Lethal Heating: 09/03/21

03/09/2021

(AU AFR) CBA Sued In Climate Lawfare First

AFR - Hannah Wootton

A Commonwealth Bank shareholder is taking the company to court to gain access to documents detailing its decision to finance oil and gas projects despite their potential to breach the Paris Agreement goals, in an action that could signal a new wave of climate change litigation.

The Federal Court case is a first for climate lawfare in Australia, with the head of the University of Melbourne’s Climate Futures Initiative, Jacqueline Peel, warning it could provide “a new avenue” for shareholders seeking to hold companies to account for their environmental commitments.

An oil field in the Permian Basin in Texas – CBA is facing legal action related to its decision to finance pipelines to carry natural gas from the site.

It comes just weeks after CBA released an updated climate plan that was criticised for back-pedalling on commitments to limit climate change in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement for all investments to instead only apply to project finance.

The shareholder, Guy Abrahams, is seeking to inspect “all documents created by [CBA] in relation to CBA’s gas projects and CBA’s fossil fuel projects” for the purpose of complying with its environmental and social framework.

He specifically points to the Permian Highway Pipeline project to carry natural gas in the US, Gaslog and FLEX LNG’s new LNG vessels, Energy Infrastructure Investments’ Tipton West coal seam gas project, Siccar Point’s Cambo oil field development, Euronav NV’s crude carriers, and Santos’ acquisition of the Barossa Gas Field.

He wants any documents related to the bank’s assessment of the environmental, social and economic consequences of these projects and whether they are in line with the Paris Agreement goals.

The role of CBA’s directors is also under his scrutiny, as Mr Abrahams is also demanding access to “without limitation, any documents provided to [CBA’s] board” about the adoption of its 2021 climate plan.

Equity Generation Lawyers, the legal firm behind strategic climate actions such as the Rest and Sharma cases, is bringing the case on behalf of Mr Abrahams, who also settled a case against CBA in 2017 alleging it failed to disclose climate risks in its 2016 annual report.

New form of climate litigation

While shareholders’ power to inspect books has been subject to prior cases, it has not yet been used in one related to environmental concerns.

But Professor Peel said that if the application was successful, it could create a new form of climate litigation in Australian courts.

“If you get the information and it shows that there’s a difference between what they [the company] say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing, that potentially would be grounds for a case for breaching directors’ duties or misleading and deceptive conduct, or both,” Professor Peel said.

“You would imagine that lots of banks that currently have these kinds of commitments in place and shareholders are increasingly interested in whether the companies they’re invested in are carrying out their climate commitments.

“This could be a new avenue for shareholders to assert their rights and see whether the companies are meeting those.”

Professor Peel said targeting the institutions financing fossil fuel projects was part of a broader move in climate litigation to target the businesses and individuals sitting behind the companies directly involved.

“Looking at the broader context [in which] this case is happening, there’s an accountability spread to a lot of the [climate] litigation we’re seeing,” she said.

“And if financing is key to these projects going ahead, then it’s bringing that accountability back to the financiers.”

While financing some oil and gas projects was often seen as compatible with meeting the Paris targets five years ago, with only coal blacklisted, new climate modelling suggests that this is no longer the case.

But to be successful, the Abrahams case will need to convince the court that its application stems from a genuine exercise of shareholder rights and not for “an improper purpose”.

The courts have rejected similar applications before after deciding they were actually attempts to get documents to help develop class action claims, for example.

“That means [Mr Abrahams or other shareholders] need to show they are worried about the value of their shares going down because of something the company may or may not be doing,” Professor Peel said.

“It can’t be for an improper purpose such as getting information for further litigation.”

A CBA spokesman declined to comment on the case while it was before the court but said the bank was committed to helping meet the Paris targets.

“On 11 August 2021 we released our Annual Report and our updated Environmental and Social Framework, which include a considered plan for managing both the risks and opportunities of climate change,” he said.

“We are committed to playing our part in limiting climate change in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement and supporting the transition to net zero emissions by 2050.”

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(USA The Hill) How easily the climate crisis can become global chaos

The Hill - Jeff Masters

© Getty Images

Author

Jeff Masters, Ph.D., is a former hurricane hunter and scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as the co-founder of Weather Underground. He writes about extreme weather and climate change for Yale Climate Connections.

After months of one extreme weather event after another, it’s hard to imagine how climate impacts could get any worse.

Unfortunately, it could. Imagine a year — not far in the future — just a couple years from now, where it all goes wrong:

A strong El Niño event warms the equatorial Pacific, bringing Earth’s hottest January on record.

Extreme drought grips Australia, the world's No. 3 exporter of wheat, bringing its most intense drought in history. A 58 percent decline in wheat production results, as occurred after their 2002 drought. Global food prices spike.

In April, record rainfall hits Canada, the world’s No. 2 wheat exporter. Canada’s wheat harvest falls 14 percent, as occurred after extreme rains in 2010. Unrelenting torrential rains hit the central U.S., delaying spring planting of crops and bringing near-record flooding on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Fortunately, because of infrastructure bills passed in 2021 and 2022, which gave funds for flood preparedness, the damage is billions of dollars less than from the great floods of 2011 and 1993.

As summer arrives, the jet stream gets "stuck" in the type of resonant pattern linked to human-caused climate change that has become more frequent in recent years. The stuck jet stream brings cool air, relentless rain-bearing low-pressure systems and record rains to the central United States. Production of corn falls 4 percent and wheat 25 percent, as occurred in 2017 after a similarly wet year. In the western U.S. and Canada, the stuck jet stream brings a record-strength dome of high pressure, exacerbating their intense drought and bringing another year of hellacious wildfires and choking smoke that leads to thousands of premature air pollution deaths.

Severe drought, typical of an El Niño year, hits India and Southeast Asia, causing failure of the monsoon rains. In India, “Day Zero” arrives for an additional 100 million people, as taps run dry from years of excessive groundwater pumping and a wasteful water supply system. Rice yields fall 23 percent in India, the world's No. 1 rice exporter, as occurred in 2002.

In the fall, another bonkers Atlantic hurricane season unfolds as record-warm waters in the Caribbean fuel five major hurricanes, bucking the tendency of El Niño to suppress hurricanes. In mid-October, a hurricane — a carbon copy of 2021’s Hurricane Ida, except occurring during peak harvest season — trashes three of America’s 15 largest ports, which lie along the Lower Mississippi River and handle 60 percent of all U.S. grain exports to the world. Barge traffic on the Mississippi is crippled for months, during the peak export period for U.S. grain.

The extreme weather onslaught causes food prices to spike to quadruple the levels of 2000. Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America. The Euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose 10 percent of their value; U.S. stock markets fall 5 percent. Civil war erupts in Nigeria, famine kills nearly a million people in Bangladesh and Africa, and Mali becomes a failed state. Military tensions heighten between Russia and NATO; nuclear-armed India and Pakistan fight a border skirmish over water rights. Even more dramatic stock market falls ensue, and the global economy tumbles into a deep recession.

This worst-case scenario year — though unlikely to occur exactly this way — illustrates one of the greatest threats of climate change: extreme droughts and floods hitting multiple major grain-producing "breadbaskets" simultaneously. The scenario is similar to one outlined by insurance giant Lloyds of London in a "Food System Shock" report issued in 2015. Lloyds gave uncomfortably high odds of such an event occurring — well over 0.5 percent per year, or more than an 18 percent chance over a 40-year period.

Given the unprecedented weather extremes that have rocked the world recently, the odds of a devastating food system shock are probably much higher. What’s more, these odds are steadily increasing as humans burn fossil fuels and pump more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the air.

A warming planet provides more energy to power stronger storms, and more energy to intensify droughts, heatwaves and wildfires when storms are not present. Earth’s oceans are heating at an accelerating rate, storing energy equivalent to an astonishing three to six Hiroshima-sized atom bombs per second. That extra heat energy allows more water vapor to evaporate and power stronger and wetter storms — like Hurricane Ida, and the catastrophic storms that hit Europe and China in July, costing over $25 billion each.

Earth’s extra heat energy also intensifies droughts and heatwaves, like the one that brought Canada’s all-time heat record in June: 121 degrees Fahrenheit in Lytton, British Columbia, a day before a wildfire burned the town down. Global warming also intensified the 2010 Russian drought, which caused a doubling in global wheat prices, helping fuel the Arab Spring protests that led to the deadly uprisings in seven nations and the overthrow of multiple governments.

If business-as-usual is allowed to continue, a civilization-threatening climate catastrophe will occur. Mother Nature’s primal fury of 2021 is just a preview of what is coming. Global temperatures are currently about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial levels, and this year may well be the coolest year of the rest of our lives. Catastrophic extreme weather events will grow exponentially worse with 3 degrees Celsius of warming — the course we are currently on.

The key to solving the climate crisis: electrify everything — while making sure the electricity doesn’t come from fossil fuels. The clean energy revolution is progressing faster than seemed possible, but it needs a coordinated international effort led by the U.S. and China to push it harder. This will be resisted by the forces of denial and delay: fossil fuel companies, right-wing partisans, media talking heads and oil-funded governments — all of which continue to profit from our dependence on fossil fuels, as detailed in climate scientist Michael Mann’s book “The New Climate War.” The best way people can help solve the climate crisis is to choose leaders committed to climate action.

Humans caused the climate crisis — we can solve it.

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(USA NYT) The Climate Crisis Is Worse for Women. Here’s Why.

New York Times - Lauren Jackson

Although climate change is a collective problem, its burdens — displacement, homelessness, poverty, sexual violence, disease — weigh more heavily on women and girls.

Paola Saliby

“If you’re going to be a feminist on a hot planet, you have to be a climate feminist.”
— Katharine K. Wilkinson, a co-editor of the climate anthology “All We Can Save”

The world’s leading climate scientists issued a landmark report this month with their clearest clarion call to date: The climate crisis is here, it’s humanity’s fault, and it’s a catastrophic, planet-threatening problem that will only get worse before it gets better — if it gets better.

The United Nations report, approved by 195 governments and based on more than 14,000 studies, determined that more than a century of extractive energy use has heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of existing emissions, additional warming over the next three decades is inevitable.

But the report stressed that the coming years offered a narrow and urgent window of opportunity: the chance to fundamentally change our consumption habits and energy usage to avoid even more disastrous warming.

Katharine K. Wilkinson, a co-editor of the climate anthology “All We Can Save,” argues that while climate change is a collective problem, its impacts will be disproportionate — skewed in its effects on the world’s most vulnerable populations, specifically women and girls.

“The climate crisis is not gender-equal or gender-neutral,” she said.

Men have a larger carbon footprint than women, by 16 percent, according to one study. And the top 1 percent of income earners globally, who are overwhelmingly male, are responsible for more carbon emissions than the bottom 50 percent of earners. According to the U.N., that’s roughly 70 million at the top compared with 3.5 billion at the bottom.

Yet it is women and girls who bear the burdens in the wake of more frequent climate disasters. Those burdens include displacement — 80 percent of people displaced by climate change are women — as well as increased homelessness, poverty, sexual violence and disease.

In her book, Dr. Wilkinson, who has a doctorate in geography and environment from Oxford, and her co-editor, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, shine a spotlight on the many women researching, leading, campaigning and writing on climate solutions.

In Her Words spoke with Dr. Wilkinson about why the answers are inextricable from gender equality and explained the idea of climate feminism. The conversation has been condensed and lightly edited.

You say the climate crisis is having a disproportionate impact on women. What does that mean?

Dr. Wilkinson: The Pentagon coined this term of climate as a threat multiplier, which, of course, they’re thinking about national security. But I think it’s such a helpful framing that the climate is a multiplier of any cracks, imbalances or injustices that are present in current society. It amplifies them.

The climate crisis is not gender-neutral in its root causes, which grow out of patriarchy, among other things. It is not gender-neutral in its impacts because women and girls are on the back foot, in various ways. Extreme weather events are being tied to early marriage, to sex trafficking, to domestic violence, all of these things that are already present in society that get turned up a notch or five.

Say more about the connection between climate change and patriarchy.

Dr. Wilkinson: The cause of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions. But to me, the question is, well, why do we have such an abundance of these emissions, and why have they been so hard to rein in? And when we start to ask those questions, we find ourselves confronting a system that has been very focused on hierarchy, control, exploitation and, frankly, decision making that has largely sat with a relatively narrow set of folks.

And, certainly, women have not been at the table anywhere near equally in shaping the status quo that we find ourselves in. And the same is true for people of color. The same is true for Indigenous peoples.

How is gender connected to climate solutions?

Dr. Wilkinson: We talk so much in climate about solutions at scale, which we need. We need regenerative agriculture around the world. We need a 100 percent clean electricity system, we need means of mobility that don’t rely on fossil fuels.

We need all of that, of course. But I think sometimes we overlook the values. Because we’re not just trying to build a zero-emissions future, right? We’re trying to build a future also in which we can thrive together.

And to me, patriarchy is fundamentally predicated on some people thriving at the expense of other people. And of course, the same is true of white supremacy. Addressing both of those things is at the heart of climate work.

In your book, you describe the need for climate leadership that is more “characteristically feminine.” Tell me more about that.

Dr. Wilkinson: Sherri Mitchell, an Indigenous attorney, activist and author from the Penobscot Nation, talks about the feminine as heart-centered wisdom and the masculine as action in the world.

When we think about the things it’s going to take to address the climate crisis and build a genuinely life-giving future, that’s going to take a fundamental reorientation to care. It’s going to take collaboration, connection, compassion, creativity, all of these things that fall within this realm of the feminine, regardless of gender identity.

Can you give an example of an area where you would like to see this reorientation manifested?

Dr. Wilkinson: When we look at climate philanthropy, there are still really significant imbalances along the lines of race and gender. Most of the money that’s being invested in the climate movement is going to work that is led by white men. And we want them on the team. They just can’t be the whole team.

How would you respond to someone who says that bold climate action is inherently anticapitalist?

Dr. Wilkinson: If capitalism is not anticlimate, the onus for proving that is on capitalists who so far have come up beyond short in showing how it can be workable within our planetary system.

We have had this very bizarre, fundamental belief in infinity at the core of this economic system, and we’re living on a finite planet, so if you think that there is a way to solve for infinite growth on a finite planet, I would love to see that mapped out.

How do you hope the movement for climate feminism will evolve?

Dr. Wilkinson: I think a lot about how we welcome in people who are committed feminists but have not seen themselves as climate feminists or have felt like the climate space is not super welcoming.

Like, if you don’t have a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, then thanks, we don’t need you. And of course, that couldn’t be couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re going to be a feminist on a hot planet, you have to be a climate feminist.

If someone came to you and asked what steps they could take now to address the climate emergency, what would you tell them?

Dr. Wilkinson: I often ask people: What are your superpowers, and how can those be contributed in some way to the work that needs doing on climate? Because we are so much more than our consumer choices, we are so much more even than our voting practices and civic participation.

Many of us can find ways to weave climate into our professional lives. And that, for me, is when things start to get powerful.

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