Pearls and Irritations - Ian Dunlop
| David Spratt
With Covid, the government has shown itself manifestly incapable of leading
or managing its core responsibilities, beset by corruption and secrecy. The
climate challenge is far greater than Covid, and there are no vaccinations
or quarantine against climate impacts, which from now on will increase
inexorably in the absence of decisive leadership.
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Image by GreenTech Media
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Authors
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Ian Dunlop
was formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry
executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of
the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is a member of
the Club of Rome and Chair, Advisory Board, Breakthrough
National Centre for Climate Restoration.
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David Spratt
has been Research Coordinator for the Breakthrough National
Centre for Climate Restoration (Melbourne) since 2014. He was
co-founder of the Climate Action Centre (2009-2012). He blogs at
climatecodered.org
on climate science, existential risk, IPCC reticence, the
climate emergency and climate movement strategy and
communications, and is regular public speaker.
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As the need for serious action to prevent runaway global warming becomes
critical, it is not surprising that efforts from the denialist lobby to prevent
that action intensify, albeit in more subtle form than the blanket refusal of
yesteryear to even accept that a climate problem existed.
Around the world, companies, investors, governments and other institutions are
committing, with much self-congratulation, to reach net-zero emissions by 2050
(NZE2050), the point at which any remaining emissions can be counterbalanced by
offsetting absorption in carbon sinks, using technologies that currently do not
exist at scale.
Regulators and central banks, concerned that global warming might de-stabilise
the world’s financial system, are urging their regulated institutions to
disclose the implications of climate change risk to their investors and to
undertake stress testing against scenarios with up to 4
oC of global
mean warming relative to pre-industrial levels.
Missing from this debate is any understanding of the real risks posed by climate
change.
Recent events such as the unprecedented 2019/20 Australian and
Californian bushfires, Chinese floods and Indian extreme temperatures, along
with even greater extremes occurring this year in Western US, Canada, the
Arctic, Siberia, Europe, China and the Amazon, should be a wake-up call that
climate impacts are accelerating and close to moving beyond human influence.
But that is far from the case. Despite impassioned pleas from scientists and
much lofty institutional rhetoric from global leaders on the need for emergency
action, the emphasis on an NZE2050 pathway, is actually locking in extremely
dangerous, and potentially catastrophic, climate outcomes by refusing to rapidly
reduce carbon emissions, which is now necessary to stop runaway warming.
The 1.5
oC global mean warming, the lower limit of the Paris
Agreement, is inevitable by 2030 irrespective of any mitigation action in the
interim. The upper 2
oC limit is likely before 2050, with the
possibility that irreversible, self-sustaining warming may be triggered by
tipping points between 1.5 – 2
oC.
The current global trajectory is
likely to result in catastrophic warming in excess of 3
oC in the
second half of this century, with little chance of changing that trajectory over
the next two decades by mitigation alone. 4-5
oC warming is possible
before 2100.
The dangerous impacts we are already experiencing are happening at
only 1.2
oC warming.
3°C warming would be catastrophic, perhaps leading to outright chaos in
relations between nations, and 4°C is an existential threat to human
civilisation, with many parts of the world becoming uninhabitable leading to
mass migration and social conflict.
Regional temperature increases
on land will be considerably higher than these global means, increasingly beyond
the limits within which human physiology can operate. These temperature
increases cannot be adapted to, rendering financial system stress testing
irrelevant.
The assumption behind the current enthusiasm for NZE2050 is that, with a bit of
tweaking and gradual action, an orderly transition can ensue, leading to a
perpetuation of the current economic system and its power structures.
That is no longer possible. The degree of change required to avoid catastrophic
climate impacts, and the speed with which it must be implemented, means that
emergency action, akin to a wartime level of mobilisation, is essential.
A major
discontinuity is inevitable; we must re-boot our societies onto genuinely
sustainable pathways if human civilisation is to survive.
NZE2050 could result in mean temperature increases above 3
oC if
global tipping points trigger within the 1.5 – 2
oC Paris range. As
our latest Briefing Note,
‘Net Zero 2050 – a dangerous illusion’
indicates, net zero must be reached as soon as possible, ideally by 2030, if
catastrophic outcomes are to be avoided. This is a massive task far greater than
anything yet contemplated officially.
Sensible risk management in these circumstances demands a precautionary approach
quite different from conventional risk-management practice. It must ensure, to
the extent possible, that temperature outcomes do not trigger these tipping
points, and is capable of returning the climate system to the stable climate
conditions under which human civilisation flourished.
This means
emergency action to keep the global temperature increase to a minimum, as close
to 1.5°C as possible, coupled with a drawdown of current atmospheric carbon
concentrations from the current level around 420ppm CO
2, to below
350ppm CO
2.
The technology to achieve such drawdown in the limited
time available is not yet fully available at scale, further adding to climate
risk.
The Australian mainstream media, with a few exceptions, ignore these realities,
consumed with the supposedly disastrous short-term economic implications of any
climate action, oblivious to the infinitely greater cost of inaction.
The
Australian Financial Review, recently
opined
that “Coal, along with oil and gas, will continue to supply the world’s energy
during the decades-long transition to net zero”, and that, “as the demonisation
of coal and gas by Australian activists shows, extremism makes the politics of
the energy transition more challenging”.
The real extremists are organisations like the
AFR, the Murdoch press,
ideologues and fossil fuel vested interests around the world whose denialist
stance has succeeded in allowing carbon emissions to continue to rise at
worst-case rates, placing humanity in grave danger with their insatiable greed
and determination to hang on to the reins of power at all costs.
If these views
prevail, human civilisation as we know it will not survive.
Quite apart from the implications for humanity, directors of these
organisations, even those who claim leadership on climate action like Shell,
BHP, Rio, Woodside and Santos, are now in clear breach of their fiduciary
responsibilities to their shareholders, because in so doing, they are destroying
their shareholder’s, and their own, future.
Ben van Beurden,
Managing Director of Royal Dutch Shell
conceded
last year that: “Yeah, we knew. Everybody knew. And somehow we all ignored it.”
That is not good enough, particularly as they had access to the best available
science and for years have known perfectly well the implications of their
actions.
A failure made even more egregious by their current refusal
to cut emissions rapidly, or far worse, their determination to massively
increase fossil fuel use with gas-led recoveries on the erroneous, self-serving
grounds it will reduce carbon emissions globally.
But nowhere is this leadership failure, and the moral and ethical vacuum behind
it, more evident than with the current Australian Federal government.
Australia is one of the regions most exposed to climate threats, as the
community is only too well aware from our recent drought, bushfire and flood
experience. Yet politically, it is as if this never happened.
For example, none
of the recommendations of the Bushfire Royal Commission has been
implemented, and many communities remain without adequate recovery support.
Policy, to the extent it exists, is decided by political advisers, with little
real-world experience, align with fossil-fuel interests, and is ideologically
committed to the neoliberal unregulated market which has created the climate
crisis and proved incapable of solving it.
Scared of the future,
they have no vision for Australia other than a perpetuation of its fossil fuel
past. Not surprising, given that former fossil fuel executives dominate
government appointments, from the Prime Minister’s office down.
So reality is swept under the carpet as the government rushes headlong into its
own gas-led recovery, quite deliberately designed to maximise the use of fossil
fuels before the shutters finally come down on the industry.
However, the government recognised rising community concern over climate, and
the electoral danger that poses if those concerns are ignored, so something had
to be done.
Ergo, multiple initiatives are announced, with great fanfare, to
demonstrate their climate bona fides; resilience, disaster management, Great
Barrier Reef research etc, all of which address the symptoms of climate change,
but ignore its fundamental cause, which is excessive atmospheric carbon
concentrations and the failure to rapidly reduce emissions
The Minister for Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, even pours fuel on the fire
by presiding over
emission increases, reassuring us that any climate issues will be solved with “technology not
taxes”.
This ignores the fact that for these technologies to work at
scale, and in the short time now available, taxes in the form of carbon
pricing are essential otherwise the massive subsidy enjoyed by fossil fuels, by
not accounting for the damage caused by their use, will continue, markedly
slowing the transition to a low-carbon future.
The Minister for the Environment, Sussan Ley, passes any responsibility for
climate change to the Minister for increasing emissions, despite the fact it is
the greatest threat to our environment; decries any duty of care to protect
Australia’s children from climate harm as a result of her deliberations on
approving coal mines; then makes common cause with a motley crew of climate
denialist countries to prevent the UNESCO World Heritage Committee placing the
Great Barrier Reef on the “in danger” list, despite the fact that it is obvious
to all but the most entrenched ideologues that the reef is now in terminal
decline due to climate change.
Geopolitically, the government’s immaturity and ignorance of Asia has totally
disrupted relations with our largest trading partner, China, with subsequent
Australian sabre-rattling designed to divert attention away from the far greater
threat of climate change.
After four years of Australian servility
to the Trumpian cause and a long history of Western abuse, it is unsurprising
that China is taking a more assertive stance in global affairs, whilst
recognising that China has its own problems and wolf warrior diplomacy is not
the mark of mature global leadership.
But both sides sidestep the
real threat of climate change, instead focussing on geopolitical point-scoring.
Overcoming that threat will require unprecedented global co-operation,
otherwise, everyone loses.
Part of which is to completely re-think the concept of defence. Vast amounts
spent on ever-more sophisticated ways of killing one another are useless on a
dead planet.
Those resources are desperately needed to stave off the climate
threat and implement genuinely sustainable, equitable, economic systems.
It is clear from its actions that the Federal government has absolutely no
intention of taking climate change seriously.
It has yet to commit to NZE2050,
but may well do so finally at the November climate summit in Glasgow, attempting
to present it, with yet more fanfare, as “Australian climate leadership”, much
as John Howard did with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol “Australia Clause”, the greatest
strategic mistake this country ever made which initiated three decades of
climate denial.
The government has no appetite to address the big issues confronting this
country and is quite happy to destroy the prosperity and future of Australian
society, its children and their own, in the interests of retaining power in the
short term.
The parallels with the Covid crisis are legion. With Covid, the government has
shown itself manifestly incapable of leading or managing its core
responsibilities, beset by corruption and secrecy.
The climate
challenge is far greater than Covid, and there are no vaccinations or quarantine
against climate impacts, which from now on will increase inexorably absent
decisive leadership.
The community must now seek that leadership elsewhere.
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