05/11/2020

We Can Avert Irreversible Climate Change

Financial Times - Martin Wolf

Action is both essential and affordable — but it demands international leaders’ co-operation

© James Ferguson

Author
Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 “for services to financial journalism”.
A renewed presidency for Donald Trump is likely to be nowhere more consequential than for climate change. The coming decades will determine whether the threat of damaging and irreversible change is averted, or not.

Without active US engagement, success seems inconceivable. Even with it, it would be unlikely. But, crucially, it would be conceivable. We know what to do and we know, too, that it is affordable. What is unaffordable is not to do what we need to do. But will we? That is the question.

It is indicative of the shift in the perspective of the global policy establishment that a chapter of the IMF’s October World Economic Outlook focuses on “mitigating climate change” — that is, preventing it — via “growth-and-distribution-friendly strategies”. In brief, the IMF insists that humanity can have its cake and eat it: both higher incomes and a safe climate.

As a result of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global average temperatures are already about 1C above pre-industrial levels. On present trends, this could reach around 1.5C in a decade and 2C half a decade later. At that point, warn climate scientists, dangerous and irreversible tipping points in the climate are likely to be passed. Most governments do at least pretend to agree. Thus, in the Paris accords of December 2015, they committed themselves to keeping temperatures below these levels, even if their promises fell short of what was needed to achieve this.





As the IMF notes: “Sizeable and rapid reductions in carbon emissions are needed for this goal to be met; specifically, net carbon emissions need to decline to zero by mid-century.” If this is to happen, emissions need to fall sharply this decade and keep on falling thereafter. That would represent a huge turnround from previous trends.

What sort of programme might deliver this outcome? The answer, suggests the fund, is a combination of front-loaded green investments, aggressive funding of research and development, and a credible long-term commitment to rising carbon prices. This is in line with other studies, notably Making Mission Possible: Delivering a Net-Zero Economy, a September 2020 report from the global Energy Transitions Commission. The latter also emphasises complementary regulation, to accelerate changes in behaviour. Compensation of poorer losers against the higher fuel prices will be needed as well.




Is a move towards zero net emissions by 2050 affordable? The answer is: surprisingly so, particularly given the economically depressed post-Covid starting point. The IMF estimates that achieving this aim might lower world output by 1 per cent, relative to its “baseline” under unchanged policies, once one adds in the benefits of damages avoided. Even so, this must be put in the context of expected cumulative global growth of 120 per cent over the next 30 years. It also ignores the benefits of far lower local pollution.

Some estimates suggest that temperature increases of as much as 5C by 2100, in the absence of mitigation, might lower global output by 25 per cent. This does not take account of the massive non-economic disruptions to humanity, indeed all life, to be expected from such an unprecedentedly rapid upheaval in the climate.


Given these estimates of the modest short-term cost of mitigation against the far greater long-term costs of failure to do so, the argument for action is overwhelming. It becomes more so when one allows for the scale of the uncertainty created by unmitigated climate change, as well as its irreversibility. 

Taking action might make sense even if the costs were many times as large as now expected. So why is it not happening? One explanation is that it involves changes in lifestyles, which we dislike. Another is that it requires thinking in decades, which is unnatural. But the most important explanation is that it requires long-term co-operation, which we usually find impossible.


Co-operation among five players — China, the US, the EU, India and Japan — would deliver a huge part of what is needed. Unfortunately, this hardly looks likely right now. A shift in the US presidency towards someone sane would be a big help. Without that, sanctions against the US might be necessary. But a more aggressive shift by China than planned will also be essential.

If needed policy shifts are to happen soon enough, it will take statesmanship of a high order indeed. Domestically, programmes must compensate the most vulnerable losers, which is a good reason for using a carbon tax. Internationally, leaders must co-operate far more effectively than they did even on the Paris accord. If they are to do what is needed, leaders must overcome two other obstacles to wise action: the fossil-fuels-forever resisters; and the ecological fanatics, who argue in favour of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the end of growth — by tomorrow, please.


The only realistic hope is technocratic problem-solving and co-operative policies. These must be guided by moral purpose, but not infused by fantasies of revolutionary transformations. Cries of “repent, for the end of the world is nigh” will not solve this emergency. Humanity is at its best when it uses its head. Climate is at bottom a crisis of technology and behaviour; it can be tackled only by changing incentives throughout the system.

As I have argued before, this is now extremely urgent. If we want to prevent a dangerous shift in the planet’s climate, we need to act far more decisively than hitherto. We are drinking fossil fuels in the earth’s last-chance saloon. The time has come for humanity to sober up.

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(AU) We Should Stop Backing Losers In The Climate Change Cup

Sydney Morning Herald - Ross Gittins

Author
Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.
The big question for Scott Morrison and his colleagues is whether they want to be a backward-looking or forward-looking government.

Do they want to enshrine Australia as the last giant of the disappearing world of fossil fuels, and pay the price of declining relevance to the changing needs of our trading partners, with all the loss of jobs and growth that would entail?

Illustration: Simon Letch
Or do they have the courage to seize this opportunity to transform Australia into a giant in the production and export of renewable energy and energy-intensive manufactures, with all the new jobs and growth that would bring?

In recent weeks, the main customers for our energy exports – China, Japan and South Korea – have done something we’ve so far refused to do: set a date for their achievement of "carbon neutrality". Zero net emissions of greenhouse gases.

Faced with this, and the free advice from fellow conservative Boris Johnson that he should get with the program, Morrison has defiantly declared that Australia would make its own "sovereign decisions".

This is infantile behaviour from someone wanting to be a leader, like the wilful child who shouts, "You’re not the boss of me!"

It goes without saying that Australia will make its own decisions in its own interests. No other country has the ability or desire to force its will on us. But nor can we force our will on them. They will go the way they consider to be in their best interests, and it's clear most are deciding to get out of using fossil fuels.

We remain free to change our export offering to meet our trading partners’ changing needs, or to tell them all to get stuffed because producing coal and gas is what we’ve always done and intend to keep on doing. Our sovereignty is not under threat. No one can stop us making ourselves poorer.

Australia can be a global source of secure and reliable renewable power. Credit: Photo: Reuters

A report issued on Monday by Pradeep Philip, head of Deloitte Access Economics, called A New Choice attempts to put figures on the choices we face in responding – or failing to respond – to global warming. I’m not a great believer in modelling results, but the report does much to illuminate our possible futures.

In last year’s election, Morrison made much of Bill Shorten’s failure to produce modelling of the cost to the economy of his plan to reduce emissions in 2030 by much more than the Coalition promised to do in the Paris Agreement.

Had he been sufficiently dishonest, Shorten could easily have paid some economic consultancy to fudge up modelling purporting to show the cost would be minor, but for some reason he didn’t. However, Morrison didn’t resist the temptation to quote the results of someone who, over decades of modelling the cost of taking action to reduce emissions, had never failed to find they would be huge.

Our sovereignty is not under threat. No one can stop us making ourselves poorer.

It’s true that the decline of our fossil fuel industries will involve much expensive disruption to those businesses and the lives of their workers, as they seek out new industries in which to invest their capital and find employment. But what’s a lot more obvious today than it was even last year is that this cost will be incurred whether it happens as a result of government policy or because the decline in other countries’ demand for our fossil fuel exports leaves us with what financiers call "stranded assets" – mines and other facilities that used to turn a profit, but now don’t.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Energy Minister Angus Taylor. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Last year it was possible for the cynical and selfish to ask why we should get serious about climate change when no one else was. Today the question is reversed: how can we fail to act when everyone else is?

One of Morrison’s great skills as a politician is his ability to draw our attention away from some elephant he doesn’t want us to notice. In the election he got us to focus on the cost of acting to reduce our emissions. The bigger question we should have been asking is, what’s the cost to the economy if we and the others don’t act to stop future global warming?

Whatever number some modeller puts on that cost, our "black summer" should have left us needing little convincing that climate change is already happening and already imposing great destruction, pain and cost on us. Nor is it hard to believe the costs won’t be limited to drought, heatwaves and bushfires, and will get a lot worse unless we stop adding to the greenhouse gas already in the atmosphere.

On a more positive note, Deloitte adds its support to those experts – including Professor Ross Garnaut and the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood – finding that "in a global economy where emissions-intensive energy is replaced by energy from renewables, Australia can be a global source of secure and reliable renewable power. Countries such as Japan, South Korea and Germany have already come to Australia asking for us to export renewable hydrogen for their own domestic energy consumption."

We have a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to simultaneously boost economic growth, create sustainable jobs [and] build more resilient and cleaner energy systems".

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Born In The Ice Age, Humankind Now Faces The Age Of Fire – And Australia Is On The Frontline

The Guardian - Tom Griffiths

The bushfires and the plague are symptoms of something momentous unfolding on Earth – an acceleration of our impact on nature

‘For the beleaguered Coalition government, Covid seemed to provide the escape it wanted from climate politics.’ Photograph: Adwo/Alamy

Author
Tom Griffiths is a Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Director of the Centre for Environmental History at the ANU.
This essay is part of an anthology, Fire, Flood and Plague, edited by Sophie Cunningham to be published by Penguin Random House in December.
What has been the most shocking event of 2020? Was it awakening on New Year’s Day to more news of terror in Australia’s southern forests, to the realisation that the future was suddenly here, that this spring and summer of relentless bushfire was a planetary event? Was it the silent transmission of Covid-19, already on the loose and soon to overwhelm the world and change the very fabric of daily life everywhere at once? Or was it the surging race riots and protests, especially across America, where police brutality triggered grief, anger and outrage about the inequality and injustice still faced by black people? Could we even distinguish them from each other, this overlapping sequence of horrors? 

Fire, plague and racism are always with us, percolating away, periodically erupting, sometimes converging. They came together in the colonisation of Australia when the conquering British brought smallpox, scorned Indigenous rights and fought Aboriginal fire with gunfire. Systemic racism is the virus, declared Black Lives Matter protesters.

In mid-June the historian Geoffrey Blainey, writing in the Australian in defence of colonial statues, looked back on the first day of the year. His opening gambit was this sentence: “On New Year’s Day, no major economist, no famous medical scientist and no political leader had predicted that this would be a tumultuous year.” Only a defiant climate sceptic could have been so uncurious about the events unfolding that day and so dismissive of expertise. 

For on New Year’s Eve, the savage summer had pulsed into frightening ferocity on the New South Wales south coast and in East Gippsland. Eight people died that day in the fires. Sleepless tourists and residents faced the dawn of the new year without power, fuel or mobile-phone reception, and some without homes. The day brought evacuations, road closures, panic buying, collective fear and a surge of dire predictions. For months, experts and bush residents had been preparing for a tumultuous fire season and here on the first day of 2020 was a frightening climax.

Throughout 2019, fire experts had pleaded with the federal government to hold a bushfire summit to prepare for the dreaded summer, but the prime minister had refused. The crisis could not be acknowledged in case it gave credence to the need for climate action.

As if neglect and omission in the face of the fire threat were not enough, Coalition politicians and their apologists then hastily encouraged lies about the causes of the fires, declaring that they were started by arsonists and that greenies had prevented hazard-reduction burns. Yet these fires were overwhelmingly started by dry lightning in remote terrain, and hazard-reduction burning is constrained by a warming climate. The effort to stymie sensible policy reform after the fires was as pernicious as the failure to plan in advance of them.

Scott Morrison attends a state memorial honouring victims of the Australian bushfires in Sydney. Photograph: Loren Elliott/Reuters
There was barely a moment to breathe between bushfires and Covid. Australians had been in lockdown for months even before the year began, fighting fires that had started at the end of winter, cowering indoors from smoke, heat and ash, and wearing masks on their brief forays outside. People spoke courageously of “the new normal” but did not yet understand that “normal” was gone. Just as they finally stepped outside to sniff the clearer autumn air, it was declared dangerous again. Their masks were still in their pockets.

Despite the connections between these crises, politicians were keen to separate them, as if one blessedly cancelled out the other, not least because the pandemic gave the prime minister a chance to reset after his disastrous summer. Instead of forcing handshakes he was forced to withhold them. For the beleaguered Coalition government, Covid seemed to provide the escape it wanted from climate politics.

Australians were forbidden from talking about the obvious relationship between bushfires and climate, so how will we manage to interrogate the common origins of climate change and the pandemic? The fires and the plague are both symptoms of something momentous that is unfolding on Earth: a concentration and acceleration of the impact of humans on nature. As the environmental scientists Inger Andersen and Johan Rockström argued in June: “Covid-19 is more than an illness. It is a symptom of the ailing health of our planet.”

Or, as the US science writer David Quammen succinctly put it: “We made the coronavirus epidemic.” Not in a laboratory but in the scary, runaway experiment humans are conducting with Earth. Historians and scientists predicted the unpleasant surprises. Like most infectious diseases in the history of humanity, Covid-19 spilled over from wild animals to humans and became a pandemic because of ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, the illegal wildlife trade and increased human mobility. “So when you’re done worrying about this outbreak,” Quammen warns, “worry about the next one. Or do something about the current circumstances.”

Doing something about it means more than finding a vaccine; it means urgently addressing the causes of the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis. It means understanding how dire the current rupture is in the long-term relationship between humans and nature.

Could people be alive down there?

In November 2019, as forest fires worked their way down the eastern seaboard, I walked for a week in the Australian Alps, my annual pilgrimage to the high country. The wild granite tors, the delicate beauty of the snow gums and the exhilarating freedom of the alpine herb fields have always lifted my spirits. In late spring and early summer this landscape still carries the memory of snow, of a magic, ethereal otherworld I came to know on skis as a child. Slicks of ice remained tucked under crags. It is a place apart, of subtle colours and sharp air, where ranges of cerulean blue cascade in receding waves to the horizon. But this time the mountains had all gone, swallowed by an apocalypse.

The entrance to Kosciuszko national park after it was closed during January’s bushfirees. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

From high in the Kosciuszko national park, I felt like a refugee from the suffering world of the plains, finding solace in the snowgrass and minty alpine forests. I could see nothing of the world below. In every direction I looked down upon a strange, suffocating orange blanket. This was no mystic lake of fog that would evaporate in the morning sunshine; it was something sinister and malevolent, infusing every scarp and canyon with its sickness. There below me, Australia was burning. Could people still be alive down there, in such dense, acrid smoke? Could they breathe? In the mornings, a temperature inversion kept the ugly blanket below me, but each afternoon my eyes started smarting as smoke infiltrated the alpine valleys, turning the sun red. That smoke killed 10 times more people than the flames. It was coming for me and I couldn’t go any higher.

This experience of looking down on a burning world brought home to me, perhaps more forcibly than facing the flames below, what the future might hold. One way to make sense of this critical tipping point is the idea that we are now living in the Anthropocene, having left behind the relatively stable Holocene epoch, the period since the last ice age. The Anthropocene – the age of humans – places us on par with other geophysical forces such as orbital variations, glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid strikes, and recognises our power to change the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its stratigraphy. Earth was first jolted into the Anthropocene by the industrial revolution in the late 18th century, when people began digging up and burning fossil fuels.

Australian National University historian Tom Griffiths. Photograph: Black Inc Books
But as I gazed down on the smoke, I remembered an alternative name for this era that has been proposed by the historian Stephen Pyne. It is the Pyrocene: a fire age, comparable to past ice ages. The Pyrocene puts fire at the centre of the human ecological story and contrasts it with ice. Fire is alive and ice is dead. Fire is at the heart of human civilisation, for we are a fire species. Yet we are also, paradoxically, creatures of the ice. We were born in the Pleistocene, a geological epoch that began 2.5m years ago and introduced a series of rhythmic ice ages – or, to be precise, one long ice age punctuated by regular brief interludes of interglacial warmth. The repetitive glaciations of the Pleistocene, which demanded innovation and versatility, promoted the emergence of humanity on Earth.

The Pyrocene is a more radical category than the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene declares the end of the latest interglacial period. The Pyrocene goes further, by declaring the end of the much longer and older Pleistocene, the whole epoch of ice ages. It announces the end of the age of ice, the beginning of the age of fire, and the end of what was truly the age of humans. Not the beginning of the age of humans, as is suggested by the smugly named Anthropocene, but the end. And Australia is on the frontline of the Pyrocene. This is what I pondered as I watched the acrid orange blanket snake up the alpine gullies towards me. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end? Is this what the Pyrocene looks like? Nowhere to go but up, and no up to go to?

The Anthropocene is primarily a geological signature, whereas the Pyrocene is biological; they are both acts of historical imagination that rupture the conventional periods within which we imagine our existence. They ask us to see human history not as something defined by documents or brought into being by the invention of writing, but as a diverse cultural odyssey that is also a biological story – even a geological one. If humans have become so powerful that they can change the condition of the planet’s oceans and atmosphere, then we urgently need to think in deeper time, on a scale where we might better understand the environmental rhythms we are so profoundly disturbing.

Before and after: the 46,000-year-old Juukan Gorge site that was destroyed by Rio Tinto in May. Photograph: PKKP Aboriginal Corporation

And yet, at the beginning of Reconciliation Week in Australia, amid the climate and Covid emergencies and as race riots escalated in the US, the corporate mining giant Rio Tinto detonated 46,000 years of human history at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara. It was an act of sacrilege committed even as George Floyd’s death unleashed avowals around the world that Black Lives Matter. In the age of Covid, people rallying against black deaths in custody donned masks and carried banners inscribed with Floyd’s final words: “I can’t breathe.”

Several years before Juukan Gorge was destroyed, archaeologists found a 4,000-year-old belt made of plaited hair in one of its rock shelters. Its DNA was associated with today’s Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura traditional owners. Chris Salisbury, Rio Tinto’s chief executive of iron ore, apologised for “the distress” caused by the destruction of the site but not for the act itself, which he defended. Here is staggering evidence of Australia’s continuing inability to empathise or identify with the peoples who discovered this continent and who today are still fighting for recognition, justice, respect and equality before the law.

It is confirmation that in the 21st century our country remains a colony, still unable to accept (as the Uluru statement puts it) that “this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood”. The deep environmental and cultural inheritance of this continent, with all the wisdom and perspective it might offer about living in this place, about survival, species and cultural burning, about fires, plagues and rising seas, is not yet important enough to Australians. When will it be, if not now? The insidious smoke is coming.

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