12/07/2021

(SMH) Power To Change: Why The US And China Must Work Together On The Climate Crisis

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

Can these two great rivals quarantine climate change from their broader competition for supremacy and work together to confront the threat?

Can the US and China work together to tackle climate change? Credit: Fairfax

A satellite image shows the new forest spreading in a thick band from China’s northern borders with Russia and Mongolia to the south and west, towards the Gobi desert.

By the time the planting is finished in 2050, the Three-North Shelter Forest Program will cover about 35 million hectares, an area about the size of Germany. It will be the largest environmental project ever undertaken on Earth.

Though launched in 1978 to stop the spreading desert from unleashing sandstorms into rapidly expanding cities, the program is a key part of Chinese domestic efforts to address climate change.

Forest workers in a tree farm in Yichun City in north-east China’s Heilongjiang Province in June 2021. Credit: Getty Images
By cartographical ledger, China is greener today than it was a generation ago.

But that isn’t the whole story.

The project is emblematic of the country’s strengths in tackling such a complex problem as climate change, says Li Shuo – who is based in Beijing and directs Greenpeace’s climate and energy policy in east Asia – but it’s also emblematic of its weaknesses.

Its sheer scale and ambition is almost difficult to comprehend for those used to the efforts of Western nations. But because it was first shaped by centralised planning departments rather than by ecologists and scientists, much of the energy expended was wasted, particularly in the early years.

The Green Great Wall
The Three-North Shelter Forest Program


Officials directed the planting of swathes of fast-growing poplar trees and the resultant monoculture did little for biodiversity and left the new forests prone to pest infestation and erosion.

In the years since, science and leadership have improved and so has the forest.

Analysis 
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China, meanwhile, performed its economic miracle, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and placing itself at the heart of global manufacturing.

As a result, in 2006 it surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide and it remains so today. Industrialisation has been as destructive to Chinese environments as it had been to others before them. And to the Earth’s atmosphere.

By the time the world met to thrash out what became the Paris Climate Accord in 2015, a few things were obvious. Each nation needed to do its bit. But if an agreement was to be reached, developed nations had to make deeper emissions cuts than emerging economies.

It was also clear that if the world had any chance at all of staving off the worst impacts of climate change, the United States and China would have to work together.

The US is the greatest historical source of emissions. Most of the greenhouse gasses it produced during its global rise are still heating the planet. Together, the US and China account for 40 per cent of today’s global emissions.

 
After the failure of world climate talks in 2009, the US and China were determined to ensure the Paris talks would not fail the same way.

Months before the Paris summit began, the two nations shocked the world by announcing their own climate deal. China agreed to peak emissions in 2030; the US to reduce its emissions by between 26 and 28 per cent by 2025. Climate laggards would not be able to use the failure of these giant economies as cover for their own Paris targets.

But with Donald Trump’s victory, the US abandoned its efforts and the relationship between the two nations deteriorated.

A new green deal

Under President Joe Biden, the US is again determined to act. Biden has announced an even bolder target - reducing US emissions by 50-52 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030. He is now using the entire machinery of American diplomacy to drive the world towards agreeing to drastic action at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow in November.

At the same time though, US domestic climate policy is hostage to Republicans in the Senate.

This boom-and-bust cycle of American urgency and inaction has not inspired confidence in China, says Li.

John Kerry, who led the pre-Paris secret diplomatic mission from the US, is again leading negotiations between the two countries. Before Biden’s climate conference in April, China and the US made a joint statement saying that climate change “must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands”, suggesting there was hope the two powers could quarantine the issue from their broader competition.

Looking back at half a century of China-US relations
Video by Tom Compagnoni

Bernice Lee, research director for futures at the London-based foreign policy think tank Chatham House, notes that although President Xi Jinping does not confront the same pressures as democratic leaders, he is not immune from political gravity.

Xi may have invested political capital in climate action, but he confronts the same imperatives to maintain prosperity and employment as his Western peers. Meanwhile, some Chinese provincial leaders ramp up coal production and coal plant construction reflexively as economic stimulus.

Lee also believes that China now sees action on climate as linked to its broader and growing international power and prestige.


Professor Bill Hare, a lead author on the fourth assessment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and chief executive of Climate Analytics, says China is reducing the carbon intensity of its coal-heavy power sector faster than many nations, including Australia. Even as it opens new coal mines, he notes, it is closing older, less efficient ones.



He agrees that Xi and much of the Chinese Communist Party leadership view climate change as a potentially existential threat, particularly as crop yields shrink and water supplies fall under threat due to climate pressures.

How far China is willing to go will become clearer in the months leading up to the Glasgow talks, he says. 

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Climate Analytics data is used to build the Climate Action Tracker, which judges the progress nations are making towards the globally agreed aim of holding warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

It makes for grim reading. Australian policies are judged as “insufficient”, China’s as “highly insufficient”.

US efforts fall into the worst category, “critically insufficient”.

Hare explains this is a reflection of the Trump administration’s abandonment of the issue, and new rankings taking in analysis of the impacts of Biden-era policies will soon be published.



Li believes that China’s actions may not be made clear at the Glasgow talks, where any concessions could be chalked up as a diplomatic victory for the US. Rather, he says, announcements could be made domestically or in other settings, such as G20 meetings or at the United Nations General Assembly in September.

Asked which nation he believes has done more to address what many see as the defining issue of our time, Li says that both have failed so far.

Looking back over their records, he says, provides data about the past but not answers to inform our future.


Pushed to forecast, Li says despite his concerns about China’s mixed messages on climate, the issue has not become as politically polarising in Beijing as it has in Washington.

While America’s climate plan will be tested at the polls again in 2024, China’s leaders, for good or ill, will dictate the course for the next three decades.

In that light, says Li, there is some reason to believe Chinese climate policy may improve more rapidly and predictably than America’s.


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(AU The Guardian) 'One More Mine Does Make A Difference’: Australian Children Argue For The Climate – And The Law Agrees

The Guardian - 

The world was watching as a judge formalised into law a government’s duty of care to protect under-18s from the climate crisis

Anjali Sharma, student climate activist and lead litigant in the ‘Sharma case’: ‘It’s hard to come to terms with the scale of all this.’ Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian

At about 9.30am on Thursday morning, 17-year-old Melbourne school student Anjali Sharma was walking her two-year-old kelpie-cross dog Maya down to the creek when the notifications started buzzing on her phone.
“I was getting updates from the lawyers in the court,” says Sharma, who as we speak is about to take another call from a journalist at the Times of India.

At the federal court in Melbourne, Justice Mordecai Bromberg was handing over his final orders in a case taken by Sharma and seven other school children – aided in court by Sister Brigid Arthur, a nun some 70 years their senior.
... what might fairly be described as the greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted
Justice Mordecai Bromberg
With a short reading to the court, the judge formalised into law that Australia’s environment minister had a duty of care to “avoid causing personal injury or death” not just to Sharma and her friends – but all Australians under 18 – “arising from emissions of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere”.

The Australian government took just 24 hours to announce it would appeal.

In May, Bromberg had rejected the children’s bid to block the expansion of the Vickery coalmining project (back then, Sharma was livestreaming the court on her laptop while in an economics class at Huntingtower school).

But he agreed with arguments from their legal team that when it came to making a decision on the mine, Australia’s environment minister had a duty of care to protect them from the ravages of the climate crisis.

School student Anjali Sharma outside the federal court in Melbourne , with lawyer David Barnden and court guardian Sister Brigid Arthur.

“As Australian adults know their country, Australia will be lost and the World as we know it gone as well,” he wrote. “Trauma will be far more common and good health harder to hold and maintain.

“None of this will be the fault of nature itself. It will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults, in what might fairly be described as the greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next.”

The judge’s words were affirmation for the children.

What is now known as the “Sharma case” is being closely followed by climate litigators around the world, who say it has done something that none of the 1,800 or so cases around the world since 1986 have managed.

Kate Higham co-ordinates Climate Laws of the World – a platform that tracks climate cases around the world at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

She says the Sharma case is the “first in which a common law court has recognised the existence of a government duty of care to avoid climate harms that is based in the law of negligence.”

Only 10 cases have tried the approach, and only one so far has been successful in common law.

Failing arguments

“It’s hard to come to terms with the scale of all this,” says Sharma, “knowing people globally have their eyes on this too.”

When governments or companies have been challenged in court about the impacts of fossil fuels on the climate, their defences have fallen broadly into two common categories.

Either a project is too small to make a difference, or stopping it won’t make a difference because the energy market will just fill the gap with fossil fuels from somewhere else.

Anjali Sharma, pictured, and seven other school children will have to wait for a date for the government’s appeal, which could come before the end of the year. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian
Elaine Johnson, director of legal strategy at the Environmental Defenders Office in Sydney, says the Sharma case shows that these two defences are now being dismissed by judges. “We have now reached a point in time with respect to the global carbon budget, where these arguments no longer hold water. One more mine does make a difference and it adds cumulatively to emissions that are already in the atmosphere.”

In the Sharma case, lawyers for Australia’s environment minister put what Prof Jacqueline Peel describes as the “drop in the ocean” defence to the court.

Burning an extra 33 million tonnes of coal from the mine, the government’s lawyers argued, was the difference between 2C of warming and 2.00005C of warming. At such a small scale, there was no evidence before the court on how that would relate to the risk faced by the young people. That argument failed.

Australian court finds government has duty to protect young people from climate crisis.  Read more

“That does not mean the mine has a trivial impact,” says Peel, a climate litigation expert at the University of Melbourne. “Any emissions could get us over a tipping point [in the climate] into more dangerous scenarios.”

Johnson was the lead lawyer in a breakthrough case in 2019, where plans for the Rocky Hill coalmine in New South Wales were stopped by a judge partly because of its potential climate impact.

In that case the company, Gloucester Resources, made what Peel calls the “market substitution” defence – also known as the drug dealers defence.

Gloucester Resources argued if their mine was blocked, the global demand for coal would mean it would simply be mined elsewhere. “The market substitution argument is also flawed,” wrote Justice Brian Preston in his judgement.

“Developed countries such as Australia have a responsibility, including under the climate change convention, the Kyoto protocol and the Paris agreement, to take the lead in taking mitigation measures to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions,” Preston wrote.

“We said [the Rocky Hill mine] was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says Johnson. “It’s the wrong time because emissions need to be dramatically reduced.”

‘Australian government is offloading its responsibility’

The LSE’s climate litigation database shows since 1986, there have been more than 1,800 cases in courts around the world. Outside the United States, where there have been 1,398 cases, there have been more cases in Australia (115) than anywhere else.

César Rodríguez-Garavito, professor of clinical law and director of the Climate Litigation Accelerator at New York University School of Law, says one reason for Australia’s outsized representation is down to persistent government failings and its position as a major fossil fuel exporter.

"We are passionate climate warriors. Our legal battle is not over but my heart is a bit lighter." Read more
Analysis has suggested emissions from burning Australian coal overseas is almost double the nation’s domestic footprint.

“Effectively, the Australian government is offloading its responsibility for climate change not only to young people but also to the rest of the world,” says Rodríguez-Garavito.

“In the face of the government’s inaction and breach of its duty of care to young people, litigants have had to resort to courts to enforce that duty and nudge the government into complying with international law and scientific recommendations.”

What has changed?

The rate that climate cases are coming before the courts has surged since the 2015 Paris agreement. Before the agreement, there had been about 800 cases. Since the agreement, there have been 1,000.

“Litigation and international agreements [like the UN Paris deal] are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are complementary and are mutually reinforcing,” says Rodríguez-Garavito.

In essence, he says climate court cases legally enforce the scientific consensus on climate change and the international forums like the UN’s Paris agreement.

Like in the Sharma case, Higham says cases around the world are increasingly representing children.

“They are interesting because of the ways in which they challenge our understanding of government obligations to citizens over longer time horizons,” she said.

In Germany last year, a youth group argued in a constitutional court their government’s greenhouse gas reduction targets were too low and violated their humans rights.

The group won, forcing the government to adjust their targets to make greater greenhouse gas reductions sooner – meaning there was less burden on younger people to make cuts.

Johnson says the ultimate goal for climate legislation for Australia is to force the government to legislate targets “consistent with the science”.

“We have seen in the courts that the science is cutting through – they’re recognising it’s the science that matters and that’s what tells us about the level of risk that exists for children and communities.”

Johnson’s EDO has three climate cases coming up before courts in August this year and another scheduled for February next year.

Now the eight Australian schoolchildren will have to wait for a date for the government’s appeal, which could come before the end of the year.

Even before the case, Sharma says she was hoping for a career in environmental law after finishing her studies.

“My mum says this is like the most intense work experience I’ll ever have.”

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(Reuters) G20 Recognizes Carbon Pricing As Climate Change Tool For First Time

Reuters - 
VENICE, Italy - G20 finance leaders recognized carbon pricing as a potential tool to address climate change for the first time in an official communique on Saturday, taking a tentative step towards promoting the idea and coordinating carbon reduction policies.

The move marked a massive shift from the previous four years when former U.S. President Donald Trump's administration routinely opposed the mention of climate change as a global risk in such international statements.

The communique, issued on Saturday after a meeting of Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors in the Italian city of Venice, which is threatened by rising sea levels, inserted a mention of carbon pricing among a "wide set of tools" on which countries should coordinate to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Such tools include investing in sustainable infrastructure and new technologies to promote decarbonization and clean energy, "including the rationalisation and phasing-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption and, if appropriate, the use of carbon pricing mechanisms and incentives, while providing targeted support for the poorest and the most vulnerable," said the communique from the financial leaders of the world's 20 major economies.

The statement was issued just days before the European Union was scheduled to unveil a controversial carbon-adjustment border tax on goods from countries with high carbon emissions.

"It is the first time in a G20 communique you could have these two words 'carbon pricing' being introduced as a solution for the fight against climate change," French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told reporters. "We have been pushing very hard to have these two words ... introduced into a G20 communique."

Those efforts met strong U.S. resistance for most of Trump's presidency, during which the United States quickly withdrew from the Paris climate agreement.

At a summit in Saudi Arabia in 2020, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin agreed to a G20 reference to climate change, but not as a downside risk to global growth. Instead, it was included in a reference to the Financial Stability Board’s work examining the implications of climate change for financial stability.

The carbon pricing mention on Saturday marks the influence of the Biden administration, which immediately rejoined the Paris agreement in January and has set out ambitious carbon reduction targets and clean energy and transportation investment plans.

But while supporting emissions reductions, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called on Friday for better international coordination on carbon-cutting policies to avoid trade frictions.

The EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) would impose levies on the carbon content of imported goods in an effort to discourage "carbon leakage," the transfer of production to countries with less onerous emission restrictions. Critics of the measure worry that it could become another trade barrier without reducing emissions.

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