Amazon Fires: Have We Reached The First Tipping Point For Runaway Climate Change?

Monash University - Paul Read

Paul Read Paul Read is Senior Lecturer, School of Psychological Sciences. His focus is on global sustainability, natural disasters, and intergenerational equity based on global UN/WHO data linked to policy and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Images of the Amazon burning from space show a black cloud extending over half of South America, eclipsing the sun 3000 kilometres away in Brazil’s capital, Sao Paulo, the entire continent dotted with incendiary markers representing, as of Sunday, 78,000 fires, half deliberately lit since the start of August.
The season of the ‘queimanda’, celebrated by cattle ranchers on 10 August, saw 2500 new fires lit in 48 hours. The cattle ranchers hoped to signal their support for their far-right, Italian-born President Jair Bolsanarro, the ‘Tropical Trump’ who has weakened ecological protections and aims to build the Brazilian economy at any cost.
When he came to power in January, he said he would "not give one more inch" to the Indigenous people of the Amazon; indeed, he’d run a highway through the middle of it to access land and mining resources.
The blaze over the Amazon Basin, roughly the same size as Australia at 7 million square kilometres, threatens nine countries, 30 million people, 400 tribes, custodians of the Amazon for 11,000 years, three million species, 20 per cent of global oxygen, and 25 per cent of the world’s carbon sink. Scientists fear, at its worst, that half the Amazon could be lost above ground.

A wider problem
Problematically, soil degradation from climate change has already put the Amazon on track to lose half its capacity for carbon absorption by 2035. Already compromised, what’s also not yet talked about is that eight metres of peat beneath the Amazon, if set alight, has the potential to spark a subterranean mega-fire that could burn for decades. Together, they would belch the world’s entire remaining carbon budget into the atmosphere, demolishing the target for the Paris Agreement and sending the world into net zero emissions territory without any remaining buffer.

What lies beneath: above-ground fires in the Amazon are only part of the problem.

Land masses known for being covered in ice have started to burn due to a combination of low humidity and climate change drying out fuel sources. The Siberian tundra, Alaska and Greenland are developing bigger fire seasons every year.
The Amazon sits on 35,000 square kilometres of peat, but the Congo sits on 150,000, and Borneo on 440,000. If the world’s peat caught alight, it would pump out enough emissions to power the US economy for 200 years. This is without considering what lies beneath the polar regions. With drier climates, ignition of existing fuel-loads are more likely. With poverty comes more ignition due to arson, where the same processes play out worldwide.

The Australian story
In Australia, it’s been confirmed that most of our 62,000 fires per year are deliberately lit, but the reasons are somewhat different to those emerging in South America. A small number of Australian fires are lit by lightning and reignition points, but recent satellite analyses confirm about 90 per cent are due to human activity, both accidental, suspicious or deliberate.

If the world’s peat caught alight, it would pump out enough emissions to power the US economy for 200 years.

About half are lit by children and adolescents, following the same age-crime curve that affects every crime in every nation, but the true arsonist aiming at maximum destruction is much older and acts alone, at least in Australia. They lurk on the urban fringes where bushland meets the edges of development. This is a crime that has equal parts psychopathology and poverty, whereas fires in South America are almost entirely economic and 99 per cent human.
Arson in the developing world is always driven by poverty. While about 2000 fires are burning the Amazon, there are 7000 fires burning in Angola, 1000 in neighbouring Zambia, 3000 in the Congo, 800 in Australia and 550 in Indonesia.

Arson in the developing world is always driven by poverty.

Ravaged by civil war, small landholders in Africa use fire to clear and replenish the soil in a wasteland littered with landmines. Their motive is entirely economic, as it is in Indonesia and South America.
The same sorts of motives play out as poor farmers respond to poverty, which has its origins, in some part, with us in the developed world. There are mining companies paying local villagers to light fires across protected reservations in the Congo. Protecting mountain gorillas has become an exercise in helping locals develop out of poverty, resist the incentives given by mining companies, and poachers for bushmeat or Chinese medicine. Likewise, the orang-utans of Borneo are threatened by mining interests, and the Amazon Basin is threatened by companies such as BHP and Vale in search of iron ore and gold.
Apart from mining, illegal logging and soy plantations, 70 per cent of burning in the Amazon is stimulated by the needs of local cattle ranchers, and 80 per cent of their produce is for export – Europe, America and China being the biggest consumers. About 57 percent of soy produce in the Amazon Basin goes to China. Illegal timber goes to Europe and the United States.

Lessons to learn
It’s easy for the developed world to pass judgement. But we should remember that South America is a place of rich culture and home to a people who live far more sustainably than we do in Australia. They live almost as long and are happier compared to Australia, despite having only a third of its wealth and being five times more sustainable.

It’s easy for the developed world to pass judgement. But we should remember that South America is a place of rich culture and home to a people who live far more sustainably than we do in Australia.

Some of their countries are the most sustainable, both in terms of human and planetary outcomes. To put it in context, if the remainder of the carbon budget were fairly given to every person on Earth, Australians would have used up their share by 2022. If everyone in the world lived like Australians, we would pump out enough carbon emissions to exceed 8 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century.
But if we all lived like Costa Ricans, the world could prosper sustainably and happily forever.
Perhaps the developed world needs to find a way of rewarding the custodians of the Amazon and other planetary factors, so they don’t have to resort, in desperation, to burning it.
Indeed, a bit more equity in Australia would also go a long way towards reducing its own problem with arson. On the edges of our bushland, children are neglected, parents work 60-hour weeks, and transport and welfare systems remain undeveloped. Growing social chaos is driving some to express their dismay with fire.

Links

• What's happening in the Amazon?
• Brazilian troops begin deploying to fight Amazon fires
• The blazes in the Amazon are so big they can be seen from space. One map shows the alarming scale of the fires.
• The ‘lungs of the planet’ are burning at a record rate. If too much of the Amazon disappears, that ‘dieback’ could turn the land into a savannah.
• Amazon fires created a smoke eclipse in the skies above Brazil’s largest city, 2,000 miles away
• Brazil’s president is blaming farmers clearing land for the fires raging through the Amazon. Here’s how big Brazil’s farming industry really is.
• Brazil’s president baselessly claimed that NGOs set the Amazon on fire on purpose to make him look bad
• 99% of the fires in the Amazon rainforest were started by humans, one expert says – here’s why they have gotten so out of control
• Fires in the Amazon could be part of a doomsday scenario that sees the rainforest spewing carbon into the atmosphere and speeding up climate change even more
• Here’s what you can do to help the burning, ravaged Amazon rainforest
• The Amazon is losing about 3 football fields’ worth of rainforest per minute
• Brazil's Climate Change Sceptic Government Says Warnings About The Fires Consuming The Amazon Are 'Sensationalist,' 'Hysterical,' And 'Misleading'
• Should Australia be investing in nuclear energy?
• They were right!
• Why old-school climate denial has had its day

Rising Force: How Extinction Rebellion Hopes To Make A Difference

Sydney Morning Herald - Jack Nicholls*


Massive protests against inaction on climate change.

The arrest of 56 protesters in Brisbane earlier this month marked the beginning of a wave of environmental strikes across the planet planned to ratchet up this Spring.
September 20 will see thousands of Australian school children walk out of their schools in solidarity with the Global Climate Strike. Earth Strike, a general strike for workers, is being planned for a week later, and non-violent civil disobedience group Extinction Rebellion have marked October 7 as the opening of their week-long Spring Uprising, when crowds of ordinary citizens across the globe are preparing to disrupt their towns and cities.
In a world where a million species are set to go extinct as a result of human activity, the Arctic is on fire, and our government responds by doubling down on a huge new coal mine, law-abiding Australians are being radicalised to an extent not seen since the Vietnam War and a sizeable minority are, increasingly, turning to symbolic acts of breaking the law. It seems that after years of "clicktivism", street politics are back.
Caught off guard by this sudden rise in climate and animal rights activism, state and federal governments have introduced bills to heighten penalties for farm trespass, while the Queensland government is also criminalising the possession of "lock-on" devices such as handcuffs shielded within PVC pipes. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has claimed that such devices have been booby-trapped with butane and glass shards – a trap that would presumably also harm the protester within and would be illegal under existing law.
Queensland protesters deny the claims, stressing their commitment to non-violence. Meanwhile there is little sign that a government crackdown will deter those committed to civil disobedience, meaning Australia could soon be witnessing a high-profile clash between the state and environmentalists willing to go to jail in order to stand against what they see as an existential threat to our way of life.
Although there are dozens of active environmental groups across Australia, the largest group openly committed to peaceful civil disobedience is Extinction Rebellion, which calls for the declaration of a climate emergency, bringing down carbon emissions and a reform of our democracy.
The international organisation gained prominence by shutting down five London intersections for a week in April this year, and in Australia 1200 people signed up as "rebels" in the days following the Federal Election. Its membership at meetings tends towards female and middle-class, and most have had no history of activism until catastrophic climate news compelled them to action.

British actress Emma Thompson speaks to the media at Oxford Circus in London in April, during an Extinction Rebellion demonstration that blocked the road. Credit: AP

Laura Lucardie, a teacher who took part in the Brisbane day of protest, is frank about the motivation for lawbreaking actions like blocking traffic: “What we have tried in the past has not worked; there is no more time to play with ineffective methods.”
Maddy Butler, a Melbourne mum who joined the group earlier this year, agrees: “It might be uncomfortable, it might inconvenience some people, but I believe that Extinction Rebellion's philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience is what we need to bring about large-scale change.”
The Prime Minister has called environmental protesters "un-Australian criminals", but there is a long Australian folk tradition of celebrating outlaws and troublemakers. Civil disobedience was also central to the highest-profile environmental action of the 20th century – the successful campaign to save the Franklin River from a dam.
Before becoming leader of the Australian Greens, Dr Bob Brown was best known for leading the Franklin campaign. In 1982 Brown and hundreds of others were arrested as part of an action which ultimately prompted the Hawke government step in and cancel the dam project.

Bob Brown and fellow protesters at Tasmania's Franklin River in 1983. Credit: John Krutop

Retired from politics but still an environmental campaigner, Brown strongly supports the new generation of activists, saying: “It takes a lot of courage to bring a city to a halt, peacefully. Whether common sense can prevail against the greed factor is the biggest question hanging over all of us, but Extinction Rebellion is a very positive plus on the common sense prevailing.”
He also believes the Franklin campaign holds lessons for today.
“The Franklin campaign didn’t stop any bulldozers,” Brown explains. “What it did do is draw national and international attention to what was happening. That is the power of civil disobedience. It is very often confused by people, who say that ‘we are going to stop this by putting our bodies in the way'.
"Well, the companies have the bulldozers and the state have the tanks. And ultimately, successful civil disobedience depends on the only thing that overrides tanks and bulldozers, and that is an activated public opinion.”
Brown successfully mobilised that public opinion to halt the Franklin Dam, but when he used similar methods this year with his high-profile convoy to "Stop Adani", the mine was green-lit and its backers in Parliament returned to power.
In today’s political landscape, with governments that make a virtue of not confronting our looming environmental catastrophe, and with all citizens complicit in the destruction of our environment, how can activists force change? And is aggravating motorists the best way to get them onside?
Miriam Robinson, an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson, draws a clear line between single-issue campaigns of the past and what the new activism is trying to achieve.
“Extinction Rebellion is different from other protest movements we have seen in recent years because the aim is not to work on individual causes, such as stopping the Adani mine, or 'locking the gate' against fracking.
Those projects have often been successful, but they come at enormous cost to the people involved, in time and energy and even fines and court appearances. They usually require people to go out to remote locations to blockade or occupy a place for extended periods. And for every victory, there are many defeats.

Police arrest an Extinction Rebellion protester after the intersection of Margaret and William streets in Brisbane was blocked earlier this month. Credit: AAP

"What we are doing with Extinction Rebellion is seeking to bring business as usual to a halt, stopping traffic and blockading cities for extended periods. To apply pressure on such a scale and, if necessary, get so many people arrested that governments are compelled to respond. Research shows that if we can get 3.5 per cent of the population to get actively involved, change is inevitable.”
Whether or not change is inevitable, there are parallels here with Brown’s campaigns that sought to sway undecided Australians, even as they stoked anger among ideological opponents.
In Brown’s view, “it’s about drawing in that great mass of people who sit and go about their daily lives not wanting to be involved. I hear all the time, ‘you’ve got to convert the people of Clermont before you go and oppose Adani, you’ve got to convert the dam workers before you oppose the dam’.  It’s nonsense. That’s like saying we should convert Vladimir Putin before we go for freedom of the press.”
The last time Australia faced sustained large-scale protest was the 2011 Occupy Movement, but that attempt to indefinitely hold territory in the heart of Australian cities made protesters relatively easy to contain. Today’s activists are more agile, gathering for short-notice disruptions then dispersing, or adopting "swarming tactics" to block traffic for short periods while allies wander down the traffic jams apologising to drivers and explaining their cause.
So far, authorities have been cautious in responding to trespass and roadblocks, publicly condemning civil disobedience acts but largely refraining from making mass arrests. It would be hard for them to know where to crack down even if they wanted to, except with a huge display of force.
The environmental movement may seem to be coalescing around the messianic figure of Greta Thunberg, but the experience on the ground is messy and fractured. In Brisbane, young activists shouted “tear this system to the ground”, but the law-abiding school strikers are more notable for their humorous tone, while Extinction Rebellion organisers offer wry greetings to any undercover police presence at public meetings, welcoming them as “part of the world too, and as concerned with this as much as anyone".
Even within Extinction Rebellion, local communities plan and launch their actions independent of a central power, and beyond that vegan, Indigenous, anti-fracking and Grey Power climate activists are working with solidarity but little cross-communication.
Technology has also empowered climate activists. The school strikers utilise social media to realise their collective power in numbers that previous generations of young activists were never able to muster. Every action is filmed and shared online, and strategic discussions which once took place around a campfire now play out nationwide over Facebook or encrypted messaging apps.
Today’s lawbreaking activists may be the spiritual successors of 1980s environmentalists, but their fragmented organisation and reactive tactics are reminiscent of their contemporaries on the streets of Paris or Hong Kong.
Violet, a young Extinction Rebel recently arrested for chalking "Climate Emergency" outside the Institute for Public Affairs, makes the comparison herself: “I am very inspired by the Hong Kong protesters' call to "move like water". At a glance, it looks pretty effective.”
Once water finds its groove it is hard to stop, as those who wanted to dam the Franklin River once found, and when it gathers in force it can be unstoppable. After decades of passionate climate protests have been largely ignored, will today’s turn to civil disobedience work?
It is easy to dismiss protesters like Violet as radicals, but when looking back at past Australian protest movements - such as those around women’s liberation, the Vietnam War or same-sex marriage - it is striking how many have been vindicated by history, and how fast public opinion can turn once people start identifying with the figures they see being arrested.
Asked to reflect on his own lifetime of activism, Bob Brown is sanguine: “I’m just a 74-year-old human being about to depart the planet, and I think the exciting thing is not the older leaders who have hung onto ideas from the ’60s and ’70s which are starting to get some potency again, but the young people who are searching for ideas and they won’t find any new formula. All the formulae are there, they just have to be taken up.”
In just 20 years, Brown and his fellow Franklin Dam campaigners moved from prison cells to parliament, and the Greens party they helped found has become a mainstay of the Australian political landscape.
In another 20 years, our current generation of politicians will be gone and likely remembered for their failure to rise to a moment of disorientating change as climate change tips out of control. When searching for their successors, perhaps Australia could do worse than looking to the young people taking a stand today.

*Jack Nicholls is a Melbourne author and a volunteer with Extinction Rebellion. 

Links

• Australia's Climate Change Inaction Is Now Bipartisan. Protest Is All We Have Left
• Some ‘Sinister Tactics’ Those Brave Protesters In Queensland Could Have Used But Also Didn’t
• Queensland Police To Get New Powers To Search Climate Change Protesters
• We’Ve Been Arguing About Climate Policy For Five Elections: How Many More Before We Get It Right?
• Extinction Rebellion: Hitting A Nerve At Australia's Climate Flashpoint
• Queensland Police Arrest 56 Climate Change Protesters In Brisbane
• I’m An Ordinary Person Who Joined An Extinction Rebellion Blockade. Here's Why You Should Too
• Young Climate Activists ‘Most At Risk’ Of Being Spied On By AFP
• US Philanthropists Vow To Raise Millions For Climate Activists
• This Is The Only Way To Tackle The Climate Emergency

Trump Skips G7 Climate Meeting, Says He Won't Risk US Wealth For 'Dreams And Windmills'

SBS

Climate change sceptic President Donald Trump says he won't jeopardise the US wealth for "dreams and windmills" but goes on to say he's an environmentalist.



US President Donald Trump, responding to a question about climate change after skipping a G7 session on the issue, says American wealth is based on energy and he will not jeopardise that for dreams and windmills.
Trump, who in 2017 pulled the US out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord involving nearly 200 countries and has described global warming as a "hoax", also sought to portray himself as an environmentalist at a news conference at the close of the Group of Seven summit in France.
"I feel that the United States has tremendous wealth. The wealth is under its feet. I've made that wealth come alive. ... We are now the No. 1 energy producer in the world, and soon it will be by far," Trump told reporters on Monday when asked about his views on climate change.
"I'm not going to lose that wealth, I'm not going to lose it on dreams, on windmills, which frankly aren't working too well," he added.
Trump's administration has reversed US environmental protections put in place by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama and has weakened the Endangered Species Act wildlife conservation law.

G7 climate meeting.

Missing: one Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/AjqPV4thZt

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) August 26, 2019

The Republican president skipped a session on climate change and biodiversity at the summit, instead holding bilateral meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The G7 leaders discussed the rainforest fires in Brazil and agreed to draw up an initiative for the Amazon to be launched at the UN General Assembly in New York next month.
French President Emmanuel Macron downplayed Trump's absence.
"He wasn't in the room, but his team was," Macron said. "You shouldn't read anything into the American president's absence.... The US are with us on biodiversity and on the Amazon initiative."
Trump called himself an environmentalist, noting that he had filled out so many environmental impact statements as part of his work as a real estate developer.
"I want the cleanest water on earth. I want the cleanest air on earth. And that's what we're doing. And I'm an environmentalist, a lot of people don't understand that. I have done more environmental impact statements probably than anybody that's ... ever been president. And I think I know more about the environment than most people," Trump told reporters.
Environmental activists heaped scorn on Trump's remarks.
"Trump's phoney brand of 'environmentalism' means gutting the Endangered Species Act, bowing down to polluting industries, and denying climate change while the world burns," Travis Nichols, a Greenpeace USA spokesman, said in a statement.

Links

• 'The Amazon must be protected': UN Chief says fires are deeply concerning
• Amazon rainforest fires: Here’s what's really happening
• Aerial vision captures scale of devastating Amazon fires
• After Amazon outcry, NASA images shine spotlight on African forest fires
• G7's $29 million Amazon firefighting fund slammed as 'shameful'
• Brazil's army fights Amazon fires after hundreds more flare up
• Scott Morrison says Australia will leave Amazon firefighting to others
• Calls to preserve Australia's rainforests as fires rage in the Amazon
• Climate activist Thunberg nears end of her zero-carbon transatlantic sail
• Church backs ‘distressed’ youth on school climate strikes
• Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop landfall, report claims

Geoengineering: 'Plan B' For The Planet

Agence France-Presse

The sun sets in a sky dusted with ash over Màrdalsjškull, 20 km east from Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano, on May 5, 2010. AFP/File / HALLDOR KOLBEINS

Dismissed a decade ago as far-fetched and dangerous, schemes to tame global warming by engineering the climate have migrated from the margins of policy debates towards centre stage.
"Plan A" remains tackling the problem at its source. But the UN's top climate science body has made it clear that slashing carbon pollution won't be enough to keep Earth from overheating
That has opened the door to a host of geoengineering schemes, and an under-the-radar set of global industry guidelines, currently in review, which could help mainstream them.
Here is a menu of "Plan B" geoengineering solutions, and their potential drawbacks:

Direct CO2 Capture
Experiments have shown it is possible to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide directly from the air, converting it into fuel pellets or storing it underground.
A Canadian company backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates launched a pilot facility in Canada in 2015, and another company unveiled one in Iceland last year.
DRAWBACK: The technology is currently prohibitively expensive and may take decades to operate at scale.

Solar radiation management would slow global warming by reflecting more sunlight away from Earth. AFP/File / Jonathan WALTER

Afforestation
Extensive planting of trees could significantly slow the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which currently stands at more than 410 parts per million, 40 percent more than 150 years ago.
DRAWBACK: Even if deforestation could be reversed -- more than 100,000 square kilometres of tropical forests have disappeared each year since 2013 -- the number of trees needed to put a dent in CO2 emissions would clash with food and biofuel crops.

BECCS
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) marries a natural process with a high-tech one.The first step is to plant rapeseed, sugarcane, corn or "2nd-generation" biofuel crops such as switchgrass, which pull CO2 from the air while growing. The second step is while burning the harvested plants for energy to sequester the CO2 produced.
In theory, the result is less CO2 in the atmosphere than when the process started. Virtually all climate change models projecting a future consistent with the Paris Agreement's temperature targets assume a key role for BECCS.
DRAWBACK: Studies calculate that up to twice the area of India would need to be given over to biofuels, putting BECCS in conflict with food crops.

Ocean Fertilisation
Microscopic ocean plants called phytoplankton gobble up CO2 and drag it to the bottom of the ocean when they die. Their colony size is limited by a lack of natural iron, but experiments have shown that sowing the ocean with iron sulphate powder creates large blooms.
DRAWBACKS: Scientists worry about unintended impacts. Die-offs of plankton, for example, use up oxygen, which could create massive "dead zones" in the oceans, something already on the rise.

Enhanced Weathering
Natural weathering of rocks removes about one billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year -- about two percent of total man-made C02 emissions.
Spreading a powdered form of a greenish iron silicate called olivine across certain landscapes can mimic that process, experiments have shown.
DRAWBACKS: It would be expensive to mine and mill enough olivine to make a difference.

Biochar
Biochar is charcoal made by heating plant waste -- rice straw, peanut shells, wood scraps -- over long periods in low-oxygen conditions. It can store CO2 for long periods, and also enriches soil.
DRAWBACK: The scientific jury is still out on how quickly this method could be scaled up, and on the stability of biochar used as a fertiliser.

Solar Radiation Management
Unlike other strategies, solar radiation management does not target CO2. The goal is simple: prevent some of the sun's rays from hitting the planet's surface, forcing them back up into space.
One idea is to inject or spray tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere -- possibly with balloons, aircraft or through giant tubes.

A picture taken on October 17, 2017 shows the sun rising in Tours. AFP/File / GUILLAUME SOUVANT

Nature sometimes does the same: Debris from the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines lowered the planet's average surface temperature for a year or two afterwards.
Scientists have also calculated ways to alter clouds that could help beat the heat.
DRAWBACKS: Even if it works as intended, solar radiation management would do nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2, which is making oceans too acidic. There is also the danger of knock-on consequences, including changes in rainfall patterns, and what scientists call "termination shock" -- a sudden warming if the system were to fail.

Links

• Greening Your Life Is All Very Well – But Only A Global Climate Strategy Will Fix This
• A Vision Of The World Acting On Climate Change – Imagine
• Six Sentences Of Hope: Defining A Unifying Vision In The Face Of The Climate Crisis
• An Urgent Call To Protect The World's "Third Pole"
• The Next Step In Fighting Climate Change
• Why Science Needs The Humanities To Solve Climate Change
• Want To Do Something About Global Warming? Talk About It With Your Family And Friends
• We Went To The Moon. Why Can’t We Solve Climate Change?
• The Counter-Intuitive Solution To Getting People To Care About Climate Change
• The One Viable Solution To Climate Change
• Device Could Bring Both Solar Power And Clean Water To Millions
• This Is A $15 Trillion Opportunity For Farmers To Fight Climate Change
• The Climate Crisis Is Already Hitting Food Production: An Urgent System-Wide Response Is Needed
• Australian Musicians Band Together To Invest In Solar Farms

David Wallace-Wells: ‘There Are Many Cases Of Climate Hypocrisy’

The Guardian - Ian Tucker

The journalist and author on the climate crisis and how the US and China will be key to averting disaster

David Wallace-Wells: ‘Incremental policy isn’t going to be adequate to avoid terrible levels of warming.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

David Wallace-Wells is the deputy editor of New York magazine. In July 2017, he wrote a long-form essay about the dire prospects for human civilisation caused by the climate crisis. It became the most read article in the history of the magazine and led to a book, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, which is being published in paperback in September.

•••••

Q&A with David Wallace-Wells

The first line of your book states: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” If you were sitting down to write the book again, would you be inserting another “much” into that sentence?
I still think the public aren’t as concerned as they should be about some of the scary stuff that’s possible this century. But I do think things have changed quite a bit. And I also think the politics have changed quite a lot. When I turned in the book in September, nobody had heard of Greta Thunberg. Nobody had heard of Extinction Rebellion. In the US, very few people had heard of Sunrise. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had not even been elected.

In the United States, you have a climate crisis denier as president, yet areas of the country are experiencing frequent flooding, more forest fires and rises in average temperature of more than 2C. How do you explain this?
Actually, it’s quite striking how many Americans do believe climate change is happening. [Democratic presidential nominee] Jay Inslee says 75% of voters want action, compared with 63% 12 months ago – that is remarkable. There was a piece earlier this month in the New York Times about how for many young Republicans, it is their top issue.

There is a pervasive techno-optimistic view that we can just invent something and it will solve the problem

There seems to be a division in the US Democratic nomination race between candidates who advocate wholesale system change such as the Green New Deal and others who favour a more incremental progress because they claim that’s the only way to get laws passed. Which is the most effective approach?
The science demands a quite systematic response; incremental policy simply isn’t going to be adequate to avoid really terrible levels of warming. But ambitious legislation has to go through the Senate and I don’t think there’s a scenario where a Democratic president takes office in 2021 with more than 60 Democratic votes [a three-fifths majority].
On the other hand, the last few administrations have gotten quite creative in how to use what’s called “budget reconciliation”, which you can use to pass stuff through the Senate with only 51 votes [a simple majority] by defining legislation as essentially budget-based. That’s one reason why you see so many of the Democrats’ plans are essentially investment programmes.
Inslee has been more ambitious in putting forward details about how he would regulate the fossil fuel business but some of the other campaigns have basically just put forward a sort of Green New Deal or green Marshall Plan – a massive spending programme directed at green energy projects.

You’re hopeful that technologies like geoengineering and carbon capture will play a significant role in mitigating temperature rise. Some environmentalists and scientists argue that these unproven methods can’t bail us out, and that they give licence to the fossil fuel industry to carry on polluting…
I look at the science and say if we’re defining a comfortable world [as] staying below two degrees of warming, I just don’t think that there’s any way we can achieve that without a really quite dramatic amount of negative emissions.
But I’m also very mindful that there is a pervasive techno-optimistic view – especially among wealthy Americans – that we can just invent something and it will solve the problem.
The UN says we need to halve global emissions by 2030 to avoid catastrophic warming. We’re really deeply deluded about how quickly new technology can scale and can be deployed. We’re far from having a 747 flying on a zero-carbon fuel.

We can agree to decarbonise – rethink our agriculture, aim for a meatless diet and so on – but we don’t live in a global, centralised command-and-control economy. Every country has its own political interests. How do you make the world take collective action?
That’s harder than the technological problem. There are many cases of what I think of as climate hypocrisy, for example, Canada declaring a climate emergency and then the very next day approving a new oil pipeline.
Each individual nation could be quite aggressive in their decarbonisation and yet be living through the exact same climate that there would be if they took no action unless the rest of the world followed suit. No major industrial nation is on track to meet its commitments under Paris.
My own hope is that I see almost half of our global emissions being produced by two countries – the US and China. Maybe it’s naive, but I hope a cooperative pact can be reached between the two countries like the nuclear non-proliferation agreements that were made between the US and Russia in the cold war. The two nations remained rivals but were nevertheless jointly committed to protecting the planet from an existential threat.
If the US and China really took aggressive leadership on this issue, the collective action problem would become less important – the world’s most powerful countries have a way of bending the will of the less powerful.

We need to fight to make the world one we want to live in, rather than giving up hope before the fight is really over

Some environmentalists argue that we need to rethink economic growth – we need to reorient our expectations of the conveniences and luxuries of modern life…
I don’t yet have a firm perspective on this. My intuition is that we don’t need to abandon the prospect of economic growth to get a handle on climate change.
I look at the case of the US and I see that if the average American had the carbon emissions of the average EU citizen, the country’s emissions would fall by 60%. And I think most Americans would be happy with those lifestyles.
The American electricity grid loses two-thirds of all energy produced as waste heat. We discard something like 50% or 60% of all of our food. So we could achieve some quite significant emissions gains.

Do you still think of yourself as a journalist or have you morphed into an activist?
I do still think of myself as a journalist. And I don’t know how long that will last. I still feel like a chronicler of the story rather than a protagonist. I’m really heartened and excited by all of the new activist energy that we’ve seen over the last year.

Millennials are expressing doubts about having children because of the environmental crisis – they are concerned that their grandchildren and possibly their own children will be living in an inhospitable and volatile world. You have recently had a child…
My intuition is that we need to fight to make the world the one we want to live in rather than giving up hope before the fight is really over. The world is going to get warmer. Almost inevitably, there will be a lot more pain and suffering in it than we have now. But how much is really up to us.

At what point should panic set in? It’s plausible there’ll be four degrees of warming by the end of the century, which would mean mass migration from areas such as the Middle East and Asia to newly temperate areas such as Siberia and Greenland. That’s not a very smooth transition for human civilisation.
It seems hard to imagine. Yet we’re already seeing some fair amount of panic. The significant amount of human migration we’re seeing in the US coming from Central America, for example.
I am personally horrified by the way our politics are beginning to adjust to them. We need to be much more open-hearted and attentive to the suffering of those around the world rather than closed off and hard-hearted, which is how almost all of the countries of the west have been over the last decade to refugees.
We’re also seeing panic in the protest movements, which are essentially declarations that existing power structures and priorities are simply not sufficient to address this crisis in the terms that it demands.

Links

• Climate Change, The Problem From Hell
• What If We Covered The Climate Crisis Like We Did The Start Of The Second World War?
• Climate Change: ‘We’ve Created A Civilisation Hell Bent On Destroying Itself – I’m Terrified’, Writes Earth Scientist
• Support For Action Surges, As Majority Say We Face Climate Emergency
• Why Is The US News Media So Bad At Covering Climate Change?
• Book Reviews: The End Of The World Is Coming, And You Are Responsible
• Study Shows IPCC Is Underselling Climate Change
• It’s Time For Climate Change Communicators To Listen To Social Science

The Amazon Fires And The Dilemma For Climate Scientists

Sydney Morning Herald - Andrew Glikson*

As fires rage across the Amazon – dubbed the "lungs of the planet" given it produces 20 per cent of the oxygen in the atmosphere – and while forests are ablaze in Siberia, Alaska, Greenland, southern Europe and parts of Australia, climate scientists might be justified in saying: "We told you so."
They tend not to gloat, however, about the tragedy that confronts us all.

The battle against fire in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, on Friday. Under increasing international pressure to contain the fires sweeping parts of the Amazon, President Jair Bolsonaro authorised the military to battle the massive blazes. Credit: AP

Brazil alone has had 72,843 fires this year. The pace of global warming is exceeding projections, astounding climate scientists. Within the past 70 years or so major shifts in climate zones and an accelerating spate of extreme weather events—cyclones, floods, droughts, heat waves and fires— is ravaging large tracts of Earth.

Scientists Jos Barlow and Alexander C. Lees write in The Conversation that “climate change itself is making dry seasons longer and forests more flammable. Increased temperatures are also resulting in more frequent tropical forest fires in non-drought years. And climate change may also be driving the increasing frequency and intensity of climate anomalies, such as El Niño events that affect fire season intensity across Amazonia.”
And yet the human causes of climate change remain subject to extensively propagated denial and untruths, despite their foundation in the basic laws of physics and the empirical observations of global research bodies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organisation, and our own CSIRO.

Climate scientists find themselves in a quandary similar to medical doctors who need to break the news of a grave diagnosis. How do they tell people that the current spate of cyclones, devastating islands from the Caribbean to the Philippines, or the flooding of coastal regions and river valleys from Mozambique to Kerala, Pakistan and Townsville, can only intensify in a rapidly warming world?

How do scientists tell the people that their children are growing into a world where survival under a mean temperatures 2C above pre-industrial levels may be painful, and in some parts of the world impossible, let alone under 4C rise projected by the IPCC?

The Cassandra syndrome is alive and well. (Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy but, humiliated by her unrequited love, he also placed a curse on her, ensuring no one would believe her warnings.)
Throughout history, messengers of bad news have been rebuked or worse. Nowadays, many scientists are reticent to publish their climate change projections. Given the daunting scenarios they confront, many find it difficult to talk about it, even among friends and family.
Atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide have reached a combined level of almost 500 parts per million, intersecting the melting threshold of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets and heralding a fundamental shift in the state of the terrestrial climate.

As fires consume large parts of the land, it would appear parliaments – including Australia's – are preoccupied with economics and international conflicts while they hardly regard the future of  civilisation as a priority.

*Dr Andrew Glikson is an earth and climate scientist at the Australian National University.

Links

• What's happening in the Amazon?
• Brazilian troops begin deploying to fight Amazon fires
• The blazes in the Amazon are so big they can be seen from space. One map shows the alarming scale of the fires.
• The ‘lungs of the planet’ are burning at a record rate. If too much of the Amazon disappears, that ‘dieback’ could turn the land into a savannah.
• Amazon fires created a smoke eclipse in the skies above Brazil’s largest city, 2,000 miles away
• Brazil’s president is blaming farmers clearing land for the fires raging through the Amazon. Here’s how big Brazil’s farming industry really is.
• Brazil’s president baselessly claimed that NGOs set the Amazon on fire on purpose to make him look bad
• 99% of the fires in the Amazon rainforest were started by humans, one expert says – here’s why they have gotten so out of control
• Fires in the Amazon could be part of a doomsday scenario that sees the rainforest spewing carbon into the atmosphere and speeding up climate change even more
• Here’s what you can do to help the burning, ravaged Amazon rainforest
• The Amazon is losing about 3 football fields’ worth of rainforest per minute
• Brazil's Climate Change Sceptic Government Says Warnings About The Fires Consuming The Amazon Are 'Sensationalist,' 'Hysterical,' And 'Misleading' 

Greening Your Life Is All Very Well – But Only A Global Climate Strategy Will Fix This

The Guardian - Larry Elliott*

The blaze in the Amazon shows the need for a green Marshall plan to allow poorer parts of the world to benefit from low-carbon tech 

Illustration: Matt Kenyon

Judging by the latest opinion polls, the public is ripe for some green austerity. Ipsos Mori says that 85% of Britons are concerned about climate change, with 52% admitting they are very concerned. These are the highest figures since the pollster started tracking opinion in 2005. Given the spate of extreme weather-related events, and the pictures of the torching of the Amazon rainforest, such concern is both logical and predictable. In this country, the climate deniers have been put to flight.

What the polls don’t show is whether the public is willing to translate this concern into action; whether similar levels of concern are present in less prosperous parts of the world; and whether it is possible to translate individual concerns into collective political action. Here, the message is a lot more mixed. The furore over the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s private jets are a case in point. People don’t like being lectured to, particularly when those doing the lecturing fail to live by their own ethical code.
Emmanuel Macron wants the future of the Amazon rainforest to be top of the agenda at the meeting of the G7 he is hosting this weekend in Biarritz, but this is an empty gesture. There is not the remotest possibility of the G7 doing anything to rein in the activities of Brazil’s rightwing president, Jair Bolsonaro. Indeed, Macron’s own experience shows how hard it is to translate a desire to curb carbon emissions into practical action. The French president said making driving more expensive was a price worth paying in the fight against global heating but faced nationwide protests from the yellow vest movement. For the gilets jaunes, the immediate threat to their livelihoods mattered more than the long-term threat posed by the climate crisis.

What Macron failed to grasp was that winning this battle first means winning the battle for hearts and minds, not least by countering the impression that tackling global heating is a luxury only the better off can afford or that going green means being miserable. The success of the UK’s 5p plastic bag levy is a classic example of how nudge economics can work. Plastic bags have not been banned: consumers simply have to think about whether they are actually prepared to pay for one. The message is that consumers respond to signals: it is not always necessary to ban things.
Despite receiving a bloody nose, Macron is right when he says the climate crisis is a global problem requiring a global response. But securing international agreement is not going to be easy, in the main because the biggest increases in emissions are coming from countries where governments put a higher priority on poverty reduction than they do on safeguarding the environment.
Sales of meat and dairy products are rising fast in China because rapid growth means households can afford fridges. In the grand scheme of things, that matters a lot more to global heating than universities banning beef from their canteens.

‘China and India have much lower rates of car ownership than countries in the west, but as they grow richer their new middle classes will inevitably seek to emulate western consumers.’ Photograph: Xavier Galiana/AFP/Getty Images

China and India currently have much lower rates of car ownership than countries in the west, but as they grow richer their new middle classes will inevitably seek to emulate western consumers.
The number of cars per thousand people are as follows: the US, 811; the UK, 471; China, 179; India, 22.
There are 2.8 billion people in China and India. Do the maths. Africa accounted for one in five of the world’s live births in the 1990s, but by the end of the next decade it will be one in three. Demand for energy will soar as the population rises.
All of which makes the case for a global green Marshall plan to finance the transfer of low-carbon technology to poorer parts of the world look pretty compelling. The US pumped billions of dollars into the reconstruction of western Europe after the second world war to secure markets for US exporters and to discourage the spread of communism.
Enlightened self-interest is required again today. If rich countries provided the financial resources to transfer low-carbon technology to the poorer parts of the world, there would be three clear benefits to the west: lower carbon emissions, fewer economic migrants and bigger markets for green goods.
Donald Trump is no Harry Truman and US participation in a green Marshall plan will have to await a change of personnel in the White House. But Elizabeth Warren, one of the leading Democrats in the presidential race, is a fan.
However, even as we wait for international agreement, there are low-hanging fruit to be picked. About one-sixth of carbon emissions in the UK come from residential property, largely as a result of old-fashioned and inefficient central heating. It represents a bigger contribution to global heating than meat-eating or flying.
A drastic cut in carbon emissions from homes requires two things: better insulation and the replacement of gas-fired heating with the latest technology – heat pumps and hydrogen boilers. This will not be cheap; few households have the money to pay for the new kit, and making them pay for it through higher energy bills would be unpopular.
The independent Committee on Climate Change said putting hydrogen boilers and electric heating into every home would cost tens of billions a year, and if this is to happen quickly – as it should – the government will have to foot the bill.
It could do this in two ways: by taking advantage of historically low interest rates to float green bonds – something the German government is planning – or by channelling money created by the process known as quantitative easing into environmental projects.
Retrofitting homes so that energy does not leak out of badly insulated walls and roofs means lower energy bills and the prospect of well-paid, secure jobs in every part of the country – and would make public engagement with the climate crisis easier to sustain.

• Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor

Links

• The blazes in the Amazon are so big they can be seen from space. One map shows the alarming scale of the fires.
• The ‘lungs of the planet’ are burning at a record rate. If too much of the Amazon disappears, that ‘dieback’ could turn the land into a savannah.
• Amazon fires created a smoke eclipse in the skies above Brazil’s largest city, 2,000 miles away
• Brazil’s president is blaming farmers clearing land for the fires raging through the Amazon. Here’s how big Brazil’s farming industry really is.
• Brazil’s president baselessly claimed that NGOs set the Amazon on fire on purpose to make him look bad
• 99% of the fires in the Amazon rainforest were started by humans, one expert says – here’s why they have gotten so out of control
• Fires in the Amazon could be part of a doomsday scenario that sees the rainforest spewing carbon into the atmosphere and speeding up climate change even more
• Here’s what you can do to help the burning, ravaged Amazon rainforest
• The Amazon is losing about 3 football fields’ worth of rainforest per minute
• Brazil's Climate Change Sceptic Government Says Warnings About The Fires Consuming The Amazon Are 'Sensationalist,' 'Hysterical,' And 'Misleading'