Climate Change: World 'Faces Food Shortages And Mass Migration' Caused By Global Warming

Independent - Tom Bawden

World Meteorological Society chief warns dwindling water supplies is greatest of all dangers posed by climate change

1.6 billion people already live in areas that are classed as having “water scarcity" Getty

The world is facing a future of food shortages and mass migration as a consequence of widespread water shortages caused by global warming, the outgoing head of the World Meteorological Society has warned.
Michel Jarraud, the WMO's Secretary-General, said of all the dangers posed by climate change – from increasingly intense storms and a growth in disease to rising sea levels that may submerge cities – the greatest threat is from dwindling water supplies.
About 1.6 billion people already live in areas that are classed as having "water scarcity" and that number is forecast to reach 2.8 billion by 2025. It will go on climbing after that as the planet continues warming.
Large swathes of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be hit hardest, although parts of Australia, the US, South America and southern Europe are also vulnerable.
Experts predict the scarcity will unleash a major refugee crisis as the lack of water for drinking, crops and manufacturing makes huge populated areas uninhabitable and hundreds of millions of people are forced to move.
"Often we think about climate change in terms of temperature but actually the most important parameter which will be affected is the water cycle," Mr Jarraud told the Carbon Brief website. "In a water-stressed area, there will be even more stress on the water resources."
The world's rising population will also exacerbate the problem as it continues to stretch increasingly meagre water supplies.

The population is due to soar from 7.3 billion people today to 11.2 billion by the end of the century – with much of the growth due to come from Africa, a continent where many areas are already hot, poor and short of water, according to UN forecasts.
There is evidence that the world's water resources are already coming under intolerable pressure. Earlier this year the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, home to 20 million people and once known as the City of Drizzle, was hit with such a bad drought that residents began drilling through basement floors and car parks to try to reach groundwater.
In California, Governor Jerry Brown introduced a drought mandate requiring cities to cut water use by as much as 36 per cent or face fines. And in Middle-Eastern countries such as Iran, swathes of countryside have been reduced to desert because too much water is being used.
Global warming will put further pressure on water supplies by upsetting established weather patterns, leading to less rainfall in some areas and drying out groundwater supplies, Mr Jarraud says.
"With climate change coming, the frequency and intensity of heatwaves will increase and the frequency and intensity of droughts in some parts of the world will increase," he said, adding that health and food shortages were among the other serious threats posed by global warming.
"Some diseases will expand in areas that they don't exist now because of climate change… A few years ago there were some major food crises. Right now, for the last few years there have been hotspots here and there. However, all the ingredients are there for a food crisis to come back on a very large scale," said Mr Jarraud, who will step down from the WMO at the end of the year after the maximum term of 12 years in the post. He will continue as an advisor.
Mr Jarraud said he welcomed the Paris Agreement this month in which world leaders agreed to limit global warming to between 1.5C and 2C – although he stressed that meeting that target would not be easy.
"It is still possible to stay under 2C but it requires bold and ambitious action," he said, adding that he was cautiously optimistic about the prospect for tackling climate change following the agreement.

Links

• COP21: Four things you need to know about the Paris climate change treaty
• Climate change: Government criticised for scrapping project intended to limit CO2 emissions

Abbot Point Coal Port Open to Challenge Over Tugboat Harbour Left Out of EIS

The Guardian - Shalailah Medhora

The federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, confirms harbour had not been considered in the environmental impact statement for the terminal expansion

The Abbot Point coal terminal expansion may face a court challenge and possible reassessment. Photograph: Alamy

The Abbot Point coal terminal may face a court challenge and a possible reassessment by the commonwealth after Greg Hunt admitted that the future development of a tugboat harbour at the site had not been considered in its environmental impact statement.
Earlier this month, the North Queensland Conservation Council said it discovered plans by the mining company Adani, which leases the terminal, to build a tugboat harbour at Abbot Point near Bowen in north Queensland.
The Abbot Point expansion cleared a major hurdle by gaining commonwealth approval on Tuesday, on the condition that it complies with strict provisions relating to how and where dredge spoil can be dumped.
The plans to build a tugboat harbour were not part of the environmental impact statement (EIS) undertaken by the federal government and could mean that the entire project needs to be referred back to the commonwealth for reassessment.
"This question of the tugboat harbour was put forward by one of the environment groups. It was asserted as if it were a fact and that it could be slipped through without approval. That's false," the federal environment minister told ABC Radio on Tuesday.
"If such a proposal were put forward then it would have to be in accordance with state and federal law. And not to do so would in fact be an action that would be punishable under the federal law."
A spokeswoman for Hunt confirmed to Guardian Australia that the tugboat harbour had not been included in the EIS.
"What was put in front of us, we assessed on the basis of law," the spokeswoman said. "There is no such proposal from the Queensland government at this stage."
Excluding the tugboat harbour could open the entire EIS up to a legal challenge, the Environmental Defenders Office in Queensland has warned.
"We will be looking very carefully at the lawfulness of the approval [granted by Hunt]," its chief executive officer and solicitor, Jo Braggs, told Guardian Australia.
Braggs said the tugboat harbour was consequential to the Abbot Point project and must be assessed alongside the expansion of the terminal, even though the harbour was not expected to be needed in the short term.
The possible legal challenge is not the only hurdle facing the expansion of the terminal, with Hunt confirming that the company would need to complete a dredge management plan before the project could proceed.
The expansion could yet hit financial snags too; the Queensland government has insisted Adani pay its own way.
"This is a private company, and the private company Adani must get the finance independently if it is to go ahead," the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said. "There will be no taxpayers' money going towards this project."
The international credit agency Moody's has threatened to downgrade the debit accrued by the Abbot Point coal terminal to junk status.
Moody's analyst, Mary Anne Low, said "severe pressure" on the coal industry meant there was a higher probability that contracts would not be renewed or would end early.
Conservationists have criticised the expansion of the port, saying it would adversely affect the neighbouring Great Barrier Reef. Laws to stop dredge spoil from being dumped in the reef were recently enacted.
But the mining industry in Queensland said that the project, which would export coal extracted from the $16bn Carmichael coalmine if it goes ahead, would create much needed jobs in the state.
Queensland's resources minister, Anthony Lynham, said fossil fuels still have a role to play.
"Coal is good, even as we move towards renewable energy," he told Sky News on Tuesday. "We've struck the right balance between economic development and the environment."

Links

• Abbot Point coal port expansion faces hurdle over 'secret' tugboat harbour Abbot Point coal terminal expansion given approval by Greg Hunt
• Abbot Point coal port expansion faces hurdle over 'secret' tugboat harbour
• Coal from Carmichael mine 'will create more annual emissions than New York'
• Conservation group challenges approval of Carmichael coalmine as 'illegal'

Could The Paris Agreement Mean That Half Of All Coal Will Go Unmined?

Grist - Clayton Aldern

Shutterstock

A new Bank of America report notes that up to 50 percent of the world's coal reserves could remain unburned if countries intend on meeting the goals laid out earlier this month at the Paris Climate Conference.
The analysts estimate there are 890 billion tons of coal reserves out there — which is a lot of money to say no to — but they are confident that looming regulatory pressure coupled with efforts like the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign will continue to push the needle in the right direction.
Coal remains the biggest horse in the race to destroy the planet, and knocking its knees out is one of most obvious ways to give Earth a little more time.
Even 50 percent might not be enough to prevent catastrophic warming, though. Previous estimates have placed the "unburnable" figure at an even more aggressive 80 percent (or more). Whatever the number, there's mounting consensus that if the world is actually interested in a habitable future — and given the outcome in Paris, ostensibly it is — it'll have to keep most of that coal in the ground. "The latest carbon initiatives are the nail in the coffin for global coal," wrote the bank.
Not that the Paris Agreement actually says any of that.
In 32 pages of bureaucratese devoted to halting climate change, the word "coal" appears exactly zero times. "Fossil" is similarly absent. It's the diplomatic analogue of writing in the passive voice: By sidestepping the fossil industry, negotiators can play the hero without actually managing to assign any real, politically unpalatable responsibility for the problem. Instead, the agreement's long-term goal is framed in terms of limiting temperature increases to a maximum of 2C, while pursuing all efforts to limit the increase to 1.5. In order to achieve the goal, countries have agreed to "achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases" — in other words, zero-net emissions by the end of the century.
Over at Vox, David Roberts argues that the zero-net emissions goal is a good one. It's easy to rally around zero, and there's a clarity here that isn't captured by a ceiling on temperature increases. "It settles the question of what will happen to the fossil fuel industry and investments that rely on fossil fuels," he writes. "They will go away. It might be soon, it might be later, but the end state is determined. They are slated for extinction." That's the same logic that Bank of America applies when it argues that the Paris Agreement will help cripple the coal industry.
But that's not what zero-net means. It's what environmentalists wantit to mean.
Zero-net is the land of offsets and moonshots. Roberts acknowledges as much: "It leaves open the possibility, badly needed for any hope of hitting, er, avoiding 2 degrees, of substantial 'negative emissions' technologies (like carbon sequestration) later in the century, enough to balance out some remaining emission sources." If zero-net is a rallying cry — a signaling mechanism — the signal it's sending is one of market solutions: of cap-and-trade and carbon capture and REDD+ and Carly Fiorina's favorite word (innovation).
Of course, there's no doubt that the private sector needs to be on board if the world is to stop a changing climate, and the agreement is chock-full of nods in its direction. But if negative-emissions innovation comes sooner than later, that's all the more reason for coal miners to keep digging and coal-fired power plants to keep burning. And as long as they continue to do so, the world will continue to see emissions offloading, inequitable air pollution, and insecurity of indigenous land tenure.
The end-of-century emissions goal "sends a clear signal to investors that each new long-term fossil fuel investment, each new mine, well, pipeline, coal plant, or export terminal, is riskier than the last," writes Roberts. Maybe. (Certainly, Bank of America knows a thing or two about investors.) But a clearer signal would have been to indict the fossil fuel industry outright. Fossil fuel lobbies, petrostates, and countries interested in cheap development made sure in Paris that wasn't the case.

Australia Is Swimming Against The Global Tide On Coal

Australian Conservation Foundation - Hannah Aulby*

Continuing down the mine shaft will leave us with a dinosaur economy.

Continuing down mine shaft will only lead to dinosaur economy, according to the Australian Conservation Foundation. Photo: Michele Mossop

The International Energy Agency's latest coal market forecast provides a startling demonstration of just how far out of synch the Australian government is with the tide of global energy trends.
The IEA's Medium Term Coal Market Report 2015 shows world coal demand has peaked and is in decline.
The agency has slashed its five-year estimate of global coal demand by more than 500 million tonnes.
Coming hot on the heels of the Paris agreement to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees, the IEA report confirms the global financial and political shift away from coal.
Other finance analysts, including Goldman Sachs and IEFFA, believe 'peak coal' is already here. The UK Government has made a commitment to close all its coal-fired power plants.
Commentators have said the Paris agreement marks the end of the fossil fuel era.
Here in Australia, the economic implications of this shift are already being felt.
Anglo American recently announced a new round of job losses as a result of the company selling its Queensland coal mines.
Other companies, such as Cockatoo Coal, have recently been forced into administration.
Yet the federal government continues to back the industry, handing out approvals for new coal mines and continuing to subsidise coal projects.
Given the Paris climate agreement and IEA's dire forecast for coal demand, you'd think a responsible government, particularly in a historically resource-driven economy such as Australia's, would be looking ahead and planning for a future beyond coal.
Such forward planning would include transition plans for community and workers, mine rehabilitation plans and diversification of the economy.
But our government's response thus far has been to bury its head in the sand and continue to prop up a dying industry.
With more than $10 billion a year in subsidies, and many fossil fuel companies avoiding tax payments, it is not only the government that's propping up the industry; every Australian taxpayer is too.
Yet according to records just released by the Australian Tax Office, coal companies such as Adani Abbot Point Holdings, Anglo American, Yancoal, EnergyAustralia, Whitehaven and Glencore all paid no tax in 2013-14.
These companies didn't pay tax, but taxpayers paid the companies. The IMF estimates each Australian pays $437 in fossil fuel subsidies each year.
Continuing down the mine shaft will only lead to stranded assets in a dinosaur economy.
The Wiggins Point coal terminal is a stark example of this.
Opened earlier this year, after a long construction phase that included major dredging on the Great Barrier Reef, the Wiggins Point coal terminal is now struggling to pay its debts.
Banks are quickly selling off their stakes and major owners Bandanna Energy and Cockatoo Coal have both gone bankrupt.
Major debtor Glencore has now had a slump in its stock price, creating yet more instability for the project.
Initially aiming to ship 27 million tonnes in its first year, working up to 60 million tonnes at its peak, the project came in at only 1.2 million tonnes leaving Wiggins Point in its first five months of operation.
Wiggins Point will mean massive taxpayer subsidies, and will likely result in environmental reef destruction and exorbitant climate pollution – and for what?  A ghost port in a dying industry.
What's next?  The government has approved the Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin – although ACF is challenging that approval in the Federal Court – and has given the green light to what would be the world's largest coal terminal at Abbot Point.
Will these turn into yet more stranded assets?
The Turnbull Government now has a choice.
It can continue down the mine shaft and keep wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on stranded assets.
Or listen to the IEA's forecast, diversify the economy and support the future livelihoods and clean, safe future for the 99 per cent of Australians that don't work in the coal industry (and the less than one per cent that do).

*Hannah Aulby is a clean energy campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation 

Bad News: Scientists Say We Could Be Underestimating Arctic Methane Emissions

Washington Post - Chelsea Harvey

BARROW, AK – A new study examined methane emissions at sites on Alaska’s North Slope, south of Barrow, and found that cold-season emissions make up a significant portion of the methane emitted from the Arctic throughout the year. This is a fact not reflected in current climate models. (Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post)

Arctic permafrost has become a recent star in the climate change conversation, capturing the attention of scientists, activists and policymakers alike because of its ability to emit large quantities of carbon dioxide as well asmethane — a particularly potent though relatively short-lived greenhouse gas — when it thaws. As temperatures rise in the Arctic, scientists are increasingly concerned that permafrost will become a major contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.
Studies of permafrost emissions are important in both estimating current levels of greenhouse gas emissions and making predictions for the future. So far, most studies have focused on the way permafrost behaves in the summer, when Arctic temperatures are at their highest. But a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says we've been overlooking the importance of cold-season emissions of methane gas in particular— and possibly underestimating their impact in the future.
"The cold period in general is the time of the year that is warming the fastest in these Arctic ecosystems," said the new study's lead author Donatella Zona, an assistant professor at San Diego State University and research fellow at the University of Sheffield.
Until recently, scientists have known very little about how much methane is released by permafrost during the cold winter months, she said. But she noted, "Really, if we're thinking about the future of climate change, we need to understand if this time of the year is important."
Currently, most of the models that scientists use to predict future methane emissions only factor in warm-season methane emissions, assuming that the vast majority of permafrost emissions will occur when temperatures are at their highest. These models are important because they allow scientists to make projections about how severe global warming will be in the future and help policymakers make decisions about how much — and how quickly — global carbon emissions need to be reduced.
So Zona, along with a group of nearly 20 other scientists, decided to investigate whether cold-season methane emissions were really as negligible as the models have assumed. They examined data collected from five different sites in Alaska between June 2013 and January 2015, as well as data collected from aircraft in the same region.
"Donatella and her team are to be commended for making the first year-round measurements of [methane] in the Arctic," said Stan Wullschleger, an environmental scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in an email to The Post. "…The fact that this was done not just at one site, but multiple sites, is a breakthrough in our ability to quantify [methane] budgets for tundra ecosystems."
The researchers found that cold-season methane emissions are not only not negligible — they're pretty significant. While emissions varied somewhat from one site to the next, Zona said that, overall, emissions from September to May accounted for about half of all the methane emitted from those sites throughout the entire year.
This might seem a little baffling when you consider the fact that methane is generally released as Arctic soil thaws — a process that should be most pronounced during the warmest part of the year. Zona said the key to understanding where cold-season emissions come from lies in the way Arctic soil is structured and how it reacts to changes in temperature.
Arctic soil layers are structured kind of like a sandwich in the winter, Zona said. There's a top layer (the very surface of the soil) and a bottom layer that both freeze as temperatures drop. In between them, there's a layer of soil — found just below the surface — that can remain unfrozen for months, even as the temperature drops. This period of time is known as the "zero curtain" period, because temperatures in the unfrozen middle layer tend to hover right around zero degrees Celsius. The researchers believe that the majority of methane emissions produced during the winter occur during this zero curtain period, while the middle soil layer is still unfrozen.
The researchers also discovered another characteristic of cold-season methane emissions that isn't well reflected in current models. According to the authors, most models assume that wetter tundra sites produce more methane than drier sites — but they found that dry sites actually seemed to be producing the most methane.
These are all important points when it comes to predicting how much methane the Arctic will release in the future.
Estimates of current Arctic methane emissions are more or less accurate, Zona said. But she believes the models are likely to underestimate how much methane will be produced in the future, if they don't take cold-season emissions into account. This is because the zero curtain period will likely exist for longer and longer amounts of time if winter temperatures continue to rise in the Arctic. Future increases in snowfall could also help extend the zero curtain period, since snow tends to insulate the soil and keep it warm.
"The problem with modeling is that there's not much data available from sites," said Martin Heimann, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, noting that different areas in the Arctic emit methane at different rates. Expanding the database with more on-the-ground measurements, such as those collected in this study, will be crucial to coming up with the most accurate understanding of the processes going on in the Arctic and the way they will affect Earth's future climate.
In the meantime, the study identifies some key aspects of Arctic methane emissions that, until now, have been largely overlooked — and suggests that a major updating of climate models may be overdue. The paper encapsulates "fascinating research that is neither captured in previous measurements or in our models," Wullschleger said. "We still have a lot to learn."

Links

• Scientists say climate change could cause a ‘massive’ tree die off in the U.S. Southwest
• The Arctic climate threat that nobody’s even talking about yet
• The world just adopted a tough new climate goal. Here’s how hard it will be to meet
• Obama just released the biggest energy efficiency rule in U.S. history
• Why the Paris agreement could be the beginning of the end for global warming denial

Coal Mining's Financial Failures: Two Thirds of World's Production Now Unprofitable

Resilience (Post Carbon Institute) - Sharon Kelly

Image via shutterstock

Sixty-five percent of the world's coal production is unprofitable at today's prices, a new research report by Wood Mackenzie, a commercial intelligence company often cited by investment analysts and the coal industry itself, concluded.
Both major types of coal — the coking coal used for making steel and the thermal coal burned in coal-fired electrical power plants — were included in Wood Mackenzie's analysis. The estimate may be conservative, as the group excluded some costs incurred during mining, and focused primarily on the sharp drop in the price of coal.
Demand for thermal coal is also expected to slump further, in part because coal-fired power plants are expected to be required to meet increasingly strict standards for their emissions of toxic air pollution and greenhouse gasses.
And coking coal, which often sells for more than thermal coal, has been hard hit by the sudden downturn of China's steel industry, which makes roughly half of the world's steel.
A recovery for the steel industry may not come for years, analysts say. "It doesn't help that Chinese steel production is about to see the most dramatic decline to the lowest in 20 years," Herman Hildan, an Oslo-based analyst at Clarksons Platou Securities, told Bloomberg News about the steel industry's prospects. "Demand growth is collapsing."
Prices for some types of coking coal have already plunged more than 75 percent since 2011.
The Wood Mackenzie analysts concluded that now, "more than 65 per cent of world coal production operates at a loss."
The situation is even more grim for some American coal mining regions, like Central Appalachia, where Wood Mackenzie concluded in March that 72 percent of the coal produced was being sold at a loss.
The firm does not expect a turnaround for the coal industry anytime soon.
"We're bearish on 2016," Matt Preston, who manages North American coal research at Wood Mackenzie, told The Billings Gazette.
Utility companies have accumulated unusually large stockpiles of coal this year, according to Platts, which reported in September that stockpiles of some types of coal were 20 percent larger than the 5-year average.
A wave of bankruptcies have swept the coal mining industry, with Patriot Coal, Alpha Resources, and Walter Energy all filing for restructuring in 2015 — though it's worth keeping in mind that simply because a company goes bankrupt, that does not automatically mean that its mines wind up shuttered, but rather that changes in management are underway.
While climate change activists have launched a major movement to divest from fossil fuels, early efforts were seen as more morally motivated than profit driven — but market conditions have shifted and a growing number of analysts say that the fossil fuel industry looks like an increasingly risky gamble for long-term investment.
And awareness of those risks could in turn help spur further divestment.
"There is only a limited amount of investors who can actually integrate the moral imperative into their investment strategy," Sébastien Lépinard, founder of the global investment firm Next World Group told American Prospect. "A lot of the money is managed in a very strict fiduciary manner where it is not about saving the world but making money for clients, trustees, family members."
Overall, fossil fuel divestment efforts have attracted the support of investors in charge of more than $2.5 trillion worth of assets, the research firm Arabella Advisors concluded in September, though the specific commitments vary.
And there's the risk that a shift away from coal could even be damaging for the climate. While coal mining companies are under pressure, Wood Mackenzie sees an upside for another fossil fuel, one that many scientists say is even worse for the climate than coal: natural gas.
"The competitiveness of natural gas is significantly reducing the demand for coal to generate electricity – a market segment that makes up 90% of coal demand in North America," the analysts wrote in a summary of their research. "Natural gas/coal competition will dominate coal market fundamentals in the near-term."
The structure of utility contracts — often signed to cover one or two years' worth of fuel purchases — means that power plants are relatively slow to respond to price shifts. When coal contracts expire next year, utility companies will face vital decisions about how to fuel their operations in the coming year.
"There will be a lot rolling off in 2016 for those utilities with operational flexibility to ramp down their coal burn," Joe Aldina, a New York City-based analyst for Wood Mackenzie, told Platts.
Wood Mackenzie has also predicted that the solar industry could be poised for a breakthrough, one on a scale to match the shale rush that has swept across the U.S. in recent years.
"During our analysis, we identified many evolutionary parallels to shale and believe that solar has the potential to make the same scale of impact across markets," the firm wrote.
Focusing on solar and other renewables would allow investors to avoid the risks of stranded assets and winding up holding reserves of fossil fuels that cannot be extracted and sold without crossing climate thresholds. If the world were to stick to the 2 degree Celsius limit originally negotiated at Kyoto, over $2.2 trillion worth of fossil fuel company assets are at risk, a report this fall by Carbon Tracker concluded.
"Fossil fuel incumbents seem intent on wasting capital trying to hold onto growth by doing what they have always done rather than embracing the energy transition and preserving value by adopting an ex-growth strategy," Anthony Hobley, Carbon Tracker's chief executive said when that report was releasted. "Business history is littered with examples of incumbents who fail to see the transition coming."

Links

• 'We need social ownership and democratic control of energy'
• As We Adapt to Climate Change, Who Gets Left Behind?
• COP21 and "4 per thousand" - Storing Carbon in the Soil

Abbot Point Coal Terminal Expansion Given Approval By Greg Hunt

The Guardian - Shalailah Medhora

Federal environment minister gives green light for dredging and disposal of spoil to create one of the world’s largest coal ports, which would be linked to the proposed $16bn Carmichael coalmine

The Abbot Point coal terminal, near Bowen in Queensland, is set to become one of the world’s largest coal ports after being given environmental approval. Photograph: Tom Jefferson/Greenpeace

The federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, has given the green light to expanding the Abbot point coal terminal in northern Queensland, on the condition that the dredge spoils are properly disposed of.
The approval, granted by the Department of Environment on Monday, lists a number of strict conditions that the project must fulfil before going ahead, including how and where the sediment can be moved.
About 1.1m cubic metres of dredge spoil from the project would be dumped in nearby industrial land, rather than in the Great Barrier Reef marine park as originally proposed.
Approving the terminal’s expansion would allow coal from other projects, like Adani’s Carmichael mine, to be shipped for export.
“All dredge material will be placed onshore on existing industrial land. No dredge material will be placed in the World Heritage Area or the Caley Valley Wetlands,” a spokeswoman for Hunt said. “The port area is at least 20kms from any coral reef and no coral reef will be impacted.”
The spokeswoman said any changes to the project lie in the hands of Annastacia Palaszczuk’s government.
“This project was proposed and developed by the Queensland government. Further approvals are required from the Queensland government,” she said.
But conservationists have condemned the decision to let the project go ahead.
“Thousands of tonnes of seafloor will be torn up and dumped next to the internationally significant Caley Valley wetlands. Sea grasses which feed dugongs and turtles will be torn up for the coal industry,” Imogen Zethoven from the Australian Maritime Conservation Society, said. “Hundreds more coal ships will plough through the reef every year.”
Advocacy organisation, 350.org, said the decision makes a mockery of Australia’s pledge at the recent Paris climate conference to limit global warming.
“The Turnbull government can’t seriously sign on to deals which limit climate damage to 2 degrees and then give a green light to massive coal export projects which guarantee that the 2 degree target can never be met,” community campaigner, Moira Williams, said. “The Abbot Point project is a gateway for foreign mining companies to unlock one of the largest stores of climate-wrecking carbon on the planet – the Galilee Basin coal mines.”
“It’s ludicrous that Hunt has given the tick to a project which has no money, no social license, is universally hated, will wreck one of the greatest wonders of the natural world and which has been rejected by most of the world’s largest banks,” Williams said.
“With coal prices at an all time low, support for climate action and protecting the Great Barrier Reef at an all time high, the Turnbull government is treading a dangerous line in approving this climate and reef-wrecking mega coal project. Their actions will come back to bite them at the ballot box next year,” she said.

Links

• Australia on the spot over Adani mine and funding of Attenborough reef series
• Coal from Carmichael mine 'will create more annual emissions than New York'
• Conservation group challenges approval of Carmichael coalmine as 'illegal'
• Josh Frydenberg puts 'strong moral case' for coal exports to prevent deaths
• Hunt says Australians 'should be proud' of Coalition efforts on climate change