24/04/2021

(AU The Conversation) Spot The Difference: As World Leaders Rose To The Occasion At The Biden Climate Summit, Morrison Faltered

The Conversation -  | 

Mick Tsikas/AAP

Authors
  •  is Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University
  •  is Emeritus Professor, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University     
Prime Minister Scott Morrison overnight addressed a much anticipated virtual climate summit convened by US President Joe Biden, claiming future generations “will thank us not for what we have promised, but what we deliver”.

But what will his government actually deliver?

Morrison’s speech was notable for its stark lack of ambition and a defensive tone at odds with the urgent, front-footed approach of other world leaders.

He resisted the peer pressure to enter the global fold on climate action by setting clear goals, saying Australia made only “bankable” emissions-reduction commitments.

Morrison instead pointed to Australia’s “transformative technology targets”. As we will explain below, those targets are small, vague and certainly not “bankable”. And the spending commitments pale in comparison to the past and future cost of extreme weather in Australia.

Expectations of Australia heading into the summit were low – a fact perhaps reflected in the summit’s agenda. Morrison’s address was way down in the running order – he was 21st of 27 speakers. Biden was reportedly not in the room when Morrison spoke. And in an unfortunate glitch, Morrison’s microphone was on mute at the start of his speech.

The summit did deliver some major gains. There was palpable relief as Biden brought the US back to the table on global climate efforts, committing to an emissions-reduction target twice the ambition of Australia’s. Other nations including Japan, Canada and Britain also outlined major new commitments.

But sadly for Australians, the summit revealed the stark contrast in climate policy leadership between Morrison and his international peers.

The contrast on climate policy leadership between Scott Morrison and Joe Biden was on display at the summit. Mick Tsikas/AAP

The world steps up

Biden opened the summit by emphasising the urgent need to keep global warming below 1.5℃ This century. Failing to do so, he said, would bring:
More frequent and intense fires, floods, droughts, heat waves, and hurricanes tearing through communities, ripping away lives and livelihoods, increasingly dire impacts to our public health […] We can’t resign ourselves to that future. We have to take action, all of us.
Biden committed the US to a 50-52% emissions reduction by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. Other notable emissions-reduction pledges included:
There were hopes Morrison would use the summit to announce Australia would finally join more than 100 countries to set an emissions target of net-zero by 2050. (Australia’s current emissions trajectory has us on track to get to net-zero in the year 2167).

But Morrison dashed those hopes early, telling world leaders: “For Australia, it is not a question of if or even by when for net-zero, but importantly how”.

He pointed to the government’s Technology Investment Roadmap, including A$20 billion to bring down the cost of clean hydrogen, green steel, energy storage and carbon capture. He also spoke of a goal to produce clean hydrogen for A$2 a kilogram, and his dream that Australia’s hydrogen industry would one day rival the scale of California’s Silicon Valley.

Morrison spruiked Australia’s high uptake of rooftop solar. Shutterstock

Will technology save us? Not likely

Earlier this week, Morrison set the scene for his address by announcing a suite of technology funding commitments. Let’s take a closer look at them.

On Wednesday Morrison announced A$540 million for regional hydrogen hubs and carbon-capture and storage (CCS) projects. Some A$275 million will be committed to seven hydrogen hubs in regional areas over five years – that’s about A$7.8 million per hub each year.

It’s hard to see this buying much more than a plan on a piece of paper. Further, there’s little detail on how much will be spent on clean vs dirty hydrogen – that is, hydrogen generated from renewables vs fossil fuels. However the proposed location of some of these hubs in fossil-fuel rich areas, such as the Latrobe Valley and Hunter Valley, does not bode well.

A further A$263.7 million over ten years will fund CCS projects. Since 2003, the Australian government has spent more than A$1 billion on CCS projects, with very little to show for it.

Globally, CCS has been criticised as unproven and expensive, simply designed to extend the life of fossil fuel industries.

CCS critics say it is simply a move to prop up fossil fuel industries. Shutterstock
The third tranche of funding, announced on Thursday, is A$566 million for research partnerships with other countries for new technology such as green steel, small modular nuclear reactors and soil carbon storage. There was little detail in the announcement, so for now it remains rather hypothetical.

In sum, the government will spend a relatively small amount on hydrogen production and CCS, spread wafer thin in various regional areas (and at least some of it subsidising fossil fuels), plus hypothetical funding for research.

Compare this to the A$35 billion cost of extreme weather disasters in Australia between 2010 and 2019, as detailed in this Climate Council report.

More recently, the New South Wales government estimated the potential cost of last month’s devastating floods at A$2 billion. A report by the NSW Treasury estimated by 2061, future economic costs of climate impacts in four key risk areas (bushfires, sea level rise, heatwaves and agricultural production) could reach up to A$17.2 billion a year – and this is just for NSW.

The recent NSW floods caused $2 billion in damage, the state government says. James Gourley/AAP
A tale of two leaders

Morrison told world leaders Australia would update its emissions-reduction target ahead of the Glasgow climate summit later this year. The current target – a 26-28% cut by 2030, based on 2005 levels – is broadly viewed as woefully inadequate.

Any increased ambition would be long overdue. However, more broadly, the contrast on climate policy between Morrison and Biden could not be clearer. Biden used the summit to tell world leaders:
Your leadership on this issue is a statement to the people of your nation and to the people of every nation, especially our young people, that we’re ready to meet this moment […] We really have no choice. We have to get this done.
Morrison, depressingly, showed little sign of hearing that message.

Links
at No comments:

(Yale) In Europe, A Backlash Is Growing Over Incinerating Garbage

Yale Environment 360 - Beth Gardiner
For years, European countries have built “waste-to-energy” incinerators, saying new technology minimized pollution and boosted energy production. But with increasing concern about the plants’ CO2 emissions, the EU is now withdrawing support for these trash-burning facilities.

A waste-to-energy incinerator at Haverton Hill near Middlesbrough, England. Islandstock / Alamy Stock Photo
For decades, Europe has poured millions of tons of its trash into incinerators each year, often under the green-sounding label “waste to energy.” Now, concerns about incineration’s outsized carbon footprint and fears it may undermine recycling are prompting European Union officials to ease their long-standing embrace of a technology that once seemed like an appealing way to make waste disappear.

The EU is in the process of cutting off funding for new incinerators, but there’s little sign most existing ones —currently consuming 27 percent of the bloc’s municipal waste — will close any time soon. And, even without EU financial support, new plants are in the works, many in southern and eastern European countries that have historically incinerated less than long-standing waste-to-energy proponents such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian nations.

Meanwhile, across the English Channel, post-Brexit Britain is charging ahead with proposals for dozens of new garbage-burning projects.

Without a more decisive change of course, critics argue, that adds up to an existential threat both to Europe’s promise to slash carbon emissions to net-zero by midcentury and its dreams of a “circular economy” in which reuse and recycling largely take the place of waste disposal.
Britain burns nearly half of its waste — more than it recycles.
“Burning plastic in a climate emergency, that’s insane,” said Georgia Elliott-Smith, an environmental engineer and Extinction Rebellion activist who is suing the British government over its decision to exclude incinerators from its new emissions trading system.

Plastic, hard to recycle and ubiquitous in garbage, is made from fossil fuel derivatives and emits carbon dioxide when burned, accounting for a substantial chunk of incineration’s climate damage.

In a case scheduled to be heard in the High Court this month, Elliott-Smith contends Britain violated its Paris Agreement commitments by omitting the waste-to-energy sector from the market it created when it left the European greenhouse gas emissions trading system as part of its divorce from the E.U.

While she also argues the new system is too weak to shrink Britain’s carbon footprint, including incinerators could, in principle, put a cost on their emissions.

Sinking billions of pounds into new incinerators now could lock Britain into decades of garbage-burning and make it harder for cash-strapped local authorities to boost recycling and composting rates, she said.

The country already burns nearly 45 percent of its waste — more than it recycles, the Channel 4 show Dispatches recently reported. “The way incineration works, it skews the economics of waste by its very existence,” Elliott-Smith said. “Once you build the beast, you’ve got to keep feeding it.”

Worries that incinerators sicken those who live near them — disproportionately poor, and people of color — have long dogged the industry. Wealthy nations such as Sweden and Denmark, which rely heavily on waste-to-energy plants, say their sophisticated emissions treatment systems mean such concerns are misplaced.

But critics note many nations lack the resources for the best pollution-control systems. Dangerous emissions such as dioxin and particulate matter sometimes go unreported, and enforcement is often porous, environmentalists say.

Garbage headed to an incinerator's oven in Helsinki, Finland. ALESSANDRO RAMPAZZO/AFP via Getty Images

The climate concerns are newer, crystallized in a report the consulting firm Eunomia produced for ClientEarth, an advocacy group.

 It found that British incinerators’ power generation was more carbon-intensive than electricity from natural gas, and second only to coal. Overall, European incinerators pumped out an estimated 95 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, about 2 percent of total emissions.

That footprint helped prompt EU officials to drop incineration from a draft of important green investment guidelines, known as the “sustainable finance taxonomy,” expected to be formally adopted this month.

Not only can trash-burning plants no longer get subsidies designated for environmentally beneficial projects, they have also been cut off from other major EU funding streams. And the European Parliament has urged member nations to minimize incineration.

“It looks like things are really changing in Brussels,” said Janek Vähk, a coordinator at Zero Waste Europe, a network of advocacy groups. Leaders, in his view, have “started understanding that incineration is a big source of greenhouse gases.”

For its part, the industry says it is unfair to compare its carbon emissions directly with those of plants whose main function is to generate power.

“The primary reason why we exist is for waste treatment, not energy production,” said Agnė Razgaitytė, a spokeswoman for the Confederation of European Waste-to-Energy Plants, or CEWEP, an industry group. “So it’s not exactly comparable in the same way.”
EU waste incineration doubled from 1995 to 2019, to 60 million tons annually.
Without incineration, she said, landfill costs tend to rise, increasing the danger of European trash leaving the continent, and ultimately being burned in uncontrolled settings or littering beaches and waterways.

And landfills have their own climate impact — any organic waste in them generates the potent greenhouse gas methane as it decays. What’s more, incinerator operators salvage metals from the ash left over after burning, allowing their reuse.

“We’re at home in the circular economy,” Razgaitytė said. “We do give value to the waste that otherwise would be just lost.” No matter how much is recycled and composted, she added, there will always be something left over: “I don’t think the waste-to-energy sector as such is going out of business any time soon.”

The EU’s shift comes after a building spree that doubled EU countries’ municipal waste incineration between 1995 and 2019, to 60 million tons annually. Such plants now provide power to 18 million Europeans and heat to 15 million, the industry says.

Individual countries remain free to fund and commission new incinerators. Those plants still make money from waste-disposal fees and by selling electricity and, in some places, heat.

In some countries, operators can still claim subsidies designed to support renewable energy, as long as they burn waste that has been collected in separate streams so recyclable or compostable material is not incinerated.

The Amager Bakke waste incinerator in Copenhagen, Denmark has a ski slope on its roof. Oliver Förstner / Alamy Stock Photo
What’s more, Vähk warned, the EU’s aim for countries to landfill no more than 10 percent of municipal waste by 2035 will unintentionally bolster incinerators’ appeal. “There’s a lot of pressure on minimizing landfill,” he said. That’s worrying, “because we don’t want to move from landfilling to incineration.”

It all comes as the EU is pushing to reduce waste, particularly plastic, by ratcheting up targets for composting and recycling, mandating that plastic bottles contain 30 percent recycled content by 2030, and banning — as of this July — single-use items such as cutlery, cups, and stirrers.

The EU has also adopted a new “circular economy” plan that aims in the longer term to encourage better product design so reuse and recycling are easier.

Continued incineration, critics argue, could threaten those goals. Once built, they say, incinerators cannibalize recycling, because municipal governments are often locked in by contracts that make it cheaper to get their rubbish burned than to sort it for recyclers.

One nation now grappling with the legacy of its long embrace of incineration is Denmark. The country, one of Europe’s biggest waste producers, built so many incinerators that by 2018 it was importing a million tons of trash.

The plants generate 5 percent of the country’s electricity and nearly a quarter of the heat in the local networks, known as district heating systems, said Mads Jakobsen, chairman of the Danish Waste Association, which represents municipal authorities and waste companies.

Pushing to meet ambitious carbon-cutting goals, Danish lawmakers agreed last year to shrink incineration capacity by 30 percent in a decade, with the closure of seven incinerators, while dramatically expanding recycling.

“It’s time to stop importing plastic waste from abroad to fill empty incinerators and burn it to the detriment of the climate,” said Dan Jørgensen, the country’s climate minister.

But in focusing only on Denmark’s own carbon footprint, Jakobsen said, the country’s politicians had failed to consider what would happen to the waste Denmark turns away. And with loan repayments still due on many plants, he said, “I’m also concerned about the stranded costs. Who’s going to answer for those costs? Will it be the citizens in my municipality?”
In central and eastern Europe, “there is strong pressure and a lucrative market for new incinerators,” says a critic.
Two regions of Belgium are also seeking to reduce incineration capacity. But few other parts of Europe are following suit. Indeed, some countries are planning new plants. Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania landfill most of their waste, and will probably need more incineration capacity, said Razgaitytė. Italy and Spain are among the others that may also build new plants, she said.

In central and eastern Europe, “there is very strong pressure and a lucrative market for new incinerators,” said Paweł Głuszyński, of the Society for Earth, a Polish advocacy group. Poland has about nine incinerators now, plus a similar number of cement plants that use processed waste as fuel, he said.

Around 70 new projects are seeking approval, he said, including proposals to convert old coal plants to burn garbage instead. Poor enforcement in Poland means emissions of toxins such as dioxins and furans often reach hazardous levels, Głuszyński said, but tightening EU rules may help,

Britain, too, seems intent on pushing ahead with an expansion of burning, with dozens of new projects under consideration. Collectively, they would double current incineration capacity.

There are hints, though, that some of what’s on the drawing board may not materialize. Wales said last month it would put a moratorium on large new waste-to-energy plants, and consider an incineration tax.

In February, Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s secretary for business, energy and industrial strategy, refused an application for a new incinerator in Kent, east of London, although he allowed expansion of an existing plant. In his decision, he said the project could hamper local recycling, reasoning that encouraged incinerator opponents.

Demonstrators protest the continued operation of the incinerator in Edmonton in north London: STOP THE EDMONTON INCINERATOR
In Cambridgeshire, the leafy, well-off home of the University of Cambridge, plans for another plant stalled in the face of vocal opposition from residents and local politicians.

But such decisions can raise uncomfortable questions. The North London Waste Authority, which manages waste for seven boroughs in the capital, plans to expand, and extend the life of, an aging incinerator in the neighborhood of Edmonton, which has a large Black and immigrant population and is one of the country’s lowest-income areas.

“Why is (incineration) not good enough for Cambridgeshire, but it’s good enough for Edmonton, which is poor, racially diverse and already suffers with a lot of pollution?” asked Delia Mattis, an activist with the local Black Lives Matter group. “There’s racism in the planning.”

Other groups, including Stop the Edmonton Incinerator Now, are also working to close the facility, which had been nearing the end of its life before the overhaul was proposed.

The neighborhood — where men’s life expectancy is 8.8 years shorter, and women’s 5.7 years shorter, than in wealthier parts of its borough — “is like a nonstop conveyor belt of trucks” going to and from the incinerator, Mattis said.

A report from Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative arm, found British incinerators are three times more likely to be sited in the poorest and most racially mixed areas as in the wealthiest, whitest ones.

Whatever countries decide on incineration, cutting waste will also require addressing its source, by pushing producers to make less throwaway packaging, and longer-lasting goods, said Jakobsen, the Danish waste association official.

“Better design, better production, more recyclable material,” he said. “That’s a huge task that has not been fully addressed.”

Links
at No comments:

(The Guardian) ‘Do Something’: An Intimate Look At The Personal Lives Of Climate Activists

The Guardian - 

Documentary The Race to Save the World makes the case for the urgency of climate action by burrowing deep into the lives of those on the frontline
A still from The Race to Save the World, released as Joe Biden seeks to re-establish US leadership on the climate crisis. Photograph: Publicity image

Early in the morning on 2 September 2014, Abby Brockway left her home in Seattle and, along with two dozen other climate activists, drove about a half hour north to a railyard in Everett, Washington.

The group erected a massive, chained tripod over the crossed tracks, blocking a large line of oil tank cars. Brockway sat atop the 20ft structure flanked by a flag which read “Cut oil trains, not conductors.”

“It was so empowering,” Brockway told the Guardian of her hours perched high above the ground and the fleet of police officers who gathered to arrest her and four others for trespassing.

The five aimed for a trial, seen in this year’s eco-documentary The Race to Save the World, which would highlight the urgency of curbing fossil fuel consumption at large, draw attention to the risk of oil train spills in their backyards, and test the “necessity defense” – the argument that civil disobedience was the only recourse for stopping fossil fuel’s harm to the planet – in court.

For Brockway, the decision to climb the tripod was “a combination of just the literal safety immediately and also long-term safety of the way we’re addicted to oil”, she said. Months earlier, an oil train derailed just a mile from her then-teenage daughter’s school; for Brockway, her daughter’s future outweighed the risk of going to jail. “I had to do this for her.”


Trailer: 02:21

Brockway is one of many featured in The Race To Save the World, a years-long documentary project following several activists, aged 15-72 and mostly based in America’s Pacific north-west, as they push, often at personal peril with incredible emotional investment, for immediate action to stem Earth’s accelerating climate crisis.

The tactics range from tests of potentially great legal liability – Brockway’s blockage of the oil train, the “Valve Turners” who shut off the 2,700-mile Keystone pipeline in North Dakota in 2016 – to more symbolic or systemic methods.

The film follows the Great March for Climate Action, in which:
  • participants walked over 3,000 miles, from outside Los Angeles to Washington DC over the course of 2014;
  • speaks with Aji Piper and his brother Adonis Williams, who along with six other youths sued the state of Washington’s department of ecology for not doing enough to fight climate change;
  • weaves through the 2019 People’s Climate March in New York; and
  • embeds with the longtime climate activist Bill Moyer, who helped organize “kayaktivism” protests to thwart the harboring of a Shell Arctic drilling rig in Seattle with a fleet of kayaks.
The documentary, released as Joe Biden seeks to re-establish US leadership on the climate crisis with a two-day climate summit for 40 world leaders, takes the exigency of climate action and the direness the damage already done as a given.

Instead, the director, Joe Gantz, focuses on the personal lives of a representative but by no means comprehensive slate of activists, offering several small, at times mundane and very human windows into the most pressing issue for the planet.

The documentary forgoes ominous narration, expert testimony, or the listing of scientific evidence, because films that “were telling people, again and again, how bad things are and how much worse they were going to get were so overwhelming and depressing that people were tuning them out”, Gantz told the Guardian.

Photograph: Publicity image

Instead, he aimed for an “uplifting and inspiring and energizing rather than depressing” burrow into the climate crisis by flipping the crisis’s overwhelming scale with footage of individual relationships strained and deepened by the stress and constancy of the work.

“These are people who don’t really have the option of tuning it out,” said Gantz. “They have no choice but to do whatever they can even if it puts their career at risk, if it puts them in hot water with their family in many respects, or puts their freedom at risk.”

“Just like my ability to do my work depends on the strength of my relationships at home, social movement is relational,” Moyer told the Guardian.

The film’s emotional focus – footage of Aji and Adonis’s tiffs with their mother, or Moyer’s teenage daughter Aziza’s feelings about her dad’s unrelenting activist work ethic, or haircuts given during the climate walk across the country – actually evince activist strategy, according to Moyer. “Building connections to other groups, expanding alliances, is absolutely the most strategic thing you can do.”

“The fact that the film focuses on relationships gets to a kind of truth and maybe a power that we can’t get to if we only talk about statistics,” he added. “We connect to each other with our hearts, and we connect to issues from our gut. And we build solidarity by acting together, doing things together.”

The film also tracks closely the stress of legal proceedings, however much they were intended. Brockway did stand trial in a court which refused to consider the necessity defense; she and the other four activists were acquitted of obstructing the train but found guilty of trespassing.

The camera finds Brockway empowered on the tripod but tongue-tied on the witness stand, breaking down into stammers and confusion over several minutes, clearly torturous for her family to watch. Foster was also found guilty in a North Dakota court and sentenced to a year in prison, much to the dismay of his loyal girlfriend.

Photograph: Publicity image

Relationship stress, climate anxiety, and joy within protests aside, climate change is, to be clear, “an existential threat to all our futures”, said Gantz. But humans being humans, motivation to act doesn’t often arise from a pile of grim facts about the planet’s climate trajectory, its sea of plastic or extended wildfire seasons or disrupted animal migration patterns.

The Race to Save the World operates on the individual and personal levels as a relatable, disarming entry point into climate action, even if some of the actions portrayed, such as Foster’s or Brockway’s trespassing charges, probably exceed many viewer’s comfort levels.

 “The scale is so daunting, so intangible, and sometimes so invisible,” said Moyer. But “the most important thing is for people to start, and do something. And to lean into the threshold of their comfort, to expand what is comfortable for them” as “rebellion is a muscle that has to be exercised.”

“I didn’t want to underline how bad things are and how much worse they’re going to be,” said Gantz. “I wanted to show that there’s a group of optimistic people who are ready to take action and to do everything they can to affect change.

“We all need to do that if we want to effect the kind of change that needs to happen in the time frame we have,” he added. “The only way that politicians are going to make these changes is if people get into the streets and make their voices heard.”

Links
at No comments: