20/12/2020

(AU) 'Zero Return': Government Savaged Over Taxpayer Grants To Open Up New Gas Basin In Australia

The Guardian -  |

Coalition funding for gas exploration in Northern Territory labelled a costly plan ‘for a climate catastrophe’

Resources minister, Keith Pitt, has repeated claims the Beetaloo basin is hot property but critics say grants to help explore gas deposits will return nothing to taxpayers.
The Morrison government has been accused of embarking on an “expensive plan for a climate catastrophe” after it announced it would pay the gas industry up to $50m to speed up exploration in the Northern Territory.
The commitment, revealed on Thursday, also prompted warnings that taxpayers’ money could flow offshore to companies linked to tax havens and a Russian oligarch.

Keith Pitt, the federal minister for resources, water and northern Australia, said the government would offer grants to accelerate exploration and development in the NT’s Beetaloo basin, which lies south of Katherine and has been estimated to hold more than 200,000 petajoules of gas.

He said Beetaloo had been described as “the hottest play on the planet” with the potential to be a world-class gas resource that could transform the NT economy and create 6,000 jobs over 20 years.

The basin’s potential as a gas source has attracted the attention of investors from around the globe, including a company that has Viktor Vekselberg – a Russian oligarch who collects jewel-encrusted Faberge eggs and has been sanctioned by the US – as a major shareholder, and another company, whose ownership is unclear and is registered in the US tax haven state of Delaware.

Pitt said the funding was “a key, early step” in the government’s promised “gas-fired recovery” which received $28.9m in the budget. The grants would apply only to work that occurred before June 2022 and could cover up to 25% of a company’s exploration costs, capped at $7.5m per gas well.

The minister’s statement on Thursday did not mention the government’s climate commitments, which have been repeatedly criticised for their lack of ambition compared with other countries.

Gas is often described as having half the emissions of coal but studies have suggested it could be significantly more than that due to methane – a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas – leaking during extraction and transportation.

Climate campaigners at 350 Australia said the grants for the gas industry were a “shameful waste of public funds”. The group released an analysis that suggested the potential emissions from five gas basins the Morrison government would like to open up could cancel out the government’s climate policies five times over.

Lucy Manne, the group’s chief executive, said the government’s strategic gas basin plans were “an expensive plan for climate catastrophe”. “They should be investing in creating secure jobs in renewable energy, green manufacturing, and planning for an economic recovery that invests in climate solutions,” she said.

Bruce Robertson, a gas analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the grants would bring “zero return” for taxpayers.

He said there was at least $11bn in gas assets for sale in Australia, with companies including ExxonMobil and Origin Energy struggling to find buyers, and the NT was a remote market unlikely to produce cheap product unless it was heavily subsidised.

“The gas industry is not even investing itself so why would the federal government?” he said.

Rod Campbell, research director with the Australia Institute, said subsidising oil and gas made little sense from either an economic or climate perspective. He said the gas industry employed fewer than one person for every $1m spent, while investment in health and education employed more than 10.

The Russian investor Vekselberg is, through an investment company, the biggest shareholder in Falcon Oil & Gas, a Canadian company headquartered in Ireland that holds a gas tenement in the basin.

The billionaire was among oligarchs sanctioned by the US Treasury in April 2018 when it froze their US assets and prohibited Americans from doing business with them over a number of matters including the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Falcon’s second biggest shareholder, Australian company Sweetpea Petroleum, owns 6.28% of the group. It is owned by Longview Petroleum in the US state of Delaware, which is regarded a tax and secrecy haven. Its ultimate owners are unclear.

Last week, the Australian Financial Review reported that Sweetpea is to be sold to another Beetaloo basin player, Tamboran Resources, in a deal that will give Longview almost 30% of Tamboran’s shares and a seat on the board.

Clancy Moore, the national director of the Publish What You Pay coalition, said the government “must rule out subsidies going to companies in the Beetaloo basin using secrecy or low-tax jurisdictions including Delaware and Ireland”.

“The Australian public should be alarmed that precious government money could be flowing to a Russian oligarch and anonymous company owners,” Moore said. “Any company that receives public subsidies must adhere to the highest levels of transparency and these companies are simply hiding in the shadows.”

Concern last week about Australia’s failure to live up to the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement led to Scott Morrison being refused a speaking slot at a global climate ambition summit hosted by Britain, France and the UN.

In addition to the gas exploration grants, government MPs including the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, this week flagged they may set up an inquiry to grill financial regulators and banks over plans to reduce lending to, or insuring of, projects considered an investment risk as the world moves to cut emissions.

The government also announced $2.5bn in support for struggling oil refineries. A leaked draft electric vehicle strategy showed it was not proposing policies to reduce the cost of buying a clean car or to ban the sale of fossil-fuel cars, as planned in other countries including Britain, Japan and Norway.

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(NZ) Climate Change Refugees: The Landmark Case Of Teitiota V New Zealand

Environment Journal - Melanie Desert

Climate change causes immeasurable damage world-wide; however, its effects are not felt evenly throughout the world and small Pacific island populations are some of the most vulnerable. 

Photo Credit – MartyNZ (Pixabay)
Economically developed nations continue to cause environmental degradation yet are often able to remain comfortably removed from the consequences of their actions and decisions. It is within this paradox that the case of Teitiota v New Zealand has occurred.

In this landmark case, the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) ruled, for the first time, that expelling an individual to a place where they may be exposed to life threatening risks due to the adverse effects of climate change could violate the right to life.

In 2013, Ioane Teitiota (the claimant) and his family left their home on the small atoll of Tarawa, part of the Pacific nation of Kiribati, for New Zealand, where they applied for refugee status on the basis that climate change had devastated Kiribati so much so that remaining there posed a risk to their lives.

The Pacific ocean has experienced a great degree of sea level rise, double the global average, which has meant low lying islands like Kiribati (only 2-3 metres above sea level) face complete inundation.

With increasing sudden on-set environmental events such as storm surges and tropical storms, which now occur 3-4 times a month, much of the land is becoming uninhabitable.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that within the next decade Kiribati will be wiped off the map if global temperatures and sea level continue to rise.

In the meantime, extensive flooding continues to cause salination of arable land and fresh water, as well as overcrowding in the only areas of Kiribati that remain habitable, causing violent land disputes and allowing disease to spread more quickly than usual.

The contamination of fresh water supplies has left approximately 60% of Kiribati’s population to have to obtain drinking water from national rations. And, because many Kiribatian families, including Teitota’s, rely on subsistence agriculture and fishing, the population’s health has been deteriorating, with deficiencies in vitamin A, malnutrition and fish poisoning.

Climate change had exacerbated the ability for Teitiota and his family to live with dignity in Kiribati; they were thus forced to migrate to New Zealand and seek protection, cutting loose their deep cultural ties with Pacific island life.

 Claiming to be a climate change refugee

At first instance, the Immigration and Protection Tribunal in New Zealand rejected Teitiota’s asylum claim as a climate change refugee. The Tribunal decided that Teitiota did not objectively face a real risk of being persecuted if he and his family were returned to Kiribati, the necessary proof to qualify for asylum.

This decision was upheld by the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. And so Teitiota and his family were deported to Kiribati.

Teitiota then took his case to the HRC, claiming that by forcibly returning him to Kiribati, New Zealand had violated his right to life under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Covenant).

The HRC had to determine whether New Zealand, which is party to the Covenant, had breached its duty not to expel Teitiota if there was sufficient evidence that there was ‘a risk of imminent, or likely, risk of arbitrary deprivation of life upon return to Kiribati’. So being, a loss of life did not have to occur to breach Article 6.

To determine whether the duty had been breached, the HRC considered 3 points.
  1. Had the New Zealand courts given proper consideration to climate change when deciding whether Teitiota could remain? – it concluded, yes.
  2. Was Kiribati taking steps to reduce the impact of climate change? – again it said yes, as the 2007 National Adaptive Programme of Action set policies and goals to address the water crisis.
  3. Finally, was the threat to life ‘imminent’ (the minimum threshold required to establish a breach of Article 6)? Whilst the HRC accepted Teitiota’s evidence that ‘sea level rise is likely to render Kiribati uninhabitable’, it decided that because this could take 10-15 years, there was still enough time for action to be taken by Kiribati and other nations to mitigate the crisis.
The ruling and its impact

Overall, Teitiota was unable to establish that his right to life had been violated by New Zealand.

However, two judges disagreed with majority of the HRC, urging that protecting the right to life meant upholding the sanctity of life and human dignity. They argued the HRC had placed an unreasonable burden of proof on Teitiota to show he had no access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

One of the dissenting judges, Duncan Laki Muhumuza, felt the difficulty in accessing fresh water and the fact that some deaths were occurring in Kiribati should be enough to reach the burden of proof. Teitiota’s child was already suffering from blood poisoning caused by the water.

‘It would indeed be counterintuitive to the protection of life’ to wait for a complete lack of water and for deaths to be frequent before the burden of proof is met.

The other dissenting, Vasilka Sancin, said: it should be Kiribati’s responsibility to demonstrate it takes ‘positive action to protect life from risks arising from known natural hazards’.

The HRC has determined outside this case that action would include providing access to food, water, sanitation, housing and electricity, along with disaster management plans which prepare the nation for climate change disasters affecting the right to life. Yet in fact, water and sanitation policies in Kiribati are yet to be implemented.

By creating these human rights obligations against the backdrop of climate change, the HRC reiterates the interdependence between states fulfilling social and economic rights, as well as civil and political rights, such as the right to life.

Yet it is perplexing that such obligations are placed on small, island nations which are still developing, particularly given that the main contributors to climate change are the developed nations. In response to this reality, the HRC ruling provided some unprecedented observations.

It established: ‘environmental degradation, climate change and unsustainable development constitute some of the most pressing and serious threats to life’, and if concrete national and international action is not taken, then individuals may be exposed to a violation of their rights to life in certain places, triggering the obligation of states like New Zealand not to forcibly return them.

In other words, by verifying that a state’s obligation not to forcibly return someone can arise, an interest is created in requiring one another to take action to curb the adverse effects of climate change on people’s lives, else nations will have to grant climate refugees protection in the future.

And the ruling makes a call to arms to all nations tackle environmental destruction as one; Laki Muhumuza felt New Zealand’s action was more like ‘forcing a drowning person back into a sinking vessel’.

This means that nations less affected by climate change, often those more economically developed, must act now, and help save those more vulnerable. If they do not, they could be held responsible for some of the most unforgiveable violations yet of the right to life.

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Venus Was Once More Earth-Like, But Climate Change Made It Uninhabitable

The Conversation - 

An artist’s rendering of the surface of Venus. (Shutterstock)
Author Dr. Richard Ernst Ph.D. is Scientist in Residence in the Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and a Professor in the Faculty of Geology and Geography at Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Siberia. 
We can learn a lot about climate change from Venus, our sister planet.

Venus currently has a surface temperature of 450 C (the temperature of an oven’s self-cleaning cycle) and an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide (96 per cent) with a density 90 times that of Earth’s.

Venus is a very strange place, totally uninhabitable, except perhaps in the clouds some 60 kilometres up where the recent discovery of phosphine may suggest floating microbial life. But the surface is totally inhospitable.

However, Venus once likely had an Earth-like climate. According to recent climate modelling, for much of its history Venus had surface temperatures similar to present day Earth. It likely also had oceans, rain, perhaps snow, maybe continents and plate tectonics, and even more speculatively, perhaps even surface life.

Less than one billion years ago, the climate dramatically changed due to a runaway greenhouse effect. It can be speculated that an intensive period of volcanism pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause this great climate change event that evaporated the oceans and caused the end of the water cycle.

Evidence of change

This hypothesis from the climate modellers inspired Sara Khawja, a master’s student in my group (co-supervised with geoscientist Claire Samson), to look for evidence in Venusian rocks for this proposed climatic change event.

Since the early 1990s, my Carleton University research team — and more recently my Siberian team at Tomsk State University — have been mapping and interpreting the geological and tectonic history of Earth’s remarkable sister planet.

Soviet Venera and Vega missions of the 1970s and 1980s did land on Venus and take pictures and evaluated the composition of the rocks, before the landers failed due to the high temperature and pressure.

However, our most comprehensive view of the surface of Venus has been provided by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s, which used radar to see through the dense cloud layer and produce detailed images of more than 98 per cent of Venus’s surface.

A visualization of Venus’s surface produced by radar on board the Magellan spacecraft.

Ancient rocks

Our search for geological evidence of the great climate change event led us to focus on the oldest type of rocks on Venus, called tesserae, which have a complex appearance suggestive of a long, complicated geological history.

We thought that these oldest rocks had the best chance of preserving evidence of water erosion, which is a such an important process on Earth and should have occurred on Venus prior to the great climate change event.

Given poor resolution altitude data, we used an indirect technique to try to recognize ancient river valleys. We demonstrated that younger lava flows from the surrounding volcanic plains had filled valleys in the margins of tesserae.

To our astonishment these tesserae valley patterns were very similar to river flow patterns on Earth, leading to our suggestion that these tesserae valleys were formed by river erosion during a time with Earth-like climatic conditions.

My Venus research groups at Carleton and Tomsk State universities are studying the post-tesserae lava flows for any geological evidence of the transition to extremely hot conditions.

A portion of Alpha Regio, a topographic upland on the surface of Venus, was the first feature on Venus to be identified from Earth-based radar. (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA)

Earth analogies

In order to understand how volcanism on Venus could produce such a change in climate, we can look to Earth history for analogues. We can find analogies in super-eruptions like the last eruption at Yellowstone that occurred 630,000 years.

But such volcanism is small compared to large igneous provinces (LIPs) that occur approximately every 20-30 million years. These eruption events can release enough carbon dioxide to cause catastrophic climate change on Earth, including mass extinctions.

To give you a sense of scale, consider that the smallest LIPs produce enough magma to cover all of Canada to a depth of about 10 metres. The largest known LIP produced enough magma that would have covered an area the size of Canada to a depth of nearly eight kilometres.

The LIP analogues on Venus include individual volcanoes that are up to 500 kilometres across, extensive lava channels that reach up to 7,000 kilometres long, and there are also associated rift systems — where the crust is pulling apart — up to 10,000 kilometres long.

If LIP-style volcanism was the cause of the great climate change event on Venus, then could similar climate change happen on Earth? We can imagine a scenario many millions of years in the future when multiple LIPs randomly occurring at the same time could cause Earth to have such runaway climate change leading to conditions like present-day Venus.

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