There Are 10 Catastrophic Threats Facing Humans Right Now, And Coronavirus Is Only One Of Them

The Conversation - Arnagretta Hunter | John Hewson

DAN HIMBRECHTS/AAP

Arnagretta Hunter ANU Human Futures Fellow 2020, Cardiologist and Physician, Australian National University John Hewson Professor and Chair, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Four months in, this year has already been a remarkable showcase for existential and catastrophic risk. A severe drought, devastating bushfires, hazardous smoke, towns running dry – these events all demonstrate the consequences of human-induced climate change.

While the above may seem like isolated threats, they are parts of a larger puzzle of which the pieces are all interconnected. A report titled Surviving and Thriving in the 21st Century, published today by the Commission for the Human Future, has isolated ten potentially catastrophic threats to human survival.

Not prioritised over one another, these risks are:

1. decline of natural resources, particularly water
2. collapse of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity
3. human population growth beyond Earth’s carrying capacity
4. global warming and human-induced climate change
5. chemical pollution of the Earth system, including the atmosphere and oceans
6. rising food insecurity and failing nutritional quality
7. nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction
8. pandemics of new and untreatable disease
9. the advent of powerful, uncontrolled new technology
10. national and global failure to understand and act preventatively on these risks.

In October, low water levels and dry land was recorded at Storm King Dam near Stanthorpe, Queensland. The dam’s water level was at 25%. DAN PELED/AAP

The start of ongoing discussions

The Commission for the Human Future formed last year, following earlier discussions within emeritus faculty at the Australian National University about the major risks faced by humanity, how they should be approached and how they might be solved. We hosted our first round-table discussion last month, bringing together more than 40 academics, thinkers and policy leaders.

The commission’s report states our species’ ability to cause mass harm to itself has been accelerating since the mid-20th century. Global trends in demographics, information, politics, warfare, climate, environmental damage and technology have culminated in an entirely new level of risk.

The risks emerging now are varied, global and complex. Each one poses a “significant” risk to human civilisation, a “catastrophic risk”, or could actually extinguish the human species and is therefore an “existential risk”.

The risks are interconnected. They originate from the same basic causes and must be solved in ways that make no individual threat worse. This means many existing systems we take for granted, including our economic, food, energy, production and waste, community life and governance systems – along with our relationship with the Earth’s natural systems – must undergo searching examination and reform.

COVID-19: a lesson in interconnection

It’s tempting to examine these threats individually, and yet with the coronavirus crisis we see their interconnection.

The response to the coronavirus has had implications for climate change with carbon pollution reduction, increased discussion about artificial intelligence and use of data (including facial recognition), and changes to the landscape of global security particularly in the face of massive economic transition.

It’s not possible to “solve” COVID-19 without affecting other risks in some way.

Shared future, shared approach

The commission’s report does not aim to solve each risk, but rather to outline current thinking and identify unifying themes. Understanding science, evidence and analysis will be key to adequately addressing the threats and finding solutions. An evidence-based approach to policy has been needed for many years. Under-appreciating science and evidence leads to unmitigated risks, as we have seen with climate change.

The human future involves us all. Shaping it requires a collaborative, inclusive and diverse discussion. We should heed advice from political and social scientists on how to engage all people in this conversation.

Imagination, creativity and new narratives will be needed for challenges that test our civil society and humanity. The bushfire smoke over the summer was unprecedented, and COVID-19 is a new virus.

If our policymakers and government had spent more time using the available climate science to understand and then imagine the potential risks of the 2019-20 summer, we would have recognised the potential for a catastrophic season and would likely have been able to prepare better. Unprecedented events are not always unexpected.

This photo from December shows NSW Rural Fire Service crews protecting properties as the Wrights Creek fire approaches Mangrove Mountain, north of Sydney. DAN HIMBRECHTS/AAP

Prepare for the long road

The short-termism of our political process needs to be circumvented. We must consider how our actions today will resonate for generations to come.

The commission’s report highlights the failure of governments to address these threats and particularly notes the short-term thinking that has increasingly dominated Australian and global politics. This has seriously undermined our potential to decrease risks such as climate change.

The shift from short to longer term thinking can began at home and in our daily lives. We should make decisions today that acknowledge the future, and practise this not only in our own lives but also demand it of our policy makers.

We’re living in unprecedented times. The catastrophic and existential risks for humanity are serious and multifaceted. And this conversation is the most important one we have today.

Links

• Report: Surviving and Thriving in the 21st Century (pdf)
• Commission for the Human Future
• Coronavirus is just a dress rehearsal for what is likely coming next
• Global catastrophic risks
• Existential risks
• Carbon emissions are falling sharply due to coronavirus. But not for long.
• A guide for using statistics for evidence based policy (pdf)
• Why we need to reinvent democracy for the long-term
• The government has been forced to talk about climate change, so it’s taking a subtle – and sinister – approachFrom the bushfires to coronavirus, our old 'normal' is gone forever. So what's next?
• Listen to your people Scott Morrison: the bushfires demand a climate policy reboot

The Story Of Our Time

Columbia Journalism Review - Kyle Pope

Reporters covering the climate crisis must be more than stenographers of tragedy

Kyle Pope is the editor in chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Journalism has always been good at fast. The home team won. An old woman was shot. A president was elected. The quicker a story moves, the more compressed the drama, the better we are at reporting it.

Slow is harder. Stories that contain subtlety, that evolve, that don’t have an ending—those aren’t our strength. Racism, systemic poverty, the long-term effects of outdated policy—these are subjects that we’ve consistently failed to get our arms around. We chase the immediate, the ephemeral, and ignore the seismic, the fundamental.

The reasons are understandable. Reporting on an event is easier than becoming deeply immersed, over time, in complex characters and bureaucracies. On television, time is tight; in print, space is limited. The gratification in quick hits is shallow but fast. Over the past decade, the encroachment of social media has caused newsroom budgets and attention spans to shrink. Often, clicks replace our consciences as the arbiters of news.

That’s also inexcusable. No longer is the value of news in saying what happened yesterday. (We’ve got Twitter for that.) The task at hand is to examine events carefully and deeply—to think of a moment not in isolation, but as part of a broader context. When, last year, California was overwhelmed by wildfires, only 3 percent of TV news reports mentioned that climate change might have had something to do with the intensity of the damage. For the most part, reporters were mere stenographers of tragedy.

I am convinced that journalism’s failure to properly report the climate story will be recorded as one of its great humiliations. Since 1988, when James Hansen, a scientist at NASA, sat before Congress and warned the United States of the effects of a warming planet, news organizations have dithered and delayed and put off critical reporting on what’s happening to the earth. They have allowed themselves to be spun by oil industry PR campaigns, convinced themselves that the science is complicated and contested (it’s not), and rested on the idea that the subject is too abstract and depressing for their audiences to handle (again, false).

The result has been a massive media fail: In 2012, researchers at Media Matters found that US news organizations gave forty times more coverage to the Kardashians than to rising sea levels. During the 2016 campaign, reporters neglected to ask a single climate question in the three presidential debates. In 2018, broadcast news outlets gave more airtime to the royal baby than to the warming earth.

In the fall of 2019, however, we began to see things shift. The climate story seemed to be moving from slow to fast, as the effects of the crisis were becoming impossible for even the most stubborn newsrooms to ignore. Floods in Venice and droughts in India were ready-made for the evening news. Devastating fires in California and Australia led news broadcasts around the world. Mass protests and their student leaders adorned magazine covers. By the time Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist, faced the United Nations at its Climate Action Summit, in New York City, and asked “How dare you?” the world, and its news media, were listening.

At this late hour there has, finally, been an awakening in journalism to the grim reality of climate change. The question now is how to tell the story. Can we ensure that the disasters we watch unfold are contextualized and explained? Will we hold the villains of the crisis accountable? Are we able to write about solutions to problems without trivializing them? How can we be fast and slow? The matter of whether or not the climate story should be told is settled: we must. This issue of CJR is focused on ways of doing the job.

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A year ago, frustrated by journalism’s persistent silence on the fate of the natural world, CJR teamed up with The Nation to launch Covering Climate Now, an initiative to encourage more and better climate coverage. The Guardian quickly signed up as our first media partner. Together, we set out to understand why news outlets weren’t doing more—and to help them improve.

We tried to keep our initial request modest. We knew that few newsrooms had money in the budget to add climate reporters, and we understood that the complexity of the story—slow versus fast—was working against us. So our ask was simple: we wanted newsrooms to commit to upping their game for a week, stretching themselves to do more climate reporting than they would normally, and then report back to us on what they learned.

We debuted in April, led by Mark Hertsgaard, my partner on the initiative and now Covering Climate Now’s executive director. We targeted the second week of September, during the UN Climate Action Summit, for the coverage experiment. Over the spring and summer, we talked to editors and reporters representing newsrooms from around the world. We learned that there was a wide consensus that more coverage was needed—few journalists (outside the right-wing echo chamber) were in denial about the importance of the climate story. Staffers, young ones in particular, had long been pushing their organizations to do more.

But news outlets still held back, for three main reasons. First, there was a pernicious view, particularly in television, that reporting on the climate story was a political act that could turn off conservative audiences. Second, newsrooms were convinced that they simply didn’t have the staff to do more climate coverage at a time when core beats—police, courts, city hall—go uncovered. And third, reporters simply did not know where to start: they lacked training that would help them interpret climate science, they struggled to find local angles to global narratives, or they didn’t see how to connect climate change to the stories they already follow every day.

On the first point, we hoped that CJR’s endorsement—and the fact that mainstream organizations like CBS News were involved in the effort—could provide cover for newsroom managers worried about how their climate reporting would be perceived. On the resource question, we never asked anyone to add to their payroll. Instead, we encouraged them to rethink their existing beats, to make everyone in the newsroom a climate journalist—from those on the news desk to sports to business to culture. The last concern—that news organizations, even large ones, didn’t know where to begin—seemed at first depressing, but then gave us hope. If they were ill-equipped to tell the most important story of our time, we would provide them with tools.

Our modest start—a plea for attention—yielded astonishing results. On the appointed week in September, more than three hundred news organizations participated in Covering Climate Now, including some of the most widely read in the world. Together, they published or broadcast more than 3,600 stories for a combined audience of more than a billion people. According to Google Trends, climate searches that September were the highest they had been in Google’s history. Since then, the number of our partners has grown past four hundred, and their combined audience approaches two billion people. We are just beginning to build a network capable of informing the world that it’s not too late to save ourselves.

We are just beginning to build a network capable of informing the world that it’s not too late to save ourselves.

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Our hope is that this magazine can begin to supply some answers about what’s needed for climate journalism to be effective. We hear from Emily Atkin, a climate reporter who felt constrained by traditional forms of storytelling (“It was difficult to hide my sense of alarm,” she explains), and Michael Specter, a writer who believes in the ability of facts to convey the severity of the crisis.

E. Tammy Kim reports from the Doomsday Clock–setting convention of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which may be the only publication, she writes, “to cover climate change with an approach that is explicitly existential.” Alexandria Neason goes back to her childhood home in Hawai‘i, where well-intentioned climate journalism focuses on tourists and ignores indigenous people.

Betsy Morais, CJR’s managing editor and the guiding force behind the magazine, writes about the difficulties—and opportunities—for reporting on the climate in China, where, as the coronavirus reminds us, censorship is rife. I talk to George Miller, the director of Mad Max, about what reporters can learn from movies when it comes to crafting climate stories. Elsewhere in the issue, we trace climate journalism across Alaska, shadow a fire reporter in California, and lament the ubiquity of the polar bear as a climate change mascot.

Clearly, the climate crisis can’t be contained in a single issue of this, or any, magazine. But we can use this occasion to survey the work being done and to consider how we can do better. It’s as good an expression of CJR’s mission as there is.

We also have worked to produce a magazine that takes its subject matter to heart. If you are holding this issue in print, you are reading it on 100 percent recycled postconsumer stock. The inks we’ve used are vegetable- and soy-based. Allied Printing, the company we’ve hired to produce the magazine, has a zero-carbon footprint; nearly three-quarters of the energy used at its facility comes from wind and solar power. To further minimize our climate impact, we’ve elected to print half the number of issues we typically would, which helps us offset the costs of eco-friendly printing and distribution. We have also made every effort possible to reduce travel for our writers and photographers.

We have reached a turning point for journalism and the planet. Old ideas that had dampened our attention to climate change—that the subject was too polarizing or too complicated or a money-loser—have been proven wrong. Old forms of storytelling—fast, without helping readers draw crucial connections—are not what’s needed to confront the crisis we face. We owe it to our audience, and our conscience, to be more thoughtful. Climate change is the story of our time. Journalism will be judged by how it chronicles the devastating reality.

Links

• When Do We Care About Climate Change?
• COVID-19 Has Lessons for Journalists Covering the Climate Crisis
• The media are complacent while the world burns
• The climate crisis is a story for every beat
• Covering Climate Now signs on over 170 news outlets
• Climate change coverage at a crossroads in Australia

(AU) Proposed Queensland Coal-Fired Power Plant Under Cloud Over Emissions And Financing

The Guardian - Ben Smee

New information casts doubt on claims about environmental merit and commercial viability of Collinsville station

A disused power station at Collinsville. Sources say carbon emissions from a new coal-fired plant would be comparable to generators built 15 to 20 years ago. Photograph: Ben Smee/The Guardian

Carbon emissions from a new coal-fired power station at Collinsville in north Queensland would be comparable to generators built in the state 15 to 20 years ago, according to sources familiar with the proponent’s submissions to the federal government.

Guardian Australia has learned the company behind the proposal, Shine Energy, has held discussions about obtaining a concessional infrastructure loan from the federal government via the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility.

In February the government awarded Shine $4.4m to conduct a feasibility study. The grant was broadly considered a concession to pro-coal Queensland Nationals MPs.

The new information about the proposal – obtained by sources with knowledge of Shine’s closely guarded business case and other information submitted to the federal government before it was awarded the feasibility study grant – casts doubt on key public claims about the environmental merit and commercial viability of a Collinsville plant.

Shine said it could not respond to questions, claiming that details of its proposal were confidential. The company indicated that aspects of the project might have changed since it submitted documentation to the federal government but it would not provide any detail.

The company has pitched its Collinsville coal proposal as having the potential to reduce carbon emissions by allowing the closure of higher-emitting power stations elsewhere in the state.

But a lack of available water allocation at Collinsville poses a technical challenge for the financing, design and construction of any plant that would emit a lower proportion of carbon, compared with the last generation of coal plants built in Queensland – which has the newest fleet in Australia.

Shine has submitted information that shows that by using a dry-cooling system the plant’s emissions intensity would be comparable to the last two plants built in Queensland – Kogan Creek, commissioned in 2007, and Millmerran, commissioned in 2002. Both produce emissions at a rate slightly above .80 tonnes of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour.

Sources say Shine’s studies identified it could pollute about 10% to 15% less carbon dioxide if it built a plant with a wet-cooling system, which requires large volumes of water.

Plans to build a large dam at the nearby Urannah Creek have been touted as a way to supply water to heavy industry, including a coal-fired power station. But while the Urannah Dam is backed by many of the same political and business interests as the proposed power station, it is bitterly opposed by local Indigenous traditional owners, including Shine Energy and some of its directors.

The Shine Energy chief executive, Ash Dodd, told Guardian Australia in February that the power generator proposal would not rely on the Urannah Dam.

“We as Birri and Widi traditional owners stand opposed to the [Urannah Dam] project as it will have a major environmental impact on our sacred rivers and all water rights belong to our people.”

Richie Merzian, the climate and energy director at the Australia Institute, said the federal government had spent $1.3bn attempting to improve the emissions intensity of coal since 2003.

“It is damning that the best technology they can find now has the same emissions intensity as plants built 15 years ago,” Merzian said. “If the best they can do is build another plant like Kogan Creek, it will do little for reliability, given this plant is the most unreliable on the grid per unit of energy.”

Dodd has raised the prospect that Collinsville could allow for the closure older, dirtier plants, including the privately operated Gladstone power station (.95 tonnes CO2 per MWh), though the Queensland government is firmly opposed to that suggestion and Gladstone has commercial energy supply contracts running until 2029.

The state’s opposition to the Collinsville plant could also prove problematic for Shine in its efforts to obtain finance.

In interviews, Dodd has said the company has held discussions with overseas-based investors and would apply for Naif financing. Guardian Australia understands Shine is pursuing a concessional federal loan from the Naif program, which it expects could then catalyse additional interest from private investors.

The Queensland government holds an effective veto over any Naif loan to a project in the state.

A Naif spokesman said it “cannot comment on whether or not it has been approached by particular entities in respect of particular projects”.

Shine Energy’s shares are worth $1,000 on paper and the company will require about $2bn in outside financing to build the power generator.

In addition to seeking Naif funding, Shine has applied for federal government underwriting against potential future losses. It was not named among shortlisted projects for a federal energy underwriting program.

Energy sector analysts say the extent to which Shine has asked for government subsidy should dismiss outright any suggestion that a coal-fired power station at Collinsville could be independently viable.

“Large subsidies are the only way they can get it up and running,” said Tim Buckley, the director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “It’s a project that’s entirely unbankable by any private financier. It’s 100% an ideological exercise, there’s no commercial viability.”

Shine’s director of marketing and communications, Kelli Cohen, warned Guardian Australia against printing “inaccurate information” but said the company “can not respond” to any aspect of this story due to commercial confidentiality.

This is despite Dodd previously speaking about emissions intensity, potential funding sources, government subsidies and other technical details in interviews on Sky News.

“You have not been given an up to date project brief from your source,” Cohen said.

Shine did not respond to subsequent attempts to clarify what details might have changed.

Links

• Collinsville: the Queensland town on the frontline of the coal wars
• Queensland energy minister tells Angus Taylor he's 'deeply concerned' about Collinsville coal plans
• Two coal-fired and hydroelectric power projects being explored for Qld
• Extinction Rebellion: Hitting A Nerve At Australia's Climate Flashpoint
• (AU) Anthony Albanese Says Coal Mining Could Continue In Australia In A Net Zero Emissions World
• (AU) New CSIRO, AEMO Study Confirms Wind, Solar And Storage Beat Coal, Gas And Nuclear
• (AU) The World Has Made The Link Between Australian Coal, Fires And Climate
• (AU) Dirty Power: An Australian Political Investigation
• (AU) Australia Fires: PM Rejects 'Reckless' Calls To Limit Coal Industry
• Six Biggest Coalminers In Australia Produce More Emissions Than Entire Economy