09/05/2020

Why It Doesn’t Make Economic Sense To Ignore Climate Change In Our Recovery From The Pandemic

The Conversation - 

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Anna Skarbek is Executive Director of ClimateWorks Australia, a non-profit collaboration hosted by Monash Sustainability Institute in partnership with The Myer Foundation.
Anna led the first project for ClimateWorks, the award-winning Low Carbon Growth Plan for Australia, working with McKinsey & Co and the Australian and Victorian Governments.
This project identified the least cost opportunities for emissions reduction across the major sectors of the Australian economy, with a roadmap for implementation.
It will be tempting for some to overlook the climate change challenge in the rush to restart the economy after the pandemic.

Federal energy minister Angus Taylor has flagged he wants to develop Australia’s gas-fired power to help boost the economy. And conservative political strategist Sir Lynton Crosby recently argued business survival is more important than environment, social and governance matters.

In the United States, the Trump administration is reportedly contemplating a coronavirus rescue package tailored specifically to oil and natural gas producers, while the Chinese government is trying to stimulate its economy by allowing polluters to bypass environmental regulations.

But the pandemic is not a reason to weaken the commitments to net zero emissions. In fact, climate action is a vital protection against further global shocks, especially as governments plan their post-pandemic stimulus packages.
The economic shock from climate change

The devastation the virus has inflicted is a reminder of our vulnerability and the importance of prevention and mitigation.

It’s a point bolstered by fresh evidence about the scale of economic shock we might face if we fail to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement.

A major study published in Nature Communications last month put a dollar value on the cost of climate inaction. If we don’t prevent the planet warming, we can expect a bill of between US$150 trillion and US$792 trillion by 2100. That’s up to A$1,231 trillion in Australian dollars.

The predicted “global shock” would be even more financially catastrophic than coronavirus.

The research, however, also points out some good news. The limitation of global warming to 1.5℃ would deliver a corresponding boost, with the global economy growing by US$616 trillion compared to inaction.

Big businesses on board

The economic cost of the shutdowns imposed to address the coronavirus pandemic have not been compared to the value of the lives saved.

Climate change action, on the other hand, has repeatedly been found to pass traditional cost-benefit tests. The solutions are known to already be available and effective if deployed in time.

What’s more, new research – with Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and leading climate economist Nicholas Stern at the helm – shows climate mitigation actions deliver maximum economic growth multiplier benefits from a stimulus perspective.

It found spending on new green energy projects generates twice as many jobs for every dollar invested, compared with equivalent allocations to fossil fuel projects.
Climate action, then, is vital for the economy. That’s why a remarkable list of business leaders have just added their names to a call for stimulus funds to be invested in what they call “the economy of the future”.

This includes chief executives, chairs and senior executives from major organisations including Rio Tinto, BP, Shell, Allianz and HSBC, together with the Energy Transitions Commission (a global group of companies and experts working towards low-carbon energy systems).

They’re urging for massive investments in renewable power systems, a boost for green buildings and green infrastructure, targeted support for innovative low-carbon activities and other similar measures.
In Europe, a coalition of chief executives, politicians and academics is calling for major investment in projects to make the European Union the “world’s first climate-neutral continent” by 2050.

They say the need for state intervention in the wake of the pandemic provides an unparalleled chance to build economies that are sustainable, resilient and dynamic.

Representatives of global companies have signed the “green recovery” platform. These include PepsiCo, Microsoft, Enel, E.ON, Volvo Group, L'Oréal, Danone, Ikea and more.

Technology is getting better

Boosting the economy with climate action is a message our recent research from ClimateWorks Australia reinforces. It shows how we can achieve the Paris targets with technologies already available.

But we can only do it if government, business and consumer decisions support the accelerated deployment of these technologies, and only if we roll out mature zero-emissions technology solutions more quickly across all sectors (not just electricity), and invest in development and commercialisation of emerging solutions in harder-to-abate sectors.

Across all sectors of the Australian economy, technology provides opportunities to decarbonise, and has rapidly improved.

For example, advances in lithium ion technology mean high-tech batteries cost only a fifth of what they did ten years ago. So it’s easier and cheaper to store electricity than ever before – even as renewables now offer a consistently cheaper source of generation than fossil fuels.

Lithium ion batteries have come a long way in a short time. Shutterstock

Innovations like that have changed the game. A new Australian Energy Market Operator study makes clear that, within five years, Australia can run a power grid in which 75% of electricity comes from wind and solar.

A clean stimulus package

Measures these pathways involve are ideally suited to a stimulus package. Governments could create jobs and spur industry, while modernising the economy for the challenges ahead.

How? By building charging infrastructure to support electric vehicles powered by renewables; encouraging investment in sustainable agriculture, fertiliser management and carbon forestry; deploying PV and battery systems across city buildings; or embracing any number of other “shovel ready” solutions.
Through this pandemic we’ve witnessed how people have learned new approaches and switched mindsets almost as quickly as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and social distancing restrictions began.

Just as we’re remembering to wash our hands more than we used to, coming out of the pandemic, it will pay to be more attentive about remembering to choose the zero-emissions option at every step.

We stand at a crossroads. If government stimulus packages around the world favour carbon-intensive practices and miss the moment to modernise and decarbonise, we will lock ourselves into a warming future.

If, however, we rise to the challenge, we can use the recovery from one crisis to simultaneously address another.

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Climate Change Has Created 'Altered World' For Young People, Lawyers Say In Child Climate Case

Global Citizen  - Laurie Goering, Reuters

A legal complaint brought by youth climate activists moves closer to a decision.

Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, center, leads a march of thousands of French students through Paris, France, to draw more attention to fighting climate change, Feb. 22, 2019. Francois Mori/AP

LONDON — Young people face a "fundamentally altered world" that threatens their human rights and safety unless governments take effective action to curb climate change, lawyers for Greta Thunberg and other child climate activists said on Tuesday.

The arguments came in a filing after Brazil, France, and Germany — three respondents in a legal complaint brought in September to the Committee on the Rights of the Child at the United Nations — said charges against them lacked jurisdiction and were unsubstantiated.

The young people's complaint accuses Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey — all substantial emitters of planet-heating gases — of knowing about the impact of their greenhouse gas emissions on the climate and doing nothing to mitigate it.

Such a failure represents a "direct, imminent, and foreseeable risk to (the) health and well-being" of the young plaintiffs, the suit noted.

Thunberg and 15 other petitioners from 12 countries, aged between eight and 17, filed the lawsuit in New York last year, saying the polluting countries were undermining their rights.

"World leaders have failed to keep what they promised. They promised to protect our rights and they have not done that," Thunberg said then, as the petitioners presented their case on the sidelines of the UN Secretary-General's climate summit.

Michael Hausfeld, one of their lawyers, said the response by Brazil, France, and Germany argued in part that no one nation was exclusively responsible for climate change, so no single country should be held individually responsible.

But the countries named provided no "justifiable explanation of why they're failing" to reduce their own emissions in line with warnings from scientists about global warming, he said.

He said bringing a legal challenge on human rights grounds was the "correct" way to try to drive swifter emissions cuts, noting "there are rights and obligations involved" under international child protection agreements.

"This is not a matter of discretion that nations can ignore as they so choose. This is a matter of an obligation to which they are accountable," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

Hausfeld said the Committee on the Rights of the Child would now consider whether to uphold the objections of Brazil, France, and Germany and dismiss the lawsuit, or move ahead and ask for a full briefing on the issues.

A decision is possible later in the year, the lawyers said.

Argentina and Turkey, the other two countries named in the complaint, have yet to submit a response.

The world's biggest emitters of climate-changing gases, China and the United States, are not among the 46 countries that have signed a protocol allowing children to seek redress under the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.

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Pandemic Also A Reckoning For Climate Change, Turnbull Tells British Audience

Sydney Morning Herald - Latika Bourke

London: Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull says climate change is a greater existential threat than the coronavirus, which he says has provided governments with a unique opportunity to simultaneously boost clean energy and stimulate pandemic-battered economies.

Turnbull told a conservative think tank in London that the pandemic had been a reckoning of science and political complacency, which he said served as a "metaphor, at high-speed" of climate change politics.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney speak to the London think tank Policy Exchange via Zoom about global climate change policy in light of the corona virus pandemic.
Credit: YouTube/PolicyExchangeUK

He said governments that took the science seriously had moved most-quickly and weathered the least-worst experiences from the pandemic.

This, he said, was compared to "insouciant" governments that had believed commentary dismissing the virus as no more serious than the flu.

"The COVID virus has been a case of biology confronting and really shaking the complacency of day-to-day politics with a physical reality of sickness and death on a scale we haven't seen for a very long time," Turnbull told Policy Exchange.

"And so the question really is: why do so many people in government and so many people in politics - particularly in the Anglosphere - not take the scientific evidence on climate change just as seriously?

"When is physics going to mug political complacency and denialism? When will that happen just as biology has mugged the complacency of politics with respect to the virus?"

Turnbull was speaking alongside Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, who is now serving pro bono as the UN special envoy for climate action and finance.

Both men took part in the discussion from their homes via Zoom. Turnbull appeared in front of a backdrop which included two copies of his recently published memoir.

He revived his attacks on the right-wing of the Liberal party, vested interests and the Murdoch-owned media in Australia for what he said was their destruction of his attempts to reduce Australia's carbon emissions and the detonation of his premiership.

Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England speaking to Policy Exchange via Zoom. Credit: YouTube/PolicyExchangeUK

Carney praised Turnbull's book and said the former Liberal leader had "true political courage." He also said the restructuring of economies after the pandemic meant there was an opportunity for investment in greener energy.

"We have a situation with climate change which will involve every country in the world and from which we can't self-isolate," Carney said.

Carbon border taxes inevitable, says Turnbull

Both men were asked about their views on carbon border taxes, where a country that is reducing its emissions faster than a country it is trading with applies tariffs to address the imbalance.

Turnbull said they were "inevitable" with Australia a target.

"The Europeans have made it very clear to Australia, publicly, that we should expect in the free trade agreement that the government has been negotiating for some time with the EU that there will be climate change elements in it," he said.

"It's an old sore but a tonne of CO2 has the same impact on the world's climate, regardless of where its emitted, so we all have an interest in everyone else's emissions.

"So I think it is inevitable and I do support them as a matter of principle."

Two sources who have taken part in Australia's ongoing negotiations with the EU told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that such no terms have been presented to Australia and that they would be rejected by Australia anyway.

Carney said such taxes should be avoided. "I wouldn't say that I'm absolutely against them," he said.

"I wouldn't put them in place now and it would be an unfortunate set of circumstances if we end up with big enough differences in ambition that they become necessary.

"I don't think we're in that position."

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