Lethal Heating: 05/25/20

25/05/2020

(AU) Opinion: Old Friendships Alone Won't Save Us From Climate Change

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

Nick O'Malley is National Environment and Climate Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is also a senior writer and a former US correspondent.

It should not be a surprise that the independent panel advising the government on how to better spend $2.5 billion on clean energy projects has proposed that it should kick the door open to, well, dirty energy.

The man tasked with leading the panel, Grant King, was managing director of Origin Energy before he became the Business Council of Australia boss in 2016.

BCA managing director Grant King (right) with Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Credit: Wolter Peeters

Among the recommendations he made was one to encourage more investment in carbon reduction schemes by allowing coal and gas industries to apply for funding for carbon capture and storage projects.

Carbon capture and storage is backed by the Australian coal industry, because it involves burning coal, but opposed by climate scientists, because it is unproven and expensive.

Extractive industries are similarly well represented on the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission, the body convened to advise the government on how to mitigate the economic fallout of the coronavirus shutdown.

It is led by Nev Power, former chief executive of Fortescue Metals Group, current deputy chair of Strike Energy. It is advised by Andrew Liveris, a board member of Saudi Aramco and deputy chair of the resource engineering firm Worley. Its membership includes Catharine Tanner, managing director of EnergyAustralia and James Fazzino, who is also on the board of APA, an energy infrastructure company.

It is no accident that these are the men and women in the room as the decisions are made. Fossil fuels have been dominant energy source over the modern era and as a result energy companies have relationships with governments fostered over generations.

Not only do politicians understand their pet projects, their top personnel are embedded in government while advocates of new ideas are too often banging on closed doors.

Professor Frank Jotzo, director of the Australian National University's Centre for Climate Economics, observes that the recommendations of the men and women picked for these advisory roles carry not only the weight of their own expertise, but of the billions of dollars of value that their industries represent, of years of well-funded and well-orchestrated lobbying, and of the unstated threat of the backlash these industries are capable of unleashing when crossed.

It cost the mining industry, Jotzo notes, just a few million to derail Kevin Rudd’s signature resources super profits tax and arguably begin the obliteration of his authority as leader.

In their 2018 book on the political economy of fossil fuel subsidies, the British academics Peter Newell and Phil Johnstone argued the only way to properly understand governments’ continued support for fossil fuels in the face of overwhelming evidence of potentially catastrophic climate change is to recognise “the extent of the depth and reach of fossil fuel incumbency”.

Jotzo says that in his view the proposals made by King are “not bad”. He believes that while they leave the door open for fossil fuel interests, renewable energy projects are likely to win funding on merit in any case. But now is hardly the moment for “not bad” ideas.

As world governments embark on a US$5 trillion ($7.7 billion) spending spree, many are directing their focus to green initiatives. The EU is discussing setting border prices on carbon, while the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged governments to use historically low oil and gas prices as an opportunity to end subsidies to fossil fuels, which the International Monetary Fund last year estimated to cost Australia $29 billion annually once the impact of pollution was factored in.

Both of these ideas are better than “not bad” and neither appears to be on the horizon for Australia. But they should be.

Shortly after the Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor announced the advice he had received from his panel, the leading journal Nature Climate Change published the first peer-reviewed study on the impact on carbon emissions of the COVID-19 crisis.

The news is not good. Yes, emissions dropped by a staggering amount in the early months of the year – up to 17 per cent a day by early April. But averaged over the year the drop will likely turn out to be between 4.2 and 7.5 per cent.

Which is to say that having suffered the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression we are just meeting the reductions targets we are going to have to hit, year after year, if we are to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees of warming. In other words, we cannot expect to rebuild the old economy and stave off global warming. And we cannot do it relying on the old guard alone.

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(AU) I Spent Over 40 Years In The Australian Defence Force. The Lack Of Readiness To Deal With Coronavirus Is A Wake-Up Call

The Guardian - Chris Barrie

It is time Australian governments started to listen to experts when it comes to climate change and pandemics

‘The last summer of bushfires and fire storms were met with an unacceptable lack of preparedness, despite several rural fire chiefs having tried to get the federal government to hear their well-founded concerns in April 2019.’ Photograph: Mark Evans/Getty Images

Chris Barrie is a former Australian defence force chief. Since then he has worked as consultant, teacher and mentor at Oxford University, the National Defense University in Washington DC, and the Australian National University.

The past 18 years has been a period of significant disengagement and disinterest by the community in Australian political affairs.

The political shenanigans described in Malcolm Turnbull’s recent book A Bigger Picture ought to be a wake-up call that as our political leaders have jostled for the right to exercise power from the PM’s office, time has been a’wasting in finding appropriate solutions for the challenges Australia must face over the next three decades.

It is time for us to hold our governments to account for the quality of their governance.

Until the end of last year, we had blindly turned away from doing anything to address many of the challenges that have been laid out by science and respected commentators. Bigots in our media and parliaments have held sway and prevented much from being done. The result has been a lack of preparation to deal with the serious issues we confront.

This lack of preparedness concerns me. I spent more than 40 years in the defence force watching for events that could present challenges to our national security. Successes under my leadership were made possible by preparedness and a federal government that listened carefully and acted appropriately.

With the shock of the bushfires and fire storms of the last summer followed by floods and now with the global Covid-19 pandemic Australians have experienced first-hand the manifestation of a significant lack of preparedness fostered by the absence of strong, principled and effective leadership.

The impact of these shocks will have a lasting impact on our economy, our society, and our wellbeing. The current pandemic is a wake-up call for what needs to be done to counter predictable and potentially existential threats from global warming, and their impact on the climate and other systems critical to human life on the planet.

Early in April the Economist Intelligence Unit reported an expected global economic contraction of 2.5% this year as a result of the pandemic.

Australia’s geo-strategic future is very uncertain. Our national character and will are likely to be challenged in many new ways

This huge downturn in the global economy has taken place in just a few weeks. Its effects will be felt for a long time. But it is not uniformly distributed around the globe. Significant economies such as the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and even Australia have been in lockdown and are slowly moving out of it.

We are not certain where the future lies. Yet, there are a few better prepared economies such as Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong that have dealt with the pandemic much better. It is ironic that Taiwan, the world leader on pandemic management is not included as a full member in the World Health Organization!

We have heard also about the “unexpected” nature of this downturn. It has been labelled as a black swan event. According to Nassim Taleb a black swan event flows from the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events – and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively.

For those in the science community looking at global warming and its consequences since the early 1990s, climate change and related health issues have been predicted. It’s just that very little has been done to prepare for them, even though there have been many scenario games and simulations held in our government bureaucracies and some businesses to stress test our capabilities. Some of those scenarios have looked like the ones we are going through now.

Last week I obtained an unclassified copy of a mobilisation review prepared for the senior leadership in defence. It was completed in June 2019. I knew work on mobilisation was being done in defence. In 2012 I was the facilitator of a closed workshop of international and national experts who examined nuclear issues, mass migrations, Pacific relocation, Southern Ocean disaster, extreme weather, pandemic and Southern Ocean eco-tourism. A report of this workshop is included in the mobilisation review.

The broad findings of the review are:

The geo-strategic environment is more uncertain than it has been for many decades.
Defence needs to have confidence that its planning arrangements are appropriate for the contemporary context.
While considerable defence mobilisation has occurred at lower levels since the 1998 lead up to operation Interfet there has been limited consideration of formal planning for large-scale, (including national) mobilisation since the Vietnam era or the need to mobilise in less traditional ways.
Despite an extended period of ADF operations since the late 1990s the mobilisation impact on the Australian economy and population has been limited to a narrow element of defence industry and some employers of defence reserves.

In the detail of the review there is much food for thought. For example, in the global engagement workshop we considered the drastic measures needed to deal with the consequences of a pandemic.

Prescient as it was, this review stated in 2019 that “the World Health Organization (WHO) expects a significant pandemic to emanate from Asia in the next 10 years” and noted that a “key area of concern is the availability of pharmaceutical supplies” because 90% of all Australian supplies are imported.

But given our current experience it is clear that going through the review in the context of preparedness would begin to reveal the extent of work needed to overcome weaknesses and the vulnerabilities exposed by it, not just by the defence department, but by a whole-of-government look.

This action would represent only a start. We cannot afford to go on as unprepared as we have been over the past 18 years. It is time Australian governments started to take notice of experts and listened to the people.

Australia’s geo-strategic future is very uncertain. Our national character and will are likely to be challenged in many new ways. The bushfires and fire storms of last summer were met with an unacceptable lack of preparedness, despite several rural fire chiefs having tried to get the federal government to hear their well-founded concerns in April 2019.

The warning about cyber security vulnerabilities set out in the review must also be taken seriously, especially in the context of unconventional cyber warfare and the potential for negative effects on social cohesion.

As well as improving national security domestically we should also consider the limits on Australia’s ability to shape the kind of world we would like. By 2050 we will be about 40 million people living with neighbours numbering 3.5 billion. Nearest to us, Indonesia will have a population of about 330 million, and PNG about 14 million people, although there are in-country predictions of about 30 million in PNG – more people than in Australia today.

We can only guess at how the contest between the major powers such as China, India and the United States will impinge on us and the decisions we will need to make.

We have an opportunity now to set right the ship of state by being highly analytical, ruthless in our judgement and focused always on better outcomes for the future. It will be a pity if our current circumstances fritter away Australia’s standing in the region.

We have much to offer, but we desperately need to start turning our minds to what the next 30 years should look like.

This is where the mobilisation review and documents like it present a good place to start, if only they could see the light of day.

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Climate Change Turning Antarctica's Snow Green

Reuters - Martyn Herman

Paleontologists working at the site on Antarctica's Seymour Island where fossils of an Eocene frog were discovered are seen in this photo released on April 24, 2020 in Stockholm, Sweden. Jonas Hagstrom/Swedish Museum of Natural History/Handout via Reuters

LONDON - Antarctica conjures images of an unbroken white wilderness, but blooms of algae are giving parts of the frozen continent an increasingly green tinge.

Warming temperatures due to climate change are helping the formation and spread of "green snow" and it is becoming so prolific in places that it is even visible from space, according to new research published on Wednesday.

While the presence of algae in Antarctica was noted by long-ago expeditions, such as the one undertaken by British explorer Ernest Shackleton, its full extent was unknown.

Now, using data collected over two years by the European Space Agency's Sentinel 2 satellite, together with on-the-ground observations, a research team from the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey have created the first map of the algae blooms on the Antarctic Peninsula coast.

"We now have a baseline of where the algal blooms are and we can see whether the blooms will start increasing as the models suggest in the future," Matt Davey of the University of Cambridge's Department of Plant Sciences told Reuters.

Mosses and lichens are considered the dominant photosynthetic organisms in Antarctica - but the new mapping found 1,679 separate algal blooms that are a key component in the continent's ability to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

"The algal blooms in Antarctica are equivalent to about the amount of carbon that's being omitted by 875,000 average UK petrol car journeys," Davey said. "That seems a lot but in terms of the global carbon budget, it's insignificant.

"It does take up carbon from the atmosphere but it won't make any serious dent in the amount of carbon dioxide being put in the atmosphere at the moment."

Green is not the only splash of color in Antarctica. Researchers are now planning similar studies on red and orange algae, although that is proving harder to map from space.

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