Lethal Heating: 02/11/21

11/02/2021

(AU) Global Climate Action Will Reshape Australia’s Trade

AFR - Toby Phillips

As countries cut emissions and demand for our key fossil fuel exports, we must make adroit shift and seize the big industrial opportunities of a post-carbon era.

Sunset for coal: While some commodities may go out of fashion other commodities like iron, lithium and aluminium will be in demand for the foreseeable future.

Author

Toby Phillips is a program director at the Centre for Policy Development.

Last week at the National Press Club, the Prime Minister said Australia would “reach net zero emissions as soon as possible, and preferably by 2050”.

Those final words are key, and represent a shifting tone more in line with our global partners.

Just two weeks ago, US President Biden signed an executive order aiming for net-zero by mid-century. Before Christmas, it was Hong Kong. A couple of months before that, Japan and China.

They say a week is a long time in politics, but where will we be in a decade? What about three decades? National discussions about climate change rightly focus on the choices of Australian governments, businesses, and people. But just as important are the global forces shaping Australia’s place in the world.

Global climate action is reshaping Australia’s trade outlook.

The numbers are stark. Looking at Australia’s top 20 trade partners, over 80 per cent of our exports are to countries that have pledged net-zero emissions by the middle of the century (China, South Korea, the UK, the EU, and several more). And Australia’s export mix is highly concentrated in carbon-intensive commodities: 70 per cent of what we sell to those countries is fossil fuels, minerals or metals.

Australia currently has one of the most stable and globally competitive economies because of our natural resources. But as major global partners decarbonise, the commodities that got Australia here today will not get us where we need to go next. Just last year, we saw how exposed Australian industry is to small changes in demand from giant importers like China: leading to lost billions in both agricultural and fossil fuel exports.

History is full of examples where the tides turn on a commodity-dependent economy. In the early 1900s, Chile was one of the richest countries in the world. Its saltpetre mining industry produced two-thirds of the world’s fertilisers. At its peak in 1920, this export industry employed 60,000 Chileans. But this high point coincided with the commercialisation of the Haber process for synthesising ammonia in the lab.

By the 1930s, Chile’s nitrate exports were a tiny fraction of their peak, the mines only employed 10,000 people, and Chile had slipped out of the top 20 largest global economies. The industry continued for some decades, eking out a living on what remained of global demand for natural nitrates.

Meanwhile, the factories of Europe prospered by providing the world with cheap, synthetic fertilisers.

Australia can remain globally competitive by having the least carbon-intensive industries in the world.

Like Chile, Australia will be forced to come to terms with lower global demand for some key exports. But like Europe, Australia can be at the forefront of the new technological revolution. There are two big industrial opportunities in a post-carbon era: renewable energy and carbon-efficient industry.

Ammonia is once again at the centre of an economic transition. The same Haber process that made saltpetre redundant in the 1920s can be used to convert hydrogen gas into ammonia for storage and transportation, at least partially solving the intermittency problem of renewables.

Australia has some major investments here, but the world still lacks global standards and infrastructure for trading hydrogen. Apart from investing in production, Australia needs to help ensure the whole chain – from production, storage, transport and end-use – is viable and globally standardised.

While some commodities may go out of fashion – like coal – other commodities like iron, lithium and aluminium will be in demand for the foreseeable future. But Australian exporters cannot rest on their laurels.

In the past week, the European Union voted to progress import taxes on carbon-intensive goods, and BMW signed a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the United Arab Emirates for green aluminium. Australia can remain globally competitive by having the least carbon-intensive industries in the world.

Many heavy industries in Australia are already highly efficient, so the biggest wins come from decarbonising the grid they run on. Beyond that, investments in R&D can push out the efficiency frontier. In aluminium smelting, new technologies could eliminate the use of carbon anodes; in steel making Australia could pioneer alternatives to metallurgical coal, such as bio-coke or direct chemical reduction.

Some MPs are proposing that any national decarbonisation plan include exemptions and carve-outs for specific sectors, such as steel or agriculture. This is a mistake: these are exactly the sectors that need to be pushed (and supported) to decarbonise. Otherwise Australia’s attempts to move up the value chain will be stymied by solar-powered smelting in Dubai or Brussels’ farm-to-fork strategy for sustainable agriculture imports.

Despite the opportunities, none of this is a given. The Commonwealth’s technology investment road map is helping to fill some of these gaps, but it is modest compared to the plans of our trade partners. Australia needs more investment and, crucially, more national co-ordination to meet the challenge.

The prime minister doesn’t want to commit to a net-zero timeline because it would be “just a bit of paper.” Actions do speak louder than words, but the words will matter too, especially ahead of G7, G20 and COP26 meetings this year where the rest of the world is co-ordinating on climate action and trade.

By 2050 we will be living in a hotter world, that’s guaranteed. We will also have the benefit of hindsight. Let’s hope we look back on an adroit shift to a post-carbon global economy.

If Australia’s approach is too timid, we will look back and wonder why we sat holding the bag as the rest of the world moved on.

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(AU) Australians Should Be Worried About Future Emissions. To Be Told Otherwise Is Absurd

The Guardian - Jeff Sparrow

By not caring about 2050, our politicians are announcing their indifference to a world in which children have become parents

“None of us in [parliament] will be here,” said Michael McCormack’s colleague Barnaby Joyce (right) about climate targets. “Quite a high proportion will have passed away … that’s the only thing certain about 2050.” Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

Author Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster.

“We are not worried, or I’m certainly not worried, about what might happen in 30 years’ time.”

With that, deputy prime minister Michael McCormack distills the absurdity of Australian climate politics into a single sentence of overproof idiocy.

Engineers building suburban roads plan 30 years ahead. But, apparently, a different timeline applies to the fate of the entire planet.

“None of us in [parliament] will be here,” said McCormack’s colleague Barnaby Joyce about climate targets. “Quite a high proportion will have passed away … that’s the only thing certain about 2050.”

Après Barnaby, le déluge – and the fires and the droughts and the heatwaves.

We’re told that the difficulty in climate action lies in convincing people to care about the distant future.

That’s bullshit.

There’s nothing distant about 30 years. A full MCC membership can take that long to arrive. McCormack wouldn’t tell you not to bother about paying your mortgage or claiming your super or getting a doctor to check a dark-coloured mole.

By not caring about 2050, he’s announcing his indifference to a world in which your children have become parents.

Actually, it’s worse than that, since the real deadline isn’t three decades away.

Back in 2018, the IPCC nominated 12 years as the time available to avoid the most catastrophic outcomes.

But you might equally say there’s no single date when climate change happens. If the atmosphere is a bathtub overflowing with carbon, the longer we let the tap run, the worse the already visible manifestations of climate change will get.

Yes, the people most affected by the transition deserve certainty from the government as to its plans for decarbonisation. To paraphrase France’s yellow vests, you can’t talk solely about the end of the world to those worried about the end of the month.

But what could be crueller than forcing people to choose between their own survival and that of their children?

Imagine telling farming families that you neither know nor care whether their kids inherit a viable property! Imagine saying to Indigenous communities that, after more than 50,000 years of custodianship, they shouldn’t bother about what happens in the next three decades!

On Tuesday in the Australian, the house journal of denial, delay and obfuscation, Joyce complained about what he calls the “quasi-religious” aspect of climate politics.

Yet, not so long ago, in a notoriously merry seasonal message, he advised us that the real authority on global warming was “beyond our comprehension, right up there in the sky”.

For Joyce, it seems, climate policy is simultaneously too religious and not religious enough.

It’s tempting to dismiss Barnaby as a harmless blowhard – all hat and no cattle, as the Texans say.

Yet in Marian Wilkinson’s recent history of the climate wars, The Carbon Club, the former deputy PM features prominently, as responsible as anyone for derailing rational discussion about the subject.

Wilkinson describes him barnstorming up and down rural Queensland in the mid-2000s, staging events with the late Professor Bob Carter, the palaeontologist and denialist paid a monthly stipend by the US Heartland Institute in a program funding “high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist [anthropogenic global warming] message”.

Like Tony Abbott, Joyce keeps changing his mind about whether he accepts climate science. Yet, while his arguments shift, his proscription remains the same: nothing whatsoever can or should be done.

I know we in the media aren’t supposed to care. I know we’re meant to think merely of the narrative, nodding savvily as punters explain how, by placating Joel Fitzgibbon, Labor sends an important signal about its pragmatism and electability.

But I’m tired of it, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

In 2020, fires linked to climate change burned some 186,000 sq km, destroyed 6,000 buildings and killed 34 people. Perhaps 3 billion animals died; toxic smoke put 4,000 people in hospital and led to the deaths of 445 of them.

That wasn’t the far-off future. That was last year.

Yet a senior figure in Australia’s governing party refuses even to acknowledge what every scientist says lies ahead. It’s so far beyond idiotic as to be scandalous.

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'Invisible Killer': Fossil Fuels Caused 8.7m Deaths Globally In 2018, Research Finds

The Guardian - Oliver Milman

Pollution from power plants, vehicles and other sources accounted for one in five of all deaths that year, more detailed analysis reveals

Two men walk along Rajpath amid smoggy conditions in New Delhi last month. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found.

Countries with the most prodigious consumption of fossil fuels to power factories, homes and vehicles are suffering the highest death tolls, with the study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution, along with nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China. Death rates in South America and Africa were significantly lower.

Deaths attributable to exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) generated by fossil fuel combustion. Guardian graphic. Source: Harvard University

The enormous death toll is higher than previous estimates and surprised even the study’s researchers.

“We were initially very hesitant when we obtained the results because they are astounding, but we are discovering more and more about the impact of this pollution,” said Eloise Marais, a geographer at University College London and a study co-author. “It’s pervasive. The more we look for impacts, the more we find.”

The 8.7m deaths in 2018 represent a “key contributor to the global burden of mortality and disease”, states the study, which is the result of collaboration between scientists at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London.

The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.

Scientists have established links between pervasive air pollution from burning fossil fuels and cases of heart disease, respiratory ailments and even the loss of eyesight. Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year, while global economic and health costs would fall by about $2.9tn.

The new estimate of deaths, published in the journal Environmental Research, is higher than other previous attempts to quantify the mortal cost of fossil fuels. A major report by the Lancet in 2019, for example, found 4.2m annual deaths from air pollution coming from dust and wildfire smoke, as well as fossil fuel combustion.

Mean attributable fraction of deaths attributed to long-term exposure to PM2.5 derived from fossil fuel combustion. Guardian graphic. Source: Harvard University

This new research deploys a more detailed analysis of the impact of sooty airborne particles thrown out by power plants, cars, trucks and other sources.

This particulate matter is known as PM2.5 as the particles are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter – or about 30 times smaller than the diameter of the average human hair. These tiny specks of pollution, once inhaled, lodge in the lungs and can cause a variety of health problems.

“We don’t appreciate that air pollution is an invisible killer,” said Neelu Tummala, an ear, nose and throat physician at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

“The air we breathe impacts everyone’s health but particularly children, older individuals, those on low incomes and people of color. Usually people in urban areas have the worst impacts.”

Instead of solely relying upon averaged estimates from satellite and surface observations that account for PM2.5 from a range of sources, the researchers used a global 3D model of atmospheric chemistry overseen by Nasa that has a more detailed resolution and can distinguish between pollution sources.

“Rather than rely on averages spread across large regions, we wanted to map where the pollution is and where people live, so we could know more exactly what people are breathing,” said Karn Vohra, a graduate student at University of Birmingham and study co-author.

The researchers then developed a new risk assessment based on a tranche of new research that has found a much higher mortality rate from fossil fuel emissions than previously thought, even in relatively low concentrations.

Data was taken from 2012 and then also 2018 to account for rapid improvements in air quality in China. Deaths were counted for people aged 15 and older.

The results show a varied global picture. “China’s air quality is improving but its fine particle concentrations are still staggeringly high, the US is improving, although there are hotspots in the north-east, Europe is a mixed bag and India is definitely a hotspot,” said Marais.

A coal power plant in Niederaussem, western Germany. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images

The death toll outlined in the study may even be an underestimate of the true picture, according to George Thurston, an expert in air pollution and health at the NYU school of medicine who was not involved in the research.

“Overall, however, this new work makes clearer than ever that, when we talk about the human cost of air pollution or climate change, the major causes are one and the same – fossil fuel combustion,” he said.

Philip J Landrigan, director of the program for global public health and the common good at Boston College, said: “Recent research has been exploring the use of newer exposure-response functions, and several recent papers that use these newer functions have produced higher estimates of pollution-related mortality than the Global Burden of Disease analyses.”

He added: “I consider it important that different risk assessment models are now being developed, because their development will force re-examination of the assumptions that underlie current models and will improve them.”

Ed Avol, chief of the environmental health division at the University of Southern California (USC), said: “The authors have applied improved methodologies to better quantify exposures and better document health outcomes in order to reach the unsettling (but not surprising) conclusion that fossil-fuels-combustion-related air pollution is more damaging to global human health than previously estimated.

"The remote satellite imagery exposure specialists and health epidemiologists on the research team are highly competent investigators and among the most talented scholars in this dynamic field.”

“Fossil fuels have a really large impact upon health, the climate and the environment and we need a more immediate response,” said Marais. “Some governments have carbon-neutral goals but maybe we need to move them forward given the huge damage to public health. We need much more urgency.”

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