(AU) It's Not Too Late For Australia To Pivot On Climate Change - Tim Flannery

Sydney Morning Herald - Tim Flannery

Author Professor Tim Flannery is chief councillor of the Climate Council. Note The Climate Ambition Summit is on December 12.

This time last year the federal government was caught dangerously off-guard. Having ignored the clear warnings, our national leadership was woefully unprepared as vast swathes of Australia went up in flames in a disaster fuelled by climate change.

A year on, the government is sailing headlong into a different kind of crisis, having failed once again to read the signs. With all our major trading partners and strategic allies now stepping up their commitments to climate action, Australia faces a diplomatic firestorm, not to mention decades of economic fallout, if it fails to act.

Vast swathes of Australia went up in flames in a disaster fuelled by climate change. Credit: Nick Moir

This weekend’s Climate Ambition Summit is set to up the stakes for Australia even more, with significant new announcements expected.

Just a few months ago, only a fifth of Australia’s two-way trade was with countries committed to net-zero emissions by around mid-century. Today, with more and more countries seeing clean energy and jobs as the path to economic recovery, that figure has shot up to over 70 per cent. The three biggest buyers of Australian coal and gas – China, Japan and South Korea – have all now signalled their intention to get out of fossil fuels, casting a cloud over three-quarters of Australia’s fossil fuel exports, worth a whopping $76 billion.

Just as importantly, the world’s three biggest emitters – the US, China and EU – are all strengthening their 2030 targets. It is, after all, the pace of emissions reductions over the coming decade that will prove decisive in whether we avert a full-blown climate catastrophe or sentence our children to a barely survivable future.

The federal government’s stubborn refusal to either commit to net-zero emissions before mid-century or to strengthen its extraordinarily weak 2030 target means we are now a total outlier among comparable countries, leaving our industries and economy vulnerable.

The world’s three biggest emitters – the US, China and the EU – are all strengthening their 2030 targets. Credit: Getty Images

Prime Minister Morrison’s announcement that Australia no longer plans to use dodgy accounting tricks to meet its current and clearly inadequate 2030 target is an early indication that the government is starting to feel the heat. Though a mere announcement that we no longer plan on cheating will not be enough to convince the international community we are serious. Having watched Australia burn, our international peers continue to look at our recalcitrance with a mix of impatience, anger, and utter bewilderment.

Closer to home, Pacific leaders are growing angrier with Australia for recklessly endangering their future. Significantly, Australia’s anxiety over China’s growing presence in the region means Pacific Islands countries have more leverage than in the past. If we want to remain the Pacific’s security partner of choice, then we are going to have to start doing more to tackle the global climate crisis.

In recent years, Australia had some cover from the US in international negotiations. We were able to hide behind our key ally’s own deeply flawed stance on climate. By contrast, the Biden-Harris administration intends to use every tool at its disposal to push other countries to raise their ambition.


Prime Minister Scott Morrison is facing pressure to make significant climate policy pledges ahead of a United Nations summit with world leaders.

Similarly, while we look forward to seeing more detail on how China plans to meet its net-zero pledge, the favourite excuse of Australia’s naysayers – that there’s little point in raising a finger until China, the world’s biggest emitter, starts getting out of coal – makes even less sense than before. In a further sign of the growing economic risks of Australia’s inaction, the EU – our third-largest trading partner – is on course to place carbon tariffs on imports from 2023, if the producing country does not have a carbon price of its own.

In hindsight, the federal government should surely have seen that such a storm was brewing. Fortunately, it is not too late for a pivot. Australia has everything it needs to flourish in a post-carbon world. We have an unparalleled natural advantage when it comes to developing a renewable export industry and tapping into growing global demand for zero/low-carbon manufactured goods.

Leadership from the states and territories has ensured some welcome progress on renewable energy despite the federal government’s failures. Though with other countries now working quickly to establish new clean industries, without stronger national leadership Australia will soon be left behind.

The Climate Ambition Summit – coming on the five-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement – is but the first in a series of major political moments leading up to COP26, which will take place in Glasgow next November. Only those countries with new targets and actions to announce are being given a platform.

It’s no exaggeration that decisions made between now and next November, including on how governments choose to direct the trillions of further spending on economic renewal, may be our very last chance at leaving a future in which our children can survive and thrive.

As John Kerry, the newly appointed US Special Envoy on Climate Change, has said: “At the global meeting in Glasgow one year from now, all nations must raise ambition together, or we will all fail together. And failure is not an option.”

Links

• Tim Flannery warns of adverse climate impacts if South32 coal mine expansion approved
• Australia, the climate can’t wait for the next federal election. It’s time to take control
• Malcolm Turnbull says a 'toxic troika' is stopping the Morrison government from acting on climate change
• The megafires and pandemic expose the lies that frustrate action on climate change
• We need to talk to our kids about the climate crisis. But courage fails me when I look at my son
• I now look back on my 20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure
• Australia's 'black summer' bushfires showed the impact of human-wrought change
• Tim Flannery: people are shocked about climate change but they should be angry
• Faced with catastrophe, David Attenborough and Tim Flannery search for a cure

(AU) Why Can’t Australia Just Trust The Market On Climate Change?

The Diplomat - Grant Wyeth

Renewable energy technologies have become better and cheaper, but Australia’s politics haven’t embraced the energy market’s transition.

Pixabay

Author Grant Wyeth is a researcher at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.

Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States over the last four years has provided cover for Australia’s recalcitrance toward action on climate change.

However, the incoming administration of Joe Biden, who has plans to take the issue of climate change more seriously, will place greater pressure on Australia to do likewise. Canberra will find it difficult to avoid this state-level pressure; Australia will also face difficulties in avoiding pressure coming from the energy market itself.

Until recently, the global energy market was dominated by fossil fuels — for a long time, no other technology could produce energy in a cheaper way. However, over the past decade this reality has shifted. Renewable energy technologies have considerably improved and the cost of production and delivery has become much cheaper. In many places in the world, power generation from renewable energy sources is now cheaper than power generation from fossil fuels. 

This trajectory could be maintained — and could flourish locally in a country with geographic advantages for both solar and wind generation — if Australia’s energy industry had a stable policy framework for the market to function within. Yet the Australian government has persistently proved unable to develop such a framework.

There have been attempts. The most recent effort was the National Energy Guarantee (NEG). But these attempts continue to come against the internal politics of the Liberal Party, making them impossible to implement. The NEG led to a party revolt that removed Malcolm Turnbull from the prime ministership in 2018. 

If we are being generous to the government, there are genuine economic concerns for the regions whose economies are reliant on fossil fuel generation. But any serious plan to combat the effects of climate change will also address these regional economic effects, as the jobs created by the renewable industry may not have the same geographic distribution as the existing fossil fuel industry.

However, the Australian government has refused to confront this reality, instead deciding to just kick this problem down the road in the hope someone else will discover a solution. This isn’t helped by there being distinct electoral calculations for political parties attached to fossil fuel generating regions, especially in Queensland, where Australian elections are typically won and lost. 

Yet the Liberal Party hasn’t shown any similar concern for other industries whose decline has come via market forces. There were regions that relied heavily on the manufacturing of motor vehicles, but when the market no longer saw an advantage in manufacturing cars in Australia in 2017 the Liberal-led government did not seek to intervene. 

This remains one of the great riddles of Australian politics: Why is the party of free markets so opposed to the forces and mechanisms of the market in the energy sector? The electoral calculations are understandable as political parties will always place their ability to win votes above any philosophical consistency.

But there is also something else going on, something deeply psychological that is preventing the party from acknowledging the reality of climate change. This is driving the Liberal Party to undermine its own adherence to liberal economics by protecting industries that are rapidly losing viability. 

In an essay I wrote for Quillette in September, I argued that the pace of change over the past several decades has proved highly confronting to what British philosopher Michael Oakeshott identified as the “conservative disposition.”

My broad argument was that it has been the mechanisms of increasingly free markets driving this rapid economic and social change, and it has been conservative parties themselves who have been the primary drivers of these economic ideas and structures. The central point is that conservative parties have failed to align their political ideals to their psychological needs. 

The threats posed by climate change are also highly confronting to those who value stability and have an instinctive suspicion toward change in general. The fear for those of a conservative disposition is that human beings will need to reorganize themselves in such a dramatic fashion to mitigate the effects of climate change that people’s current comfortable existences will be upended.

Faced with this potential disruptive prospect, their reaction has instead been to simply deny the phenomenon. This has led to Australia’s conservative parties and their media allies developing a political identity built around this denialism, making it now almost impossible for the issue to now be approached as one of “economics and engineering,” as has become the common phrase used by Turnbull.  

The current trajectory toward more affordable renewable energy is a result of the energy market doing what conservative parties over the past 50 years have told us that markets do: They find solutions to problems and make these solutions cheaper and easier to access.

While these market forces do often extinguish industries and impact regions that are reliant on these industries, they also offer considerable new opportunities, and in doing so they make humanity’s ability to confront its major challenges often far less dramatic than they may otherwise be perceived to be.

Yet an obstinate government that actively seeks to hinder these market forces will prevent Australia from taking advantage of these opportunities, and increase the continued serious threats that climate change presents to the country, as well as to its more precarious neighbors. 

Links

• Australia still back of the global pack on climate, despite best efforts of states
• Taylor avoids mention of bushfires as Australia given a zero for climate policy
• Chart of the day: Renewables are increasingly cheaper than coal
• How government strangled the National Energy Market
• 4 astonishing signs of coal’s declining economic viability
• Renewable Energy Is Now The Cheapest Option - Even Without Subsidies
• Renewable Energy Job Boom Creates Economic Opportunity As Coal Industry Slumps

The World’s Rich Need To Cut Their Carbon Footprint By A Factor Of 30 To Slow Climate Change, U.N. Warns

Washington Post - Brady Dennis | Chris Mooney | Sarah Kaplan

Despite sharp drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic, the world remains on pace for catastrophic warming in coming decades

Students gather at John Marshall Park in Washington to protest climate change during a climate strike on Sept. 20, 2019. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)

The world’s wealthy will need to reduce their carbon footprints by a factor of 30 to help put the planet on a path to curb the ever-worsening impacts of climate change, according to new findings published Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program.

Currently, the emissions attributable to the richest 1 percent of the global population account for more than double those of the poorest 50 percent. Shifting that balance, researchers found, will require swift and substantial lifestyle changes, including decreases in air travel, a rapid embrace of renewable energy and electric vehicles, and better public planning to encourage walking, bicycle riding and public transit.

But individual choices are hardly the only key to mitigating the intensifying consequences of climate change.

Wednesday’s annual “emissions gap” report, which assesses the difference between the world’s current path and measures needed to manage climate change, details how the world remains woefully off target in its quest to slow the Earth’s warming. The drop in greenhouse gas emissions during this year’s pandemic, while notable, will have almost no impact on slowing the warming that lies ahead unless humankind drastically alters its policies and behavior, the report finds.

Instead, nations would need to “roughly triple” their current emissions-cutting pledges to limit the Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average — a central aim of the Paris climate agreement. To reach the loftier goal of holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the report found, countries would need to increase their targets at least fivefold. That goal in particular would require rapid and profound changes in how societies travel, produce electricity and eat.

“We’d better make these shifts, because while covid has been bad, there is hope at the end of the tunnel with a vaccine,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said in an interview. “But there is no vaccine for the planet.”

Global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to fall by about 7 percent during 2020 — a significant change driven by the spread of the coronavirus and the shutdowns that accompanied it, which had a particularly strong impact on travel. But that temporary dip probably will have only a “negligible long-term impact” on climate change in the years ahead, the U.N. report found.

If the drop in emissions caused by the pandemic proves an isolated event rather than the beginning of a major trend, the episode will prevent only .01 degree Celsius (.018 degree Fahrenheit) of warming by the year 2050, the report found.

Last year’s “emissions gap” report found that humans would need to collectively cut emissions by close to pandemic amounts (7.6 percent) every year to begin to meet the Paris agreement’s most ambitious climate goals. That is nowhere near to becoming a reality.

“Are we on track to bridging the gap? Absolutely not,” the new report bluntly states.

Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen about 1.4 percent annually on average over the past decade. Last year saw the highest global emissions ever recorded, at 59 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, a category that includes not only the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, but also methane and other climate-warming agents.

Based on countries’ current promises, U.N. researchers found, the world remains on a trajectory to experience a temperature rise this century of about 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) — an amount that many experts say would have catastrophic effects on much of the planet.

Bending that disturbing curve in a more sustainable direction will require fundamental, unprecedented changes on the part of leaders around the globe. But as Wednesday’s report makes clear, individual behavior also has a role to play. And the wealthy — whom the report defines as those with the highest 1 percent of incomes globally, or more than $109,000 per year — bear the greatest responsibility for helping fuel such a shift. (The “1 percent” in the United States, a wealthy country, are considerably richer than average, with annual household incomes above $500,000.)

Wealthy people are more likely to travel frequently by car and plane and to own large, energy-intensive homes. They tend to have meat-rich diets that require large amounts of greenhouse gases to produce. They buy the bulk of carbon-costly appliances, clothing, furniture and other luxury items.

Residents of the United States — the world’s largest historical source of planet-warming emissions — have some of the most carbon-intensive lifestyles. The carbon footprint of the average American is about 17.6 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents a year, about twice the footprint of a person living in the European Union or the United Kingdom, and almost 10 times that of the average Indian citizen’s 1.7 tons annually.

If the world is to achieve the kind of sweeping societal transformation needed, limiting consumption “will be really important,” said Surabi Menon, vice president of global intelligence at the ClimateWorks foundation and a member of the report’s steering committee.

And yet, although it is hard to argue with the numbers overall on the emissions consequences of more affluent lifestyles, this approach to rapidly changing people’s ways would likely prove contentious.

“Shaming people and nations and demanding they change never has or will work,” said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell LLP, a law firm that works with a variety of energy companies in multiple sectors. “What is necessary is creating modestly increasing political, technology and cultural successes that build upon each other to create meaningful overall change.”

Still, this year’s pandemic might offer clues about how humans could achieve those cuts, Menon added. People are flying less, teleworking more and making fewer luxury purchases. “The question is, how do you keep these new behaviors we learned this year, but in a more sustainable way?” she said.

The latest sobering snapshot of the world’s uphill battle to halt warming comes amid constant reminders of the urgency of the problem, as well as ongoing uncertainty about whether world leaders can summon the political will to take the actions scientists say are necessary.

Already, 2020 is on pace to be one of the warmest years on record, marked not only by a crippling pandemic but also devastating wildfires, scorching droughts and a startling number of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin. A separate report Tuesday, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that the Arctic as a whole is warming at nearly three times the rate of the rest of the world.

“To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in an address last week at Columbia University, in which he pleaded that world leaders act with more urgency. He pointed to the collapse of biodiversity, the bleaching of coral reefs, and “apocalyptic” fires and floods. He noted that global emissions are 62 percent higher now than when international climate negotiations began three decades ago.

“Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal,” Guterres warned. “Nature always strikes back, and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.”

Wednesday’s report does not paint an entirely bleak view of the future.

Governments around the world have spent $12 trillion boosting their economies in the wake of the pandemic — an unprecedented injection of public funds. The authors found that if leaders around the world seize the opportunity to invest heavily in renewable energy and other green infrastructure as part of a post-coronavirus stimulus, the world could trim as much as 25 percent from its predicted 2030 emissions.

“We are in the middle of the pandemic, and recovery packages can still be shaped to solve the economic and the climate crises at the same time,” Niklas Höhne, a German climatologist and founding partner of NewClimate Institute, and a contributing author to Wednesday’s report, said in an email. “This is the one chance we have. Governments will not spend this much money again in 10 years.”

Still, the report found little evidence that most countries, at least so far, have prioritized climate-friendly stimulus; instead, they have mainly funded existing industries, many of them carbon-intensive. “Large shares of resources still support fossil fuels with waivers of environmental regulations and bailouts of fossil fuel ... companies without environmental conditions,” Höhne said.

A growing number of countries have committed to eliminate their net emissions entirely by mid-century. The report notes that at least 126 nations, representing 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have either announced or are considering such a goal. That number is likely to grow in the coming months, with a similar pledge widely expected from the United States under the incoming Biden-Harris administration.

Although such promises offer hope of a dramatic shift in the next decades, most nations have yet to back them up with concrete action.

“What’s very exciting is that countries have now come out with these declarations on net zero,” said Andersen, the UNEP chief. “Now, they need to sit down and do the hard work of telling us how they are going to get there.”

In his speech last week, Guterres pleaded for a more equitable, thoughtful world to emerge from the pandemic. “We cannot go back to the old normal of inequality, injustice and heedless dominion over the Earth,” he said.

And yet, studies have shown that the economic impacts of the coronavirus have most battered developing countries, the working poor, women and racial minorities. In the United States, billionaires have seen their wealth grow this year while millions of Americans head into the holidays unemployed, behind on rent and dependent on food banks for their next meal.

Research suggests that greater inequality within countries makes them less able to tackle climate change. The more wealth is concentrated at the top, the more powerful people tend to insulate themselves from the effects of warming and resist meaningful climate action. To make the extraordinary changes necessary in the years to come, the United States and other nations will need to overcome the habits of the past.

“We worry about the recovery being K-shaped: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and inequality keeps widening,” Menon said. “I’m very mindful that those kinds of inequalities can really hamper any kind of climate progress that is made.”

Links

• Earth Is Still Sailing Into Climate Chaos, Report Says, but Its Course Could Shift
• The World Is Headed for 3 Degrees of Warming This Century, U.N. Report Warns—But a Green Pandemic Recovery Could Offer Hope
• Australia will beat 2030 emissions targets if the tech road map works
• UN report rightfully shames Australia over fossil fuel plans
• 'Net zero' climate targets? Read the fine print
• Happy Talk Vs Hard Truth — Why Fossil Fuel Production Cuts Are So Not Happening
• 'Tick tock': U.N. climate talks end with fresh doubts over global unity
• Much of the American West is on fire, illustrating the dangers of a climate of extremes
• Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world