Lethal Heating: 06/20/20

20/06/2020

World Has Six Months To Avert Climate Crisis, Says Energy Expert

The Guardian - Fiona Harvey

International Energy Agency chief warns of need to prevent post-lockdown surge in emissions

The cooling tower of a coal-fired power plant in Datteln, Germany. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images

The world has only six months in which to change the course of the climate crisis and prevent a post-lockdown rebound in greenhouse gas emissions that would overwhelm efforts to stave off climate catastrophe, one of the world’s foremost energy experts has warned.

“This year is the last time we have, if we are not to see a carbon rebound,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.

Governments are planning to spend $9tn (£7.2tn) globally in the next few months on rescuing their economies from the coronavirus crisis, the IEA has calculated. The stimulus packages created this year will determine the shape of the global economy for the next three years, according to Birol, and within that time emissions must start to fall sharply and permanently, or climate targets will be out of reach.

“The next three years will determine the course of the next 30 years and beyond,” Birol told the Guardian. “If we do not [take action] we will surely see a rebound in emissions. If emissions rebound, it is very difficult to see how they will be brought down in future. This is why we are urging governments to have sustainable recovery packages.”

Carbon dioxide emissions plunged by a global average of 17% in April, compared with last year, but have since surged again to within about 5% of last year’s levels.

In a report published on Thursday, the IEA – the world’s gold standard for energy analysis - set out the first global blueprint for a green recovery, focusing on reforms to energy generation and consumption. Wind and solar power should be a top focus, the report advised, alongside energy efficiency improvements to buildings and industries, and the modernisation of electricity grids.

Creating jobs must be the priority for countries where millions have been thrown into unemployment by the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns. The IEA’s analysis shows that targeting green jobs – such as retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, putting up solar panels and constructing wind farms – is more effective than pouring money into the high-carbon economy.

The sustainable recovery plan could create
nearly 9m new green jobs each year

Guardian graphic. Source: IEA

Sam Fankhauser, executive director of the Grantham Research Institute on climate change at the London School of Economics, who was not involved in the report, said: “Building efficiency ticks all the recovery boxes – shovel-ready, employment intensive, a high economic multiplier, and is absolutely key for zero carbon [as it is] a hard-to-treat sector, and has big social benefits, in the form of lower fuel bills.”

He warned that governments must not try to “preserve existing jobs in formaldehyde” through furlough schemes and other efforts to keep people in employment, but provide retraining and other opportunities for people to “move into the jobs of the future”.

Calls for a green recovery globally have now come from experts, economists, health professionals, educators, climate campaigners and politicians. While some governments are poised to take action – for instance, the EU has pledged to make its European green deal the centrepiece of its recovery – the money spent so far has tended to prop up the high-carbon economy.

At least $33bn has been directed towards airlines, with few or no green strings attached, according to the campaigning group Transport and Environment. According to analyst company Bloomberg New Energy Finance, more than half a trillion dollars worldwide – $509bn – is to be poured into high-carbon industries, with no conditions to ensure they reduce their carbon output.

Only about $12.3bn of the spending announced by late last month was set to go towards low-carbon industries, and a further $18.5bn into high-carbon industries provided they achieve climate targets.

In the first tranches of spending, governments “had an excuse” for failing to funnel money to carbon-cutting industries, said Birol, because they were reacting to a sudden and unexpected crisis. “The first recovery plans were more aimed at creating firewalls round the economy,” he explained.

But governments were still targeting high-carbon investment, Birol warned. He pointed to IEA research showing that by the end of May the amount invested in coal-fired power plants in Asia had accelerated compared with last year. “There are already signs of a rebound [in emissions],” he said.

Climate campaigners called on ministers to heed the IEA report and set out green recovery plans. Jamie Peters, campaigns director at Friends of the Earth, said: “A post-Covid world must be a fair one. It will only be equitable if the government prioritises health, wellbeing and opportunity for all parts of society. As if the case was not compelling enough in a dangerously heating planet, it is even more urgent post-Covid.”

Putting the IEA’s recommendations into action would boost the economy, added Rosie Rogers, head of green recovery at Greenpeace UK. “Government putting money behind sustainable solutions really is an economic no-brainer. It can see us build a recovery that both tackles the climate emergency and improves people’s lives through cleaner air and lower bills.”

Investors were also keen to put private sector money into a green recovery, alongside government stimulus spending, said Stephanie Pfeifer, chief executive of the Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change, representing funds and asset managers with $26tn in assets. “The IEA has shown [a green recovery] is not only desirable, but economically astute. Investors are fully committed to playing their part in this process.”

Links

Reversing The Climate Crisis Isn't On You. We Need To Change The Entire System

VICE - Tristan Kennedy

For starters, 71 percent of all global carbon emissions come from just 100 companies.

A controlled surface burn following the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in 2010. Photo: US Navy Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

Cast your mind back to the middle of March. This wasn't quite the pre-Covid era – those halcyon days when the only place publishing articles about "curves" and "flattening" was the sidebar of shame – but it still feels like a lifetime ago. By the third week of that month, we all knew that lockdown was coming. We'd seen what was happening in Italy. Yet, somehow, the British government seemed to be incapable of delivering clear instructions.

On Monday the 16th, four days after telling the country that "many more families would lose loved ones", Boris Johnson stood at the podium in Downing Street and announced: "You should avoid pubs, clubs, theatres […] and non-essential contact." He didn't order venues to close. He didn't make guidance legally binding, or introduce any enforcement measures. Instead, he effectively abdicated responsibility, leaving it up to the general public to decide which actions were appropriate. For the next week, until lockdown was finally introduced on the 23rd of March, confusion reigned. The consequences, as we've seen, were catastrophic.

It's far from a perfect analogy, but in many ways that third week of March is where we're currently at with the climate crisis. The British government, and indeed governments around the world, know that this is an emergency (today, one of the world's leading energy experts warned we have just six months to avoid a climate crisis). They're well aware that radical action is needed, and that any delay will be disastrous. But rather than legislate, they prefer to shift the burden of responsibility onto companies (which all too often can't see past their immediate bottom line), and onto us as individuals.

There's a long-held misconception that individual consumer choices can make a significant difference when it comes to tackling climate change. You see it in the many thousands of articles listing ways to cut your carbon footprint. You see it in the campaigns to stop people driving to work, drinking from single-use plastic, or buying clothing from fast fashion brands. These initiatives are usually well-intentioned, and can help kickstart useful conversations. But most climate activists agree that unless they include calls for concrete, legislative change, consumer-focused campaigns make little difference – and may even do more harm than good.

"You hear it all the time on the news, items on how individuals can change their habits," explains Angus Satow, from the campaign group Labour for a Green New Deal, "but that's something we really need to move away from."For starters, 71 percent of all global carbon emissions come from just 100 companies. While these fossil fuel producers continue to pump out pollution unabated, using a refillable coffee cup makes about as much difference as moving a deckchair on the Titanic two centimetres to the left. But focusing on consumer choices doesn't just fail to address the scale of the problem, it misunderstands the nature of the problem completely.

"The way you consume is determined by the free time you have, and the economic system which dictates that," argues Satow. As long as it's quicker to travel by car, more convenient to buy Coke in plastic bottles and cheaper to wear disposable, polyester dresses from Boohoo, people can't really be expected to make positive decisions for the planet.

"We're all living in this toxic system," says Alice Wilby, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. Even when there are good options, taking "individual responsibility is often not a matter of choice, but a matter of privilege". Which is why, in common with most climate groups, XR argues that it's the system itself that needs to change, not just the way individuals operate within it.

Alice is one of the coordinators of XR's fashion action team, working on ways to clean up what’s arguably the most consumerist industry of all. She explains that their aim is never to shame individuals for their purchasing choices, but to stop companies from producing clothes like that in the first place. Unfortunately in fashion – and, indeed, in most industries – "the current capitalist system provides zero incentive for corporations to change", she explains. "So we have to pursue it at a legislative level."

The idea that individuals, not governments, should somehow be responsible for fighting climate change isn't just misguided. It's more pernicious than that. As Canadian writer Martin Lukacs has pointed out, the world's worst polluters have a vested interest in the neoliberal ideology which convinces people "you are responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse", because as long as the public is talking about individual actions, it's distracted from the real issues.

It's not just climate activists who are convinced by this argument. Fossil fuel companies have quite literally bought into it too. Between 1974 and 2004, ExxonMobil pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a coordinated, 30-year-long campaign of misinformation, spearheaded by weekly "op-ads" in the New York Times.

Designed as conversation starters, these articles were often crude attempts to muddy the waters around established facts (the "Unsettled Science" advertorial from 2000 is an oft-cited example). But "perhaps the[ir] most insidious narrative", according to Amy Westervelt, a journalist and podcaster who's written extensively on the issue, was "instilling in the American public the idea that solving global warming is up to individuals, not systems. That it's about you driving too much, or eating too much meat, or changing your light bulbs – not any sort of broader systemic change."

This misleading narrative is one fossil fuel companies continue to push to this day. In October, seemingly without irony, BP launched a carbon footprint calculator and invited people to make pledges on reducing their individual emissions.

"It's like a sleight of hand magic trick," says Alice Wilby of XR. "While [individuals] are focused on getting something small scale done, and feeling quite rewarded, the larger polluters go unchecked."

A lot has been written in recent weeks about how it was "everyone doing their bit" that flattened the curve of the coronavirus epidemic. Right-wing commentators have fondly invoked the spirit of Dunkirk (somehow missing the point that the public having to bail out a shambolic retreat is hardly an aspirational example of leadership). But although the extent of the collective endeavour has been impressive, the lockdown was far from spontaneous or self-imposed.

If that disastrous week of dithering in the middle of March taught us anything, it's that you need the government to provide clear guidance if you want the kind of coordinated, society-wide response needed to tackle problems of this scale. Radical changes are perfectly possible. You just need elected leaders to actually lead.

"We've shown what societies can do when they want to," the climate activist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot said recently, in a podcast interview about the pandemic. "If [the] government gave us a clear steer and said, 'We've got a climate emergency, we need to do something fast,' we would do it," he argued. "We just need that clear steer."

Links

Three Years And $3 Trillion To Save The World Climate And Economy

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

For a cost of $US3 trillion ($4.35 trillion) spent over three years from 2021 the world could force greenhouse gas emissions into permanent decline and boost global economic growth by 1.1 per cent a year under a post-pandemic economic plan outlined by the International Energy Agency last night.

"Governments have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reboot their economies and bring a wave of new employment opportunities while accelerating the shift to a more resilient and cleaner energy future," said Dr Fatih Birol, the IEA executive director, launching the so-called Sustainable Recovery Plan as part of its flagship World Energy Outlook series.

Dr Fatih Birol. Credit: Sean Davey

The cost would constitute 0.7 per cent of the current world GDP and would include both public and private spending, designed to save or create nine million jobs a year and cut 4.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases – leaving 2019 as the high tide mark for emissions.

The analysis is being released as governments around the world begin the second phase of stimulus spending, designed to rebuild economies rather than simply respond to the unfolding crisis.

"Policymakers are having to make hugely consequential decisions in a very short space of time as they draw up stimulus packages," said Dr Birol. "Our Sustainable Recovery Plan provides them with rigorous analysis and clear advice on how to tackle today's major economic, energy and climate challenges at the same time.

"The plan is not intended to tell governments what they must do. It seeks to show them what they can do."

According to the IEA's analysis, about 3 million jobs have already been lost or are at risk of being lost in the energy sector around the world, with a similar amount lost or at risk in related areas, such as manufacturing and construction.

The largest portion of new jobs created should the plan be adopted would be in retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency and in the electricity sector, particularly in investment grids and renewables, the report says.

According to the report investment new clean energy has benefits that extend beyond the environment or the energy sector, because it boosts employment while delivering more affordable and reliable power to the wider economy.

"This in turn helps to support higher employment and activity levels in all parts of the economy," the report says.

It says that enhancing electricity grids, upgrading hydropower facilities, extending the lifetimes of nuclear power plants, and increasing energy efficiency would improve electricity security by lowering the risk of outages, reducing losses and helping integrate larger shares of variable renewables such as wind and solar power.

The report notes that the stimulus packages introduced by governments after the 2009 financial crisis caused greenhouse gas emissions to spike during the recovery, but that since then the cost of clean energy technologies has fallen dramatically – and some emerging technologies like batteries and hydrogen are ready to scale up.

As a result such an emissions rebound could be avoided if governments adopt the right policies.

Dr Birol said that IEA – which in the past has been criticised for its support for fossil fuels – was seeking to support a "grand coalition" of government and business leaders and investors to help tackle climate change through the pandemic response.

Links