06/03/2022

(Grist) Big Oil Is Exiting Russia. What Does That Mean For The Climate?

Grist - Emily Pontecorvo

Withdrawing from Russia may hinder plans to transition to clean energy.

Stanislav Krasilnikov\TASS via Getty Images

Major international oil companies began dumping their investments in Russian oil and gas this week following the country’s invasion into Ukraine.

But experts say it’s unlikely these decisions will mean anything good for the transition to clean energy, and could actually set the companies back with their plans to achieve net-zero emissions. It started with BP.

Last weekend, under pressure from the U.K. government, the British oil giant decided to exit it’s nearly 20 percent stake in the Russian company Rosneft.

Russian crude makes up about a third of BP’s oil production, and the company said it would take a financial hit of as much as $25 billion.

In a statement, BP Chair Helge Lund said, “The Rosneft holding is no longer aligned with BP’s business and strategy.”

Shell, Exxon, and the Norwegian oil company Equinor have since followed, withdrawing from various joint ventures in oil and gas projects in Russia.

While abandoning oil and gas production is exactly what climate advocates want these companies to do, the moves do not represent a shift in strategy for Big Oil.

For one thing, when BP first announced its plans to achieve net-zero emissions in 2020, the company made it clear that the plan did not apply to its stake in Rosneft.

Now, the exit from Russia might actually hurt that plan, according to Jonathan Elkind, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Both BP and Shell have said they planned to fund their forays into clean energy with profits from the fossil fuel side of their businesses.

“So this creates, at a minimum, a crosswind that they have to figure out a way to manage,” said Elkind, referring to the two companies’ exit from Russia. “That may translate into a need to rethink some of what their priorities had been.”

In other words, the situation in Russia won’t stop demand for fossil fuels, and major oil companies may decide to replace their Russian investments with new oil and gas ventures elsewhere.

According to the International Energy Agency, Russian oil and gas production is not the most carbon-intensive in the world, but it’s also not the cleanest.

If this leads BP, Shell, or Exxon to move into parts of the world with dirtier production, their emissions could increase.

It’s also unclear whether oil companies will be able to sell off their Russian assets or if they’ll be forced to walk away from them.

Even if they are able to sell assets, the proceeds may not be put toward clean energy.

When Shell sold off its assets in the U.S. Permian Basin last year for $9.4 billion, it said that it would spend some of the cash for the energy transition, but returned $7 billion of the proceeds to shareholders.

“There’s not generally a straight line you can draw from oil majors selling out of oil and gas plays to buying into clean energy,” said Lorne Stockman, research co-director at the advocacy organization Oil Change International.

Stockman also takes issue with the idea that BP and Shell need oil and gas funds to transition to clean energy.

“Companies that are in the clean energy business don’t need to run that business off of fossil fuel profits. There’s a thing called credit markets. You can get loans. You could issue shares. There are many ways to raise money to invest in clean energy,” he said.

Another question is whether Big Oil’s withdrawal of capital, and the technical expertise that comes with it, will have consequences for Russia’s plans to expand oil and gas development in the Arctic Circle — development that has been made possible due to climate change’s rapid warming of the area.

For example, Rosneft is building a multi-billion dollar oil production and export hub called the Vostok Oil project on the Taymyr peninsula, threatening a fragile ecosystem and the Indigenous communities that depend on it.

On Wednesday, a key international investor in the project, Trafigura, said it was reviewing its stake.

Elkind said it’s hard to tell whether the withdrawal of investment and trade ties with Russian companies will be a short-term phenomenon or more enduring.

But another factor is whether Russia can complete a project like Vostok without technological support from the West.

“All of this would create headwinds for Vostok,” he said. “Whether they can be overcome by Rosneft, it is too early to tell.”

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(AU The Guardian) ‘Unscientific’: Morrison Government Wanted IPCC To Say Great Barrier Reef ‘Not Yet In Crisis’

The Guardian - |

Australian officials attempted to water down language around health of world’s largest coral reef in latest climate change report

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the Great Barrier Reef was already heavily affected by ocean heating, leading to more frequent and severe coral bleaching. Photograph: HOGP/AP
The Australian government pushed to soften the wording of a major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading climate science authority, to say the Great Barrier Reef is not yet in crisis.

It has prompted accusations that the Morrison government had been unscientific, and was trying to play down the damage already being caused by global heating to avoid making deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

The latest major assessment by the IPCC, released this week, included a section headed: “The Great Barrier Reef is in crisis”.

It said the world’s largest coral reef was already heavily affected by climate change, particularly ocean heating, which was leading to more frequent and severe coral bleaching.

The 2,300km reef system has endured mass bleaching events in three of the past six years.

A bulletin by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a global thinktank, said Australian government officials suggested in a meeting about the wording of a report summary that it should say the reef was “not yet in crisis” and “coral reefs are under increasing pressure, but targeted measures and management could reduce risk”.

They were supported by officials from Saudi Arabia.

The proposal, which Guardian Australia has confirmed independently, was opposed by France and several Caribbean island countries including Trinidad and Tobago, which argued coral reefs were already experiencing loss and damage.

The original wording was ultimately retained in the report by consensus.

The director of Blue Ocean Consulting and an adviser to the Australian Marine Conservation Society, Imogen Zethoven, said the trajectory of the reef was dire and the government’s attempt to not have that reflected in the IPCC report was “unscientific”.

“Scientists through the IPCC have said that the Great Barrier Reef is in crisis, and there’s a lot about it in the report, but the government has completely denied the crisis the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs around the world are facing,” she said. “Anything other than claiming coral reefs are in crisis is dishonest.”

Some IPCC scientists emphasised that the Australian government had ultimately joined 194 other countries in agreeing to the final wording of the summary report. They said negotiations over the text was normal practice.

But the chief executive of Climate Analytics and former IPCC lead author, Bill Hare, said the Morrison government’s attempt to change the wording was consistent with its previous attempts to play down the risk facing the reef.

“The claim that the reef is not yet in crisis is quite fundamentally wrong, but it’s symptomatic of what the Australian government had been doing,” Hare said. “This is just the latest iteration.”

Guardian Australia last year revealed the government had tried to block the passage of a Unesco recommendation that countries should try to keep global heating to 1.5C to protect world heritage sites such as the reef from the impacts of the climate crisis.

Hare said Australian government representatives had also unsuccessfully tried to water down a section of the IPCC report that said ecosystems including some ​​warm water coral reefs were already reaching or surpassing “hard adaptation limits” at which they had limited capacity to adapt to further heating.

He said the final report, which summarises thousands of published peer-reviewed scientific studies, was essentially saying that coral reefs were “on the edge”.

It said there was “very high confidence” that some natural systems in Australia, including the Great Barrier Reef, had already experienced irreversible change.

It found extreme events exacerbated by emissions – heatwaves, droughts, floods, storms and fires – were causing death, injury and financial and emotional stress, and their impacts were “cascading and compounding” across Australia’s nature, society and economy.

“There are so many things in this report that are so bad, and the government just wants to ignore them because the only way to deal with them is to get [greenhouse gas] emissions down,” Hare said. “The report shows it is urgent that we increase our emissions reduction target for 2030 to a cut of more than 50%.”

The Morrison government has resisted international and domestic pressure to increase its six-year-old target of reducing emissions to at least 26% below 2005 levels by 2030.

Official projections suggest the country will cut emissions by 30%.

Scientists say this is inconsistent with limiting global heating to well below 2C, a key goal the government signed up to at the landmark 2015 Paris climate summit.

A spokesperson for the environment minister, Sussan Ley, confirmed Australia had attempted to change language in the report and said the proposal “was both science-based and accurate, in line with normal practice”.

“We fully accept that global climate change needs to be addressed as the biggest threat to the world’s reefs,” the spokesperson said.

“The Great Barrier Reef is the best managed reef in the world and our investments in science-based adaptation, regeneration and on-water management show that local science-based strategies are needed to improve resilience as the world reduces emissions, and that they can have a positive impact.”

The government announced in January an additional $1bn funding for Great Barrier Reef conservation projects over the next decade. It said more than half would be spent on improving water quality, including by limiting pollution from agriculture.

The IPCC report published this week is the second part of its sixth major assessment of the climate crisis.

It found global warming caused by humans was causing dangerous and widespread disruption, with many effects expected to be more severe than predicted.

It said there were options to limit the impacts if there was proper planning, but progress on adaptation was uneven.

A 2018 IPCC report found coral reefs were likely to decline between 70% and 90% if global heating surpassed 1.5C.

If the temperature rise reaches 2C, more than 99% of coral reefs were projected to decline.

Average global temperatures have already increased about 1.1C.

The Australian government last year successfully lobbied against UN scientific advice that the reef should be placed on a list of world heritage sites in danger.

The 21-country world heritage committee is due to consider the reef’s plight again in June.

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(AU SMH) Floods Are The Right Time To Talk About Climate Change

Sydney Morning Herald - Editorial
The floods that have devastated the east coast of Australia demonstrate yet again the dire consequences of climate change but Australia’s response is still far too feeble.

A dozen lives have already been lost in the floods on the NSW North Coast and in south-east Queensland and in Sydney 200,000 people were evacuated from their homes on Thursday as the Hawkesbury and Georges rivers broke their banks.

The damage bill will be billions of dollars.

Yet, if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced quickly and the planet warms by 3 degrees this century, these extreme weather events will only grow more damaging, according to a United Nations report on the impacts of climate change released on Monday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change update of previous reports says it has ever higher confidence in predicting “compounding and cascading” effects of climate change.

Bushfires and droughts will grow in severity and frequency; floods will be more severe; it could be too hot for normal outdoor activity in parts of northern Australia; the Great Barrier Reef will likely die; snowfields will shrink or disappear.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said Lismore was hit by a “1-in-1000 year” flood but this phrase is meaningless now that floods are becoming more frequent and breaking records every year.

The federal government belatedly seems prepared to accept the scientific consensus that there is a direct link between specific instances of extreme weather and climate change.

Emergency Management Minister Bridget McKenzie told ABC TV that “given all the predictions of climate change we are going to see more intense and irregular events”. She added: “The IPCC is dead right.”

Yet her government is still not taking all the steps needed to avoid the worrying predictions of the IPCC’s report.

While the Coalition government took an important step before the recent Glasgow Summit by adopting a target of zero net emissions by 2050, it is still lukewarm, at best, in its efforts to cut emissions.

The Coalition’s interim target of a 26-28 per cent cut in emissions below 2005 levels by 2030, is less than other comparable countries and the ALP’s election promise of a target of 43 per cent.

More importantly, it is not consistent with keeping the rise in global temperatures below 1.5 degrees, seen as a threshold for mitigating the most serious impacts of climate change.

Rather than taking the lead in cutting emissions, the government too often sides with the fossil fuel lobby.

Ms McKenzie is a key supporter of the NSW coal industry.

When tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes last week launched an $8 billion takeover bid for AGL, which involved closing down the company’s coal-fired power plants more quickly than planned, Energy Minister Angus Taylor described the plan as “a significant risk to electricity consumers”.

The government is missing a huge opportunity.

Australia’s resources of wind and solar put it in an ideal position to reduce the role of coal and gas in its power grid, unlike Europe which is desperately trying to end its dependence on imported Russian gas.

Alongside faster reductions in emissions, Australia must better prepare for the inevitable natural disasters that lie ahead.

NSW will have to invest more in emergency response infrastructure. Many vulnerable people trapped in their homes by rising waters waited too long to be rescued.

Governments tend to over-promise but under-deliver when it comes to promising emergency financial assistance.

Around flood-prone areas, the government faces a difficult choice of whether to invest in more dams and levees or whether to abandon some areas and offer help to residents to move to higher ground.

The flood waters will recede in the next few days but the myriad threats posed to Australia by climate change will only compound for decades.

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