in the economy of about 8 per cent.

“So, if all Sweden’s trading partners have a recession, then the chances are they’ll have a recession.”

This is compounded by the fact that in Sweden, even without a mandatory lockdown, many people changed their behaviour.

It is all very interesting but only broadens the question about the differing responses to the two crises from both the government and the community.

McKibbin says one crisis was perceived as being personal and immediate. The threat horizon for the virus was days or weeks; climate change, meanwhile, has loomed for decades.

“We were watching morgues in New York overflowing, watching people dying in the streets in Italy,” McKibbin says. “The impact of the pandemic was already real.”

The virus set down a clear either/or: “If you don’t do anything in Australia, you’re going to get it. If you do something in Australia, you may not get it.”

In relation to climate change, though, the widely held perception is fatalistic – that, regardless of any actions Australia might take, “climate change is going to happen anyway, if nobody else does anything either”.

This sentiment is the subtext of Scott Morrison’s words back in February: why suffer the costs of change, if no benefit will flow?

But there is growing evidence to suggest this is a false narrative.

The Australia Institute recently conducted a meta-analysis in response to claims that an ambitious climate response would “wreck the economy”, combing through 19 reports published in the past five years in peer-reviewed journals, and from academics and government agencies, along with three major Treasury reports from 2008 to 2013.

A number of these went to the electricity sector only, with five modelling a 100 per cent renewable grid. Others looked at the broader economy. Most of the models showed negligible economic cost would be incurred by meeting targets broadly in line with the goal of the Paris climate change agreement. And some showed positive economic gains.

Nonetheless, as McKibbin acknowledges, Australia cannot make much difference to the climate crisis on its own.

But, he says, Australia’s role is bigger than that, as “a laboratory” for the rest of the world when it comes to policy.

“If you do something on climate in Australia … and you demonstrate that a very high carbon economy can end up with a low carbon economy, cheaply, then people will copy your policies. And that can actually totally change the global emissions profile,” he says.

This country has served as such an example to the world many times before.

“We’ve done that when it comes to monetary policy. We’ve done it in fiscal policy with the tariff policy,” says McKibbin. “We’ve done it in health policy, [and] designing our education funding through the HECS scheme. We’ve demonstrated to other countries and they’ve adopted that scheme. And that’s improved the quality of life for everybody.

“So, Australia’s role is not to be the leader because we’re going to make a difference to emissions. It’s because we’re going to demonstrate policy that will make a difference to emissions.”

The question that remains, though, is do we have the will?

The signs from our current federal government are not promising. But it seems the Covid-19 crisis hasn’t distracted people from the climate emergency.

An Essential poll conducted in mid-March, at the height of the coronavirus outbreak in Australia, found 31 per cent of those surveyed were more concerned about climate than they were a year ago, before the fires.

Is it possible, then, that rather than supplanting concern about the climate, the Covid-19 episode has accentuated the popular sense of urgency?

Kate Reynolds, professor of psychology at the ANU, thinks so. Having successfully faced one existential threat, she says, people are more inclined to believe they can deal with another.

“Covid showed us a few things,” she says. “It showed that people’s attitudes and behaviours can change.

“We had leadership, crafting a sense of who we are and what we should do and how we should act in the interests of ourselves and our communities. Call it a social identity, a sense of shared social identity, and a common cause.”

She says that people came to feel in some ways a greater “efficacy”, in the psychological sense: “Things that seemed hard before Covid – in making profound changes in the way we went about our lives – proved possible.”

It will be harder for governments to now make excuses on the basis that change is too big, too costly, too hard.

Reynolds says that as social creatures, humans are motivated to “protect the group, to act in the best interests of the group”.

As civilisation has advanced, that understanding of “the group” has, on the whole, grown more encompassing.

What the coronavirus crisis has shown – and this stands true for the climate crisis, too – is that our conceptualisation of who is part of the group will need to further expand.

For when it comes to the really big issues, there is no immunity to the risk. And no one is safe unless all are.

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(AU) The Climate Crisis Looms As The Coalition Fiddles With Fossil Fuels

The Guardian - Greg Jericho

The government is like a smoker switching to low-tar cigarettes. Its energy policy is just a sop

‘Angus Taylor’s discussion paper is the ... wrong policy at precisely the wrong time.’ Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

We may be dealing with a health crisis, but the climate change crisis has not gone away, nor become any less urgent. In fact, the opposite.

A few conservative commentators have suggested Covid-19 shows what a real crisis looks like compared with, in their opinion, the hyperventilating over climate change.

What bollocks.

NASA estimates that last month was the hottest April on record and the first four months of this year are the second hottest start to a year.

The past seven months have all been 1C or higher than the 1951-1980 average (roughly around 1.3C above the pre-industrial average) – tied with the longest streak set from October 2015 to April 2016. But unlike in 2015 and 2016 the Bureau of Meteorology records we are currently not in El Niño.

That very much suggests the pace of warming is speeding up.

The linear trend of temperatures over the past 60 years suggests we will hit 2C above pre-industrial levels in 50 years; the trend of the past 20 years has it happening in around 30 years, but the trend of the past decade would see us hit that level in 2038 –just 18 years’ time.

In 2018, the IPCC warned we had little time to keep temperatures below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. If the trend of the past decade continues, we’ll hit that temperature in 2025.

And no, the virus has not bought us more time.

A study published this week in Nature Climate Change estimates the annual global drop in emissions due to virus shutdowns will be “comparable to the rates of decrease needed year-on-year over the next decades to limit climate change to a 1.5°C warming”.

That it took forcing people to stop their lives to achieve such cuts highlights just how big the job ahead of us is and how it cannot be done through individual action alone.

Cutting emissions without crippling the economy requires not everyone self-isolating, but changing industries and the very foundations of our economy.

We need to move away from oil, coal and gas to renewable energy.

And so it should be of great concern that the government is using the coronavirus as cover to push fossil fuels.

This week Adam Morton revealed that a manufacturing taskforce, headed by Dow Chemical executive and Saudi Aramco board member Andrew Liveris, is recommending to the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission (itself headed by the current deputy chairman of Strike Energy, Neville Power) that “the Morrison government make sweeping changes to ‘create the market’ for gas and build fossil fuel infrastructure that would operate for decades”.

It comes off the back of Angus Taylor suggesting it is not government policy to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, and the government giving in-principle support to recommendations made by a panel headed by a former CEO of Origin Energy, Grant King, to allow the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation fund projects involving carbon capture and storage.

Taylor also this week released a discussion paper for a “framework to accelerate low emissions technologies”. While suggesting renewables are vital, it essentially pushes for the same energy mixes that were being advocated a decade ago – more gas, the discredited carbon capture, as well as nuclear power.

The government is like a smoker who still thinks switching to low-tar cigarettes is a healthy approach.

It’s the wrong policy at precisely the wrong time.

As Morton has reported, organisations and governments around the world are advocating using economic stimulus measures to push towards a greener economy.

A report released this week by the Australian Conservation Foundation echoed the Grattan Institute’s recent “Start with steel: A practical plan to support carbon workers and cut emissions” report, arguing that we should see the virus as an opportunity to transform our economy and invest in renewable energy.

But no. It is clear the government remains wedded to a fossil-fuel based economy in which its climate change policy is merely a sop rather being designed to deal with a major crisis that is only becoming more urgent.

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(AU) Bushfire Report Warns Climate Change Will Cause More Intense And More Frequent Blazes

The Australian - Ean Higgins

Climate change will increase the duration of the fire season, a report has warned. Picture: Getty Images

Climate change will increase forest fires, making many areas drier and hotter, extending the duration of the fire season and increasing the area and intensity of unplanned forest blazes, a government report has warned.

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences study of forest fires, released on Wednesday, says the changes will reduce the interval between fires and the opportunity for using planned fires to contain the hazard.

ABARES principal forest scientist Steve Read said while climate change would have an impact on most forests one way or another, the bureau had identified “a distinct north-south divide” in the pattern of forest fires.

“Unplanned fires in forests in northern Australia are more frequent and occur over greater areas,” Dr Read said.

“Unplanned fires in forests in southern Australia are less frequent than in northern Australia, but they can be much more intense when they do occur and in some years, such as 2019-20, cover large areas.”

The ABARES study has found that between 2011 and 2016, 55 million hectares, or 41 per cent of Australia’s total 134 million ha of forest, burned one or more times.

LARGE IMAGE

Of the cumulative forest fires over the five years, 96 per cent covered northern Australia, including large areas burnt in multiple years. Of all the fires, 69 per cent were unplanned and 31 per cent were planned.

“The difference between northern and southern Australia is the biggest point to communicate,” Dr Read told The Australian. “The biggest difference is that there is a huge amount of fire every year in the savannah forest right across northern Australia.”

This reflected the regular annual pattern of a wet season when grasses, including more invasive species, grew, followed by a dry season when they burned.

“Fires in northern Australia are driven by fuel load,” Dr Read said. “Climate change in the north will work through, giving you more fuel seasonally every year because of potentially better growing seasons in the wet season when the grass grows.”

In the south, Dr Read said, extensive forest fires were usually produced after a set of dry years.

“The real driver for the fires in 2019-20 was that we had a hot drought — a series of dry years and some heat — and climate change is expected to give you more heat and drier conditions in southern Australia,” he said.

The report says most Australian forests are adapted to fire and can regenerate.

“Fire is an important ecological driver in most Australian forests, whether the tall moist forests of southeastern and southwestern Australia or the woodlands of northern Australia. It influences the nature of entire forest ecosystems,” the report says.

Some tree species specifically require fire to regenerate or establish, it says, such as mountain ash which forms tall forests in Victoria and Tasmania.

In southern Australia, nearly 80 per cent of the fires occurred on nature conservation reserves or multiple-use public forests.

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30/05/2020

Plunging Solar Energy Prices Spell Bright Future For Clean Electricity

Deutsche Welle - Ajit Niranjan

Solar energy has fallen in cost faster than experts predicted. How did electricity from photovoltaic panels get so cheap?

The plummeting cost of turning sunlight into electricity is beating forecasts by decades, speeding the transition toward a clean energy system.

Solar prices have sunk low enough to make photovoltaics the cheapest source of electricity in most of the world — undercutting fossil fuels in price even before counting costs like air pollution and climate change. Averaging about $0.05/kWh, the cost of generating solar electricity has reached lows that six years ago the International Energy Agency did not expect to come until the middle of the century.

When Jenny Chase started working on solar energy in 2006, her job title was head of "improbable technologies" — and she thought solar could only ever provide 1% of the world's electricity mix. "Now, it's already gone north of 2%," said Chase, a solar analyst at energy consultancy BloombergNEF.

The price of renewables like solar matters for climate change. The energy sector is responsible for about three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions — mainly from burning coal, oil and gas — and governments must rapidly decarbonize their electricity grids to meet targets that keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Forecasters have underestimated the rate at which solar capacity would grow

Coal, which has long been considered the cheapest way of generating electricity, is now struggling to compete with energy from sunlight. The competition has grown so fierce that developers risk wasting more than $600 billion (€546 billion) through planned coal projects, according to analysis published in March by think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative.

Within a decade, the authors predict, it will be cheaper everywhere to shut down existing coal-fired plants and build new solar and wind plants in their place. That could shift the energy mix in coal-hungry countries like the US with governments hostile to efforts to halt climate change.

Cheap solar energy has now become a "no-regrets" solution, said Marcelo Mena-Carrasco, a Chilean former environment minister. "It doesn't matter what your presidents think, it's the market that's doing the talking."

Burning coal carries hidden costs like air pollution and climate change

Germany's new Datteln 4 coal-fired power station is likely to be the country's last

Where is solar energy cheapest?

The cheapest solar energy deal in the world was signed last month by Abu Dhabi at $0.0135/kWh, lower than record-breaking deals set earlier this year by Dubai and then Qatar. Analysts say that utilities in these countries benefit from free land and grid connections that lower prices beyond the true cost.

In other regions — even sunny ones — barriers to finance hold back expansion.

In India, where the government is pushing to revive a faltering coal industry, solar developers pay several times more interest on debt than in the Middle East, said Vibhuti Garg, senior energy specialist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

Across Africa, where energy demand is projected to soar as populations and living standards rise, difficulties securing loans have stalled a potentially lucrative solar boom. There are just 5 gigawatts of solar photovoltaic panels installed on the continent — less than a single country like the UK, which receives far fewer hours of sunshine.

"We're talking about a geography that is incredibly blessed with renewable energy," said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, an energy think tank. "What we need now is for our leaders, particularly in Africa, to put everything in place to allow us to harness and take advantage of the renewable energy revolution."

China has installed more solar capacity than any other country in the world

African countries have abundant sunlight but limited access to cheap loans

How did solar energy become so cheap?

The first solar photovoltaic cells were invented by researchers in the US in 1954, brought to markets through subsidies in Germany in the early 2000s, and made competitively cheap on a large scale in China after that. A study published in the journal Energy Policy in 2018 found that 60% of the fall in prices between 1980 and 2012 was because of government policies that stimulated market growth, like feed-in tariffs that pay consumers for unused energy they supply to the grid.

In Germany, which has the most installed solar power per person, such policies triggered investments that, in turn, led to rapid innovations, said David Wedepohl of German solar lobby group BSW. It created incentives for manufacturers to make solar panels and build new factories and machines.

Each time solar capacity has doubled, the total price of solar energy has fallen by about 30%. Analysts call this relationship a learning curve. The more solar plants are deployed, the more the technology comes down in price — though the gains flatten out over time.

Germany's demand for solar power "not only installed a lot of solar, but it catalyzed the learning curve," said Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written a book on how solar energy became cheap. In China, where most of the world's solar panels are now made, production processes were refined further to bring prices down to levels that compete with coal.

Electric cars could help fluctuating energy manage supply

What is the future of solar energy?

In sunny parts of the world, average solar prices are on track to hit $0.01/kWh by 2035, according to analysis by clean energy advocate Ramez Naam in May. "In a purely open market, these incredibly low prices would drive the world's remaining coal plants into bankruptcy, and steal some of the most profitable operating hours even from cheap natural gas plants," he wrote.

But other analysts are less optimistic, questioning whether the learning rate can be applied to the total cost of solar or just the capital costs. Solar price predictions in sunny countries in the next couple of decades range from below $0.01/kWh to $0.025/kWh, which is still well below the cost of running existing coal plants.

Electricity grids must also fix problems of intermittency, said Auke Hoekstra, an electric vehicle researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology. Because skies are darker at night and in the winter, the attractiveness of solar depends on how well an electricity grid can manage demand and store energy.

The price of solar power depends on sunlight, financing and government support

What's more, as renewable energy dominates grids, it lowers electricity prices while running, which erodes revenues for suppliers. This could offset gains in technology costs if better storage or demand solutions are not found, according to a new study published in the journal Renewable Energy.

Still, progress in these fields is also accelerating. Battery technologies, for instance, are making similarly rapid progress to solar, said Nemet, and electric vehicles could be charged at night as a way of spreading out demand. Access to cheap, abundant solar energy "gives us a tool that we didn't have in the past."

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Big Oil Loses Bid To Move California Climate Court Fight

Bloomberg Law - Ellen M. Gilmer | Malathi Nayak

A woman walks along the seawall at Fort Point near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on Dec. 28, 2005. Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

California cities and counties cleared an important hurdle in their legal fight to get major oil companies including BP Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp., and Chevron Corp. to pay tens of billions of dollars to deal with the effects of climate change.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said Tuesday that San Francisco, Oakland, San Mateo County, and other jurisdictions can pursue their lawsuits in state court rather than in a federal venue thought to be more favorable to the energy industry.

The decision doesn’t guarantee the local governments will ultimately prevail, but it paves the way for a full airing of their arguments in state court.

The cities and counties “live another day to put forth their claims and argue their case,” said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

The suits seek to reimburse taxpayers for costs associated with adapting to impacts such as rising sea levels—from building multibillion-dollar sea walls and repairing damage from powerful storms to—perhaps soon—moving whole communities inland.

Lawyers for the cities and counties have long argued that such local infrastructure damage raises classic local-level concerns that belong in state court. Industry lawyers, supported by the Trump administration, have countered that climate change is a global issue, pushing the litigation to a federal jurisdiction.

“We hold that the state-law claim for public nuisance does not arise under federal law,” Judge Sandra S. Ikuta wrote for a three-judge panel on Tuesday, reviving a case from San Francisco and Oakland.

The George W. Bush appointee also penned a related ruling Tuesday that rejected oil companies’ bid to jettison a separate set of climate cases from state to federal court.

More Claims?

The ruling could spur more such claims and influence whether cases in other states are decided under local nuisance statutes, rather than under federal laws cited by courts that threw out similar complaints.

“Venue is really important to the cities” because it allows them to “get to the point of arguing the merits of their case,” Vizcarra said before the ruling. But there’s still “another round of consideration” at the federal district court before the case fully moves forward in state court, she later said.

And cities and counties face an uphill climb on the climate change-linked claims at the heart of the dispute, something state courts haven’t yet grappled with, she said.

Similar disputes over court venues have dominated climate liability cases playing out in Colorado, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, and Hawaii.

“We’re pleased that we can proceed with this case to protect our residents, workers, and businesses from the costs and damage these fossil fuel companies knowingly imposed on our communities,” San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement.

The coalition of local governments involved in the San Mateo case issued a joint statement saying they’re looking forward to proceeding in state court, “where the Californians we represent will have a chance to present the facts about what the defendants knew about the climate change-related dangers their fossil fuel products pose.”

But Chevron spokesman Sean Comey said the lawsuits aim to penalize reliable and “ever cleaner” energy.

“They present substantial issues of national law and policy which makes them inappropriate for state law,” he said in an email. “In whichever forum the cases are ultimately determined, these factually and legally unsupported claims do nothing to sensibly address the significant national economic, legal, and policy issues presented by climate change.”

Reconciling Competing Opinions

Industry groups could push the issue to the Supreme Court, where they’re already seeking review of another appellate decision that allowed a climate case from Baltimore to proceed in state court.

The rulings reconcile competing opinions issued by two federal judges in cases several municipalities filed in 2017.

The appeals court overturned a decision from U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who sided with the industry and dismissed cases brought by San Francisco and Oakland. Tuesday’s ruling sent the case back to federal district court for further proceedings.

The panel affirmed a ruling by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, who permitted cases by San Mateo County, Marin County, Imperial Beach, and others to proceed in state court.

“We conclude that the defendants did not carry their burden of establishing this criteria for removal,” the court wrote in the San Mateo decision. “Because we lack jurisdiction to review other aspects of the remand order, we dismiss the remainder of the appeal.”

Narrow Question

Ama R. Francis, a fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the Ninth Circuit rightly confined its review to a narrow legal question in the San Mateo case: whether the litigation triggered federal court jurisdiction by involving federal government officers.

Industry lawyers had encouraged the court to consider a host of other grounds for placing the case in federal court.

“The Ninth Circuit San Mateo decision protects the critical balance of power between state and federal courts,” said Francis, who co-authored a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the local governments. “This case raises standard state law claims, and belongs in state court.”

‘Abundantly Clear’

Industry advocates, meanwhile, criticized the court’s analysis.

“It makes no sense to spend years of judicial resources on these procedural rulings when it is abundantly clear that this is a policy issue for executive or legislative bodies, not courts,” said Phil Goldberg, special counsel for the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an industry advocacy group.

“In fact,” he said, “today’s ruling underscores why the U.S. Supreme Court should hear the climate tort cases now and resolve them once and for all.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit recently allowed Baltimore to litigate a similar case in state court. Industry attorneys have asked the Supreme Court to reverse that decision.

The cases are Cty. of Oakland v. BP Plc, 9th Cir., No. 18-16663, 5/26/20 and Cty. of San Mateo v. Chevron Corp., 9th Cir., No. 18-15499, 5/26/20.

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Cop26 Climate Talks In Glasgow Will Be Delayed By A Year, UN Confirms

The Guardian - Fiona Harvey

Date moved for Covid-19 travel reasons, but fears raised over delay to green recovery plans

The UK business secretary, Alok Sharma, said that while the focus was on fighting Covid-19, the fight against climate change must not be forgotten. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA

Global talks aimed at staving off the threat of climate breakdown will be delayed by a year to November 2021 because of the coronavirus crisis, the UN has confirmed.

The summit, known as Cop26, which 196 nations are expected to attend, will now take place in Glasgow from November 1 to 12 next year, as reports had anticipated, with the UK government acting as host and president. They were originally set to take place from 9 November this year.

Earlier dates were thought to be too difficult, as travel restrictions may still be in place in some countries next year and finding a new date was further complicated by the scheduling of other major international environmental meetings, including global talks on the biodiversity crisis.

Alok Sharma, UK business secretary and Cop26 president, said: “While we rightly focus on fighting the immediate crisis of the coronavirus, we must not lose sight of the huge challenges of climate change. We are working with our international partners on an ambitious roadmap for global climate action between now and November 2021. Everyone will need to raise their ambitions to tackle climate change.”

Cop26 is the most important international meeting on the climate emergency since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. Under the landmark accord, countries must come forward every five years with revised plans on curbing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris goal of limiting global heating to no more than 2C, and preferably no more than 1.5C.

Current national targets would take the world to at least 3C above pre-industrial levels, scientists warn, so countries are under pressure to come up with more stringent commitments.

According to the timetable, those emission-cutting targets – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – should be put forward this year, even though the meeting itself has been delayed. The UK has not yet submitted its NDC, but has pledged to do so before Cop26.

Many developing countries and civil society groups were supportive of the delay, but called for governments to bring forward plans for a green recovery from the Covid-19 crisis, to set the world on the right track to meet the Paris goals.

Patricia Espinosa, the UN climate chief, also linked the two: “Our efforts to address climate change and Covid-19 are not mutually exclusive. If done right, the recovery from the Covid-19 crisis can steer us to a more inclusive and sustainable path.”

Sonam Wangdi, from the Kingdom of Bhutan, who chairs the Least Developed Countries group at the UN climate talks, said: “The postponement of climate negotiations should not be taken as postponement of climate action. Climate action has been delayed long enough … To focus on recovering from the Covid-19 crisis while ignoring action to address the climate crisis would only lead to more devastation in the future.”

Poor countries are concerned that the damage caused by the coronavirus crisis and the global economic shock will mean less assistance is available to help them reduce carbon emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown.

Janine Felson, Belize’s ambassador to the UN and chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: “Small island developing states are at the brink of economic collapse, with the major drivers of our economies at a standstill. This comes at a time when we are preparing for a volatile hurricane season.”

As well as the Cop26 presidency, the UK will hold the revolving presidency of the G7 group of industrialised countries next year, and Italy – which will co-host Cop26 with the UK – will be president of the G20 group, which includes major emerging economies.

That puts the Cop26 hosts in pole position to steer both sets of discussions towards a green recovery, experts said. Environmental and development groups called on Boris Johnson – who spoke on Thursday at a development conference of the need “to build back better and base our recovery on solid foundations, including a fairer, greener and more resilient global economy” - to take an international lead.

“We need to see countries using their economic recovery packages to accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon world,” said Kat Kramer, global climate lead at the charity Christian Aid. “Boris Johnson needs to show he’s a credible host by ensuring the UK is leading the world with a truly green stimulus.”

“The government now has a short window of opportunity to start delivering on the Paris agreement,” said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK. “What is required is action, not words, starting at home by delivering a climate-proof economy that supports millions of jobs. Next year’s climate summit will only be a success if major economies use this opportunity to build a green recovery.”

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29/05/2020

(AU) 'Some Things Were Out Of Bounds': Fire Chiefs 'Gagged' On Climate Change Warnings To Government, Inquiry Told

Sydney Morning Herald - Mike Foley

Decorated former firefighter and climate action advocate Greg Mullins says current fire chiefs have been effectively gagged from raising the bushfire risks created by global warming with politicians.

Mr Mullins said he had "deep concerns over climate change", which was fuelling "unprecedented" bushfires in evidence to a Senate inquiry into the 2019-20 bushfire season on Wednesday.

NSW RFS crews extinguish a fire that crossed the Monaro Highway, four kilometres north of Bredbo, NSW, in February this year. Credit: AAP

Asked by Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson if he thought "the current serving fire chiefs are gagged in some way", Mr Mullins replied: "yes".

Mr Mullins, a former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner, said when he was in the role "some things were out of bounds and often climate change was one of those issues, even to the point of having to work around it when preparing documents, and I think that is a tragedy".

Greens senator Janet Rice asked Mr Mullins if it was "still the case" that fire chiefs were discouraged from raising the effect of climate change on bushfire risks with politicians.

"I know it's the case," Mr Mullins said. "I’ve had a number of discussions and it's clear."

Mr Mullins had a 39-year career in NSW Fire and Rescue, and was appointed commissioner in 2003. He retired in 2017.

Mr Mullins was representing the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action group, which comprises 33 former fire and emergency service leaders from around the country.

Mr Mullins said he was pressured not to speak out on climate change when he was a public servant.

"We self-censored because we knew what would be acceptable, and what would not, for certain political masters and if you went outside those bounds life could be made very unpleasant for you," he said.

The Emergency Leaders for Climate Action unsuccessfully sought meetings with Prime Minister Scott Morrison in April and again in May last year, ahead of the long 2019-20 summer bushfire season about the looming "catastrophic" fire season.

Significantly less property may be have been lost to the fires if the government had heeded their warnings, and moved to secure lease agreements for an expanded fleet of water bombing aircraft ahead of the most recent fire season, Mr Mullins said.

"These aircraft weren’t available and arrived too late," he said.

A concurrent hearing of the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements heard evidence from NSW’s National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) Blue Mountains Branch Director David Crust fire impacts to the only known stand of ancient and endangered Wollemi Pines left in the wild.

Mr Crust revealed it could be five years before "we've got a really clear idea of ... what the longer term mortality is going to be of individual trees within the population".

NPWS co-ordinated a last ditch aerial and ground firefighting operation last summer to protect the only known stand of the ‘living fossil’ Wollemi Pines, which date back at least 200 million years, from the Gospers Mountain Fire that would go on to scorch much of the Wollemi National Park.

A mere 200 trees cling on in remote, rugged and deep gorges which have been gouged out of the sandstone escarpment.

"In the short term, it looks like the sites are generally okay," Mr Crust told the commission. "Most of the mature trees were impacted by fire, but appear to have survived."

Mr Crust is optimistic even though firefighters couldn't stop the understory burning, because most of the Wollemi Pines' upper canopy is intact. However, there had been "quite a bit of mortality" among the 200 juvenile trees, but since the fires "many of them are actually re-sprouting now so we're just going to have to wait and see what the long-term impacts are and if those individual plants... survive", he said.

Melbourne University ornithologist Rohan Clarke told the commission about the "successful" rescue mission to save the endangered eastern bristlebird as fires bore down on its habitat near the NSW and Victorian border.

About 2000 birds are left in the wild, and just 150 in Victoria. A team of scientists and Victorian Department of Environment staff captured and relocated 15 birds and relocated them to Melbourne Zoo, to be held as an insurance population in case the wild population was wiped out.

Luckily, the fires only licked the edges of the bristlebird' Victorian habitat. Unfortunately, six of the birds dies from a stress-related fungal disease while in captivity. Seven birds have been returned to the wild and two remain at the zoo.

Dr Clarke said fires did hit bristlebird habitat on the NSW side of the border, and "we don't know yet how many of those birds... survived".

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(AU) Australia Stalls On Emissions Target Update As UN Urges Deeper Cuts

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Angus Taylor responds to question from Labor saying Australia is not due to update target until 2025

Australia’s energy and emissions reduction minister has said he does not intend to increase the international climate change commitment this year. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

The Australian government has told parliament it does not intend to increase its climate change commitment before the next major international meeting, and is not due to set a new target until 2025.

The statement was made after the British host of the meeting, Boris Johnson, and United Nations secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, urged all countries to lift their targets to include net zero emissions by 2050, noting 121 nations had already done so.

Labor’s Pat Conroy asked Angus Taylor, the energy and emissions reduction minister, in February whether Australia was due under the Paris agreement to submit a new or updated commitment this year and, if not, when it was expected.

In a written response on May 12, Taylor said the government planned to “recommunicate” its current commitment – known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC) – before a UN climate conference in Glasgow, which has been postponed until next year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Taylor said Australia’s next commitment, including a target for 2035 or 2040, was not due until 2025.

Analyses have found Australia’s commitment – a 26% to 28% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with 2005 levels – is not enough to play its part in meeting the goals of the Paris agreement. The government received advice in 2015 from the Climate Change Authority that its fair share under a meaningful global deal over that time would be a 45% to 63% cut.

Mark Butler, Labor’s climate change and energy spokesman, said the answer showed the Morrison government was not serious about the Paris agreement or protecting Australians from the dangerous impacts of climate change.

“Their climate policy is still centred around funnelling billions of taxpayers dollars to big polluters and they are still arguing for the construction of a new coal-fired power station,” he said.

“If they were serious about action on climate change, they would take the advice of scientists, the international community, experts, industry and business, who have called for a target of net zero emissions by 2050. Having a target would frame policy decisions and give investors confidence.”

In a statement on Monday night, a spokesman for Taylor said the government was working on its “re-communication” of its current commitment. “This will outline the real and meaningful action Australia is taking to reduce emissions. It won’t change our 2030 target, which is set,” he said.

The spokesman said to date only four countries had formally submitted a net zero emissions target to the UN.

The government has promised a long-term emissions reduction strategy, which it says will be released before the Glasgow meeting and build on a technology investment roadmap.

While the prime minister, Scott Morrison, last year agreed at the Pacific Island Forum that Australia’s plans may include commitments and strategies to reach net zero by 2050, Taylor now says that is not the government’s policy.

In response to other questions from Labor, Taylor conceded Australia was expected to emit more between 2021 and 2030 than would be expected to meet its Paris target. He said it was estimated the country would emit 5,169m tonnes of carbon dioxide over that time, when under the target it could emit only between 4,710m and 4,777m tonnes.

He said this did not take into account Australia’s “overachievement against previous targets” – a reference to the government’s controversial plan to count carbon credits from a different climate agreement against its Paris goal – or cuts from policies still being developed, including a promised electric vehicle strategy.

Labor has supports net zero emissions for Australia by 2050, but said it would review its mid-term target – which had been a 45% cut by 2030 – after losing last year’s election.

What the Paris deal says

The Paris agreement says countries will put forward a commitment every five years. A related agreement asks countries that initially set targets for 2025 to submit a new one by 2020, and those that used a 2030 timeframe to “communicate or update” their commitment by 2020.

The agreement also “notes with concern” that existing commitments for 2025 and 2030 are not enough to limit average global heating to less than 2C, a headline goal of the Paris agreement, and that much deeper cuts will be needed to avoid that mark. It commits countries to act in accordance with “best available science”.

The meeting asked the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to report on what would be needed to limit heating to 1.5C. The IPCC found it demanded a global 45% cut between 2010 and 2030, and carbon dioxide emissions to reach net zero by about 2050.

Despite this, Taylor and other government MPs have described the Paris agreement as requiring net zero emissions “in the second half of the century”.

Bill Hare, head of science and policy thinktank Climate Analytics and a long-term adviser to developing countries at UN climate negotiations, said he believed there was a legal obligation on all countries to increase their ambition.

He said the term “recommunicate” did not appear anywhere in the Paris agreement or related documents, and Australia’s current target was “transparently inadequate”.

“This represents a very legalistic cherry-picking of language that ignores the ultimate purpose of the agreement and its enabling decisions, and in effect sets aside scientific knowledge and advice about the increasing urgency of action,” Hare said.

Dean Bialek, a former Australian diplomat to the UN, now working with the Mission 2020 campaign led by ex-UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, said the confirmation that Australia intended to submit the same “very weak” target it took to Paris revealed two things.

“First, the government remains deaf to the widespread calls from business, banks and bushfire-ravaged communities that we need to be heading for a much safer climate future,” he said.

“Second, despite the crystal clear science, and the green energy bonanza on the horizon, there is no real government plan to reduce emissions, rather an obsession with a gas-led recovery and a CCS [carbon capture and storage] lifeline to a coal industry in steep decline.”

John Connor, the executive director of the team that ran a 2017 UN climate conference hosted by Fiji, now head of the Carbon Market Institute, said the expectation of the global community, and particularly Pacific nations, was that countries would review and update their commitments before Glasgow.

He said climate targets for 2035 would be an issue at the next election, which was likely to roughly coincide with the conference in Scotland.

“It will rightly be a focus, and the government elected then will essentially determine the next commitment,” Connor said.

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