(AU) Call To Integrate Post-Virus Rebuild With Land And Climate Repair

Farmonline



COVID-19 stimulus and budget initiatives should align with investment and policies working on land, climate and economic repair, the Carbon Market Institute says.
In welcoming the Climate Change Authority's latest policy toolkit report, CMI's chief executive officer John Connor said the government should plan now to integrate both the recovery from COVID-19, and the huge public stimulus, with the recovery from Australia's black summer bushfire season.
"Aligning the three tasks of land, climate and economic repair will give clear long-term signals to investors, business and farmers who are managing risks and seizing the opportunities in the transition to net-zero emissions economy. These signals can help ensure the long-term safety and prosperity of Australia," he said.
"It is imperative that we use the public funds that are available now well, but plan for when public taxpayer funding will need to be reduced," added Mr Connor.
This can be done by evolving policies such as the Government's safeguard mechanism so that its carbon reduction regulations or 'baselines' for emissions intensive industries align, at least, with national carbon reduction targets.
Farmers have been winners from the Government's Emission Reduction Fund with $100 million being invested in land sector projects.
"The ERF is throwing lifelines and new revenue streams to farmers who have been struggling with drought, but these policies need more to be put on more sustainable footing, and be less dependent on public taxpayer funds," said Mr Connor.
Next week will see the tenth ERF auction after the last auction priced carbon reductions at $14.15 a tonne.
"The Government's commitment to add almost $2 billion to the ERF over the next 15 years is welcome but we should be planning to transition to policies - such as stronger Safeguard Mechanism baselines - that make business the drivers of this market, not the taxpayer," said Mr Connor. This week's report by the Climate Change Authority "Prospering in a Low Emission World: A Policy Toolkit for Australia" also recommends declining baselines and measures to maximise the potential of the land sector in carbon reduction.
CMI believes we can and must reform with smart policy that manages emissions intensive companies' trade exposure and supports affected workers and communities.
CMI's January 2020 bushfire recovery workshop report noted that recognising climate change as a factor in the unprecedented bush fire weather conditions meant that emissions reduction is hazard reduction. It called for an integration of land and climate repair tasks, now we need to also integrate economic repair with these tasks.
"Finally, it is worth noting that the South Korean Government, so successful in containing COVID-19's impacts, is announcing policies for net-zero emissions for 2050 and boosting its carbon pricing mechanism, setting the course for a clean and more resilient post-COVID-19 economy, Australia should do the same," said Mr Connor.

Links

• Plan now: Integrate post-virus repair plan with land and climate repair
• Prospering in a low-emissions world: An updated climate policy toolkit for Australia
• 'Unprecedented' globally: more than 20% of Australia's forests burnt in bushfires
• Net zero: why is it necessary?
• Emissions control policies
• National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting: Baselines
• Climate Solutions Fund - Emissions Reduction Fund

(UK) Climate Change Is Still With Us

Financial Times - Nick Butler

The fundamentals of energy use have not changed, even if the focus of attention has

A visualisation of Tidal Lagoon Power’s tidal energy project in Swansea Bay, Wales © PA 

Nick Butler is chair of the Policy Institute at King’s College London

Climate concerns were top of the agenda just a few weeks ago. Governments were making commitments to transform the ways in which energy is used. Companies from Microsoft to BP were expressing their intention to decarbonise.

None of the fundamentals have changed: emissions will fall a little this year in line with energy consumption but the shift is not permanent. After the coronavirus pandemic ends, a carbon-rich reality will return. The world in 2021 will still rely on hydrocarbons for close to 80 per cent of its energy needs, the chances of extreme weather conditions have not changed and the risk of floods has not receded.

The level of attention being given to the issue has, however, fallen sharply. Preparations for the COP26 meeting planned to be held in Glasgow in November have been minimal and the event could be postponed. Media coverage has moved on to more immediate problems, and companies are focused on responding to dramatic short-term falls in activity and income and on survival.

Recapturing attention will not be easy but it will be necessary. Two practical approaches would match the mood of the moment and help restore lost momentum.

The first is to accept the urgent need for international co-ordination of policy in key areas. That is evident in the coronavirus crisis in terms of both the medical issues and the economic implications. Similar co-ordination is needed for the climate agenda. The International Energy Agency, in the absence of any other serious body equipped to do the job, should be asked to propose how such co-ordination can be put in place.

The process matters but so does the substance. The second thing to do is to shift the focus from the setting of goals for 2050 to what can be done over the next decade — 2050 is beyond the horizon of any government, while 2030 is within measurable sight. Countries can take different actions depending on their circumstances but all can move towards a common objective. A cut of 25 per cent in emissions by 2030 will not satisfy campaigners but it has the virtue of being within reach.

The aggregation of certain steps using proven technology can make a material difference in the short term. These include:

• efficiency gains encouraged through incentives and regulation to close the wide gaps between performance at national and sector levels;
• the development of infrastructure from strengthened grids to charging systems capable of dealing with growing numbers of electric vehicles;
• the deployment of smart systems to maximise energy use; and 
• greater use of storage technology that is advancing beyond vehicle batteries and already playing a role in managing volatility at grid level.

Of course, a 25 per cent reduction is not enough and we should also use the next few years to prepare for the bigger steps needed later. That is about testing at scale prospects that are already within sight, for example hydrogen, which could transform the heating sector and potentially many other forms of energy consumption such as in ships’ engines.

Work needs to be done on carbon capture and storage to identify ways in which costs can be reduced and how carbon can be used rather than simply stored. Tidal and wave power must be made more economic and new financing mechanisms found that match their potential to produce power over many decades. Small modular nuclear reactors should be built and tested. Fusion power is a possibility but needs years of further research.

Some of these may not prove to be viable but all need exploring. At the same time the door must be opened to other technologies that can reduce the emissions from the production, processing and use of energy.

Few of these ideas can be deployed at scale until the 2030s but the work should be accelerated once the coronavirus crisis subsides. The effort should be public and private, local and international and should not be delayed by waiting for the most reluctant to sign up.

It is time to move on from proclamations of extinction and vague promises to do something by 2050. Over the coming weeks we should turn our idle, if well washed, hands to producing a practical, pragmatic plan to reduce emissions over the next decade.

Links

• Here Are The Top Ways The World Could Take On Climate Change In 2020
• (AU) We Must Fight Climate Change Like It’s World War Iii – Here Are 4 Potent Weapons To Deploy
• (UK) Patriotism Could Be The Unlikely Answer To Solving The Climate Crisis
• Coronavirus Should Give Us Hope That We Are Able To Tackle The Climate Crisis
• Coronavirus And Climate Change
• Report Finds 76 Solutions Available Right Now To Slow Down Climate Change
• 50 Simple Ways To Make Your Life Greener

Everyone, Everywhere: The Global Challenge Of Climate Change

Nature - Maria Ivanova

Christiana Figueres (second from left) and other global leaders celebrate adoption of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Credit: Arnaud Bouissou/COP21/Anadolu Agency/Getty

 

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac Knopf (2020) Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case Anatol Lieven Allen Lane (2020)

Climate change demands action: humanity must shift from persistent destruction to intentional regeneration. So, how best to make that happen? Two new books give very different answers. In one, the solution lies exclusively with nation states and their protection of security and self-interest. The other expects a global-scale spirit of shared endeavour to harness the collective power of governments, corporations and individuals.

The collaborative approach is set out insightfully in The Future We Choose. Its authors — Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac — had crucial roles in the Paris climate agreement of December 2015. Hailed both as a monumental achievement and as woefully inadequate, the agreement saw 197 parties commit to keeping the global average temperature rise to less than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Figueres is recognized as the person most responsible for that achievement: as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, she was at the heart of the process for six years, from the aftermath of the breakdown of negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 to the success in Paris. Rivett-Carnac worked with Figueres at the UN and ran political strategy for the agreement.

Visions of the future
The book is an immersive journey through two very different visions of the year 2050. In one, the world has no fresh air and two billion people live with temperatures exceeding 60 °C for days on end. On the alternative, thriving, green planet, renewable energy powers smart grids and 50% of the land is covered in forest. Although such a stark choice could be criticized as simplistic, it brings into sharp relief the risk that humanity runs.

“Systemic change is a deeply personal endeavor,” the authors write. The most effective way to get anyone to act — from the person on the street to the diplomat in the negotiation room — is, they argue, to shift mindsets towards a deep acknowledgement of humanity’s dependence on nature.

Figueres and Rivett-Carnac are in a prime position to unpick exactly how to do that. Their behind-the-scenes stories are captivating, including the little-known details of the 2014 climate negotiations in which China and the United States moved away from competition towards shared wins, or Figueres’s decision to keep the 2015 conference running after UN security services found a bomb in the underground station serving the conference centre. I yearned for more, however, on what it took to change the mood and get commitment that no one thought possible. What was the exact chain of events leading up to the strike of the green gavel at 7.25 p.m. on 12 December 2015?

One of the duo’s major achievements was to bring civil society and business into the historically intergovernmental affair. Rivett-Carnac, for example, designed and led the Groundswell Initiative — a largely covert organization that mobilized support for the ambitious agreement from a wide range of stakeholders. Nation states are not the single or even most important driver in solving the climate crisis; it is, as the authors put it, an “everyone-everywhere mission”.

Bolivian soldiers combat forest fires in 2019. Credit: Aizar Raldes/AFP via Getty

National self-interest
By contrast, Climate Change and the Nation State argues for reframing the struggle in nationalist terms. Some 55% of all emissions come from four countries — China, the United States, India and Russia. What would compel these states to drastically change their behaviour and reduce emissions? For author Anatol Lieven, the answer lies in self-interest.

A British journalist with significant expertise in Pakistan and Russia, and an academic post in international relations, Lieven weaves his first-hand knowledge and experience into a compelling narrative. The branch of international-relations theory called realism, which assumes that states act to maximize their power, has rarely considered environmental concerns. Lieven calls on his realist colleagues to “wake up” to climate change as a paramount security threat. The heatwaves across Europe in 2003 and in Russia in 2010, he points out, respectively claimed more lives than France lost in its eight-year war in Algeria and Russia lost in a ten-year conflict with Afghanistan.

The mass movement of people, Lieven argues, will be “the most dangerous indirect effect … on Russia and the West”. The confluence of climate change, migration and automation will be the perfect storm, rivalling the devastation of nuclear war. Displacement of large numbers of people will put strain on states’ ability to provide for their populations. When this comes on top of massive unemployment resulting from increased automation, the nation state will not be able to respond. That will lead to a world much like Figueres and Rivett-Carnac’s potential dystopia.

Urgent action
Lieven makes a strong case for urgent action, especially by powerful states. He sees the armed forces, as experts on national security, as the logical first responders — not just for crowd control, but for large-scale infrastructure changes such as building flood defences. He advocates military support of the US Green New Deal, for example.

But Lieven is wrong to disregard global governance. Climate change is the quintessential worldwide problem. No one state, no matter how powerful its economy or military, can resolve it alone. Despite the primacy of the nation state in international affairs, global agreements and institutions are indispensable in ensuring that commitments are fulfilled, action is supported and agreements revised — think of the role of the World Health Organization in the coronavirus pandemic. This underscores that human and planetary health are inextricably bound, that global action is imperative, and that effective international or supranational organizations are crucial.

Lieven is convincing when he writes: “If there was ever an issue that demands prudence in judgment and courage in action, it is climate change.” But the judgement and action have to be global. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac might come across as overly optimistic in their conviction that a sense of global responsibility, for fellow humans and other species alike, will prove sufficient to spur the necessary action. But their short and simple book grabs you by the heart and makes you want to join the great adventure against overwhelming odds.

Links

• A Better Planet: Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future
• More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
• On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
• The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720,
• Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America
• Waters of the World: The Story of the Scientists Who Unraveled the Mysteries of Our Oceans, Atmosphere, and Ice Sheets and Made the Planet Whole
• McSweeney’s Issue 58: 2040 AD
• Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age
• Greta and the Giants: Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s Stand to Save the World,
• One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon
• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
• The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future

Greenland's Melting Ice Raised Global Sea Level By 2.2mm In Two Months

The Guardian - Oliver Milman

Analysis of satellite data reveals astounding loss of 600bn tons of ice last summer as Arctic experienced hottest year on record

The loss of land-based glaciers in Greenland leads directly to sea level rise, ultimately increasing the risk of flooding to millions of people. Photograph: Ian Joughin/IMBIE

Last year’s summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600bn tons of ice from Greenland – enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found.

The analysis of satellite data has revealed the astounding loss of ice in just a few months of abnormally high temperatures around the northern pole. Last year was the hottest on record for the Arctic, with the annual minimum extent of sea ice in the region its second-lowest on record.

Unlike the retreat of sea ice, the loss of land-based glaciers directly causes the seas to rise, imperiling coastal cities and towns around the world. Scientists have calculated that Greenland’s enormous ice sheet lost an average of 268bn tons of ice between 2002 and 2019 – less than half of what was shed last summer. By contrast, Los Angeles county, which has more than 10 million residents, consumes 1bn tons of water a year.“We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous,” said Isabella Velicogna, a professor of Earth system science at University of California Irvine and lead author of the new study, which drew upon measurements taken by Nasa’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellite mission and its upgraded successor, Grace Follow-On.
Glaciers are melting away around the world due to global heating caused by the human-induced climate crisis. Ice is reflective of sunlight so as it retreats the dark surfaces underneath absorb yet more heat, causing a further acceleration in melting.
Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, scientists revealed last year, pushing up previous estimates of global sea level rise and putting 400 million people at risk of flooding every year by the end of the century.
More recent research has found that Antarctica, the largest ice sheet on Earth, is also losing mass at a galloping rate, although the latest University of California and Nasa works reveals a nuanced picture.
“In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which is very bad news for sea level rise,” Velicogna said. “But we also observe a mass gain in the Atlantic sector of east Antarctica caused by an increase in snowfall, which helps mitigate the enormous increase in mass loss that we’ve seen in the last two decades in other parts of the continent.”
The research has further illustrated the existential dangers posed by runaway global heating, even as the world’s attention is gripped by the coronavirus crisis. Crucial climate talks are set to be held later this year in Glasgow, although the wave of cancellations triggered by the virus has threatened to undermine this diplomatic effort.
“The technical brilliance involved in weighing the ice sheets using satellites in space is just amazing,” said Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University who was not involved in the study.
“It is easy for us to be distracted by fluctuations, so the highly reliable long data sets from Grace and other sensors are important in clarifying what is really going on, showing us both the big signal and the wiggles that help us understand the processes that contribute to the big signal.”

Links

• Antarctica logs hottest temperature on record with a reading of 18.3C
• Arctic ecosytems and communities are increasingly at risk due to continued warming and declining sea ice (pdf)
• Polar ice caps melting six times faster than in 1990s
• Greenland's ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s
• Explainer: The high-emissions ‘RCP8.5’ global warming scenario
• Heatwaves amplify near-record levels of ice melt in northern hemisphere

Locust Swarms, Some 3 Times The Size of New York City, Are Eating Their Way Across Two Continents

InsideClimate News - Bob Berwyn

Climate change is worsening the largest plague of the crop-killing insects in 50 years, threatening famine in Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. 

Millions of locusts swarm in Tsiroanomandidy, Madagascar. Credit: Rijasolo/AFP via Getty Images

As giant swarms of locusts spread across East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East, devouring crops that feed millions of people, some scientists say global warming is contributing to proliferation of the destructive insects.
The largest locust swarms in more than 50 years have left subsistence farmers helpless to protect their fields and will spread misery throughout the region, said Robert Cheke, a biologist with the University of Greenwich Natural Resources Institute, who has helped lead international efforts to control insect pests in Africa.
"I'm concerned about the scale of devastation and the effect on human livelihoods," Cheke said, adding that he also worried about "the impending famines."
"Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the region needs money and equipment to deploy insect control teams in the affected regions," he said.
New swarms are currently forming from Kenya to Iran, according to the the United Nations locust watch website. Addressing the outbreak requires urgent, additional funding and technical help from developed countries, Cheke said, because the tiny size and budget of the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization team responsible for locust monitoring and control is already overwhelmed.
Changes in plant growth caused by higher carbon dioxide levels, as well as heat waves and tropical cyclones with intense rains, can lead to more prolific and unpredictable locust swarming, making it harder to prevent future outbreaks.
The desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) needs moist soil to breed. When rains are especially heavy, populations of the usually solitary insects can explode. In Kenya, one of the biggest swarms detected last year was three times the size of New York City, according to a March 12 article in the journal Nature. Swarms a fraction of that size can hold between 4 billion and 8 billion locusts.
At times, the locusts in East Africa have swarmed so thick that they have prevented planes from taking off and their dead bodies have piled up high enough to stop trains on their tracks.

Global Warming's Many Impacts on Insects
The changing climate has spurred other insect invasions. Warmer winters, for example, are magnifying an ongoing bark beetle outbreak in western North America. Until the 1980s, periodic cold snaps kept the beetles in check. But since then, the tree-killing bugs have swarmed—not as fast as desert locusts, but just as destructively. Since 2000, they've killed trees across about 150,000 square miles in Canada and the western U.S., an area nearly the size of California. In recent years, historic bark beetle outbreaks have also devastated European forests.
Other research shows that seasonal shifts caused by global warming are disrupting cycles of insect reproduction and plant pollination, including a recently documented decline of bumblebees, threatening food production in some areas.
Global warming is also affecting the feeding and breeding patterns of North America's grasshoppers, species that behave similarly to locusts. In the 1930s, swarms of grasshoppers destroyed crops in the Midwest, even eating wooden farm tools and clothes that were drying outside. States like Colorado used flamethrowers and explosives to battle the insects.
It's hard to predict how grasshoppers will respond to today's changing climate, said University of Oklahoma biologist Ellen Welti, who studies the relationship between insects and plants.
But, she said, "Warmer winters, with less egg mortality and changes in precipitation patterns that affect the amount and quality of plant food, could lead to outbreaks of particular grasshopper species or other herbivorous insects."
Locust outbreaks could be driven by changes in plant nutrients caused by extreme weather, Welti said, like more frequent soggy tropical storms, which make plants grow faster but dilute elements like nitrogen. "Locusts have a weird physiology—they like low nitrogen plants," she said of connections she explored in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But the current locust outbreaks, Welti said, are occurring against the backdrop of an alarming global decline in overall insect abundance, which is also, to some degree, connected to climate change and will have far-reaching ecosystem impacts.

Extreme Weather, Failed Governance Favor Swarms
Warm weather and heavy rains at the end of 2019 set up a perfect storm of breeding conditions for the destructive bugs. The outbreak followed an unusually active West Indian Ocean cyclone season with several of the storms bringing extreme rainfall to parts of East Africa.
Studies in the last few years have showed that global warming is boosting the rainfall from tropical storms. Other recent research shows that human-driven warming may be intensifying a regional Indian Ocean pattern of warming and cooling that could exacerbate extremes like tropical storms, heavy rains and heat waves—all factors that can affect locust populations.
More moisture is a double-edged sword for the Horn of Africa, said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, which addresses the human impacts of climate change.
"We need rain for agricultural productivity, but it is then also conducive to locust breeding," van Aalst said. "It's a classical case of rising risks partly due to rising uncertainties. But we can manage some of this uncertainty. In this case we have had good predictions of elevated risks, and it is concerning that it still takes us so long to respond."
Martin Huseman, head of the entomology department at the University of Hamburg Center for Natural Sciences, said, "In general I think it's partly climate change. We get more extreme weather conditions. The cyclones we had there in the region could lead to enhanced swarming."
Locusts swarm out to find more food when they reach extremely dense populations during the nymph stage of their development. Aided by wind, the insects can travel more than 90 miles per day. Scientists warn they could spread across hundreds of thousands more square miles from Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia to Sudan, and across the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea into Iran, Pakistan and India. Such a spread would threaten the food supplies of 20 million people.
Those food shortages will mainly be felt later in the year, so there is still time to act by bolstering regional food supplies, van Aalst said. But travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic will challenge locust control projects, as well as relief efforts. According to the UN's locust watch program, the countries facing the biggest risk are Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iran, Pakistan and Sudan.
Cheke said poor monitoring, conflict and a breakdown of governance in key locust breeding areas enabled the recent outbreak to grow unchecked, and threatens the progress made in controlling locusts during the last half century.
"It all started with substantial rainfall in May and October 2018 allowing good desert locust breeding in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula to continue until March 2019, where it was not noticed and thus left uncontrolled," he said.

Swarms Could Expand Their Range and Emerge More Frequently
Huseman said that, in the global warming era, other parts of the world may also need to prepare for unexpected insect invasions as part of larger scale shifts in the distribution of animals. In northern Germany, for example, scientists recently spotted Asian wasps for the first time. A 2013 study found that crop-damaging insects are moving poleward at about 4 miles per year.
In addition to the ongoing plague of locusts around the Horn of Africa, there have been recent outbreaks of varying intensity in places like Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea, and Las Vegas.
David Inouye, a University of Maryland biologist who studies the effects of global warming on plants and animals, said conditions favoring outbreaks are becoming more common.
"I think that there is the potential for locust swarms to become more frequent, and potentially more widely distributed, as the environmental factors like rain and warm temperatures that favor their outbreaks continue to become more prevalent," he said. Some insects have a strict biological clock, but locusts respond strongly to environmental factors like precipitation and temperature.
Arianne Cease, a researcher at Arizona State University's School of Sustainability, said there are other factors related to climate that could promote locust swarms. Livestock grazing, rising carbon dioxide levels and extreme rainfall all lower nitrogen levels in plants—exactly the conditions that locusts thrive on.
"However," she said, "a direct link between atmospheric CO2, plant nutrients and swarming grasshoppers or locusts has yet to be tested, to my knowledge."
Cheke said it's unlikely, but possible, that locusts could swarm into new regions.
"With climate change it is possible that increasing aridity or changes in rainfall patterns could lead to locusts expanding their usual geographical range," he said. "For instance, in October 1988 desert locusts crossed the Atlantic but the habitat on the other side was unsuitable. Similarly, there are cases of desert locusts reaching the U.K. and Italy."
He believes several important questions remain to be answered, including whether locusts' speed of development from egg to maturity—which is temperature dependent—has increased in line with global warming.
"What I think is worth considering is whether climate change has led to habitat changes," he said. "Or changes ... regarding rainfall that might facilitate the success and spread of a locust plague once it has started. Or if climate change, through its effects on weather changes, could lead to changes in the locusts' usual migration routes."
In Africa, some of those questions have already been answered. Colin Everard, formerly with the Royal Aeronautical Society (U.K.), worked on locust control in Africa for 40 years. The increase in regional tropical cyclone activity during the last few years is certainly a factor, he said, as such storms are known to cause locust plagues.
"If this trend continues, for sure there will be more desert locust outbreaks in the Horn of Africa," he said. "There will be hunger and starvation in northeastern Kenya, the area which borders Somalia. Apart from humans, livestock will also starve to death due to the destruction of grazing."

Links

• Locust Crisis Poses A Danger To Millions, Forecasters Warn
• Locust swarms and climate change
• How climate change has triggered locust plagues across East Africa
• Locust plagues point to grim future of climate change
• Scientists turn to tech to prevent second wave of locusts in east Africa
• Locust Swarms Threaten Food Security For Millions; Climate Change Contributing To Breeding, Spread
• Climate change linked to African locust invasion

Paul R. Ehrlich: A Pandemic, Planetary Reckoning, And A Path Forward

The Daily Climate - Paul R Ehrlich

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing environmental destruction and the deterioration of social and cultural systems into sharp focus. But we can learn from this.

COVID-19 Mobile Testing Center in New Rochelle, NY. (Credit: The National Guard)

Paul Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus and President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford.

In addition to great concern over the COVID-19 pandemic, I'm also disappointed.
For more than half a century, scientists have been expressing concern over the deterioration of what I like to call the "epidemiological environment." That environment consists of the constellation of circumstances that influence patterns of disease and factors related to health.
It includes such things as population sizes and densities, diets, speed and type of transportation systems, toxics, climate disruption, frequency of human-animal contacts, availability of medical isolation facilities, stockpiles of medicines, vaccines, and medical equipment.
The epidemiological environment also includes cultural norms: levels of education, equity in societies, competence of leadership. Few aspects of the human predicament do not impinge on our epidemiological environment.
My own interest in one part of that environment, transmissible diseases, started as a grad student working on the evolution of DDT resistance in fruit flies. The results of that research had obvious implications for the evolution of antibiotic resistance, a key element in the epidemiological environment.
It clearly influenced my wife Anne and my scenarios in our 1968 book, The Population Bomb and a section on the epidemiological environment in The Population Explosion, the 1990 sequel book. We were responding not just to our own fears, but the fears of colleagues much more knowledgeable in areas like virology and epidemiology.
Of course, the utter failure of global society to deal appropriately with high probability threats to civilization warned of by the scientific community is hardly limited to pandemics.
Climate disruption is the best recognized of contemporary health threats, but the decay of biodiversity, and "updating" the American nuclear triad as part of the Russian-United States' "mutually assured imbecility" are among the most critical.
Those, at least, are not obvious to the average citizen or decision-maker, but what about others such as increased flows of plastics and toxics (especially synthetic hormone mimicking compounds) into the global environment?
Everyone knows about volumes of plastics in waste streams and oceans and has personal experience with the thermal paper receipts coated with bisphenol-A (BPA), yet little to no remedies have been undertaken.
Indeed, why are there so few effective responses to the epidemics and the maladies of industrial civilization?

Bolster basic medical care

Credit: New York National Guard

It is convenient for progressives to blame the COVID-19 disaster in the United States on the spectacular incompetence and corruption of the current Republican national leadership. Yes, it has turned away from science, and worked hard to speed the demise of civilization.
One of the Republicans' many steps in that direction was to destroy the global health security and biodefense directorate that the Obama Administration created to help prepare for emergent diseases. Americans are now likely paying with their lives for Trump's move there.
But the basic problem dates much further back and is bipartisan. After all both parties have been supportive and remain supportive of the growthmania that has been the basic driver of environmental destruction.
Rather than dwell on the past, however, let's look at what the U.S. should be doing about the epidemiological environment starting right now. The U.S. has long stood alone in failing to supply all its citizens with health care, an error COVID-19 has highlighted. Changing that, however it is done, should be top priority.
Besides the obvious ethics and justice reasons, people without basic medical care exacerbate public health problems, especially pandemics, in ways that threaten even senators and presidents.
A comprehensive national health program should also remove incentives for infected people to go to work sick and for keeping businesses and other entities that provide essential services functioning.
Plans and equipment should be put in place to greatly increase the capacity of the medical system to deal with large surges of victims of epidemics.
Programs are needed to keep both the plans and essential supplies up to date. A provision for quickly establishing unified leadership in disasters is essential.

Climate change and biodiversity 
U.S. security in a globalized world demands leadership in dealing with all aspects of the world's epidemiological environment.
In addition to rejoining the Paris agreement, America should demand greatly increased ambition in replacing fossil fuels in energy systems so it will have a better chance of ameliorating the building climatic catastrophe and reduce the likely huge refugee flows that will transform the entire global epidemiological environment.
The U.S. should aid China to reduce that nation's huge pig-duck-pond-wildlife market, which is a lethal virus manufacturing machine. Putting pigs and ducks together with ponds is bad in itself, but adding wildlife markets to the mix makes it worse – and it's an important factor in the global epidemiological environment.
America and China could lead a civilization-wide program to halt the destruction of biodiversity – another factor which negatively impacts that environment.
What I'm basically saying is that the U.S. should fix the epidemiological environment by taking the obvious steps to solve the human predicament – to avoid the collapse of civilization now entrained.

Teaching planetary literacy

(Credit: JR P)

This seems wildly optimistic in a world that has not even recognized its problems of overpopulation and overconsumption or the impacts on health and well-being of socio-cultural regression: rising xenophobia, racism, religious prejudice, sexism, and, especially, economic inequity.
What explains this?
There are the causes usually noted, such as the power of money, not just in politics but in global culture as a whole. But a major element is widespread ignorance, partly due to broken educational systems – allowing, for example, mobs of innumerate economists, politicians, and decision-makers in general to believe in perpetual growth in population and consumption.
The widespread inability of "educated" people to think is frequently underlined by statements on how "we don't have a population problem, just a problem of too much consumption."
Can't they grasp the not-so-difficult idea that a billion people are likely to consume more than a hundred? Case in point on the ignorant "educated": Donald Trump got a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
To overwhelm this vast ignorance demands resuscitation of our higher education system. Universities and colleges remain stalled in a 19th century Aristotelian state. They have given up any goal except turning out people who will be financially successful in a deteriorating culture -- oiling parts of the engine with never a thought for where the train is heading.
And that "education" clearly doesn't even give its products a grasp of such concepts as exponential growth, as the response of Trump and many others to the COVID-19 epidemic have shown.
Educational systems have given up any pretense of supplying leadership to society or informing people about what is coming down the track. Faculty members discuss "sustainability" in major universities that will not even divest from fossil fuel stocks.
Can the absence of a draft alone explain the difference between the ferment in universities during the Vietnam War and the quiet today with the situation a million times worse?
Once again, population size and growth are major factors in this human dilemma – maybe Homo sapiens shouldn't have tried to organize itself into groups exceeding the Dunbar number, which anthropologist Robin Dunbar showed was about 150 people, the size of hunter-gatherer groups. He also showed that's roughly the size of groups in which human beings are comfortable today.

Rethinking resources 
Where could all the money come from to make the changes to preserve civilization? That's one of the challenges for the economists who today are operating in a perpetual-growth fairyland.
Much depends on the course of events and whether the debt pyramid collapses. One obvious step, however, is repurposing the military. When Anne and I were working with them on nuclear winter issues, we were greatly impressed by the intelligence and ethics of some of the field-grade officers with whom we were involved.
The military is already way ahead of the present civilian government in addressing existential threats like climate disruption. Various military units have already been deployed to deal with emergencies ranging from pandemics to hurricanes, and there is no reason why they cannot be used to help in tasks ranging from building medical isolation facilities to small-scale affordable housing for the homeless.
Allocation of resources is part of the epidemiological environment. The gigantic amounts of money wasted on such nearly useless toys as nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, main battle tanks, and air superiority jet fighters could be redirected toward rebuilding infrastructure such as sewage systems, modernized electric grids and water-handling networks, and on and on.
The same can be said for the other funds and activities used for decades to support (often clandestinely) U.S. state terrorism that has cumulatively killed millions since the second World War.
Is all this impractical, pie-in-the-sky, never-happen stuff? Sure.
But nothing is more impractical than civilization trying to continue business as usual as it circles the drain.
The current pandemic disaster may end up damping down consumerism and improving the environment – there are reports of the lethal smog usually blanketing some Chinese cities clearing during pandemic lockdowns.
Maybe there's some chance that people are learning lessons.
We can always hope.

Links

• If We’re Bailing Out Corporations, They Should Bail Out The Planet
• (AU) What Role Did Climate Change Play In The Australian Megafires?
• The Coronavirus And The Climate Movement
• Coronavirus Response Should Be A Model For How We Address Climate Change
• What Machiavelli Would Do About Climate Change
• The War On Global Carbon

If We’re Bailing Out Corporations, They Should Bail Out The Planet

New Yorker - Bill McKibben

Congress has an opportunity to make any coronavirus-related industry bailout depend on promises to meet the targets set in the Paris climate accord. Photograph by Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker.

One of the best chances to make some positive use of the coronavirus pandemic may be passing swiftly. As the economy craters, big corporations are in need of government assistance, and, on Capitol Hill, the sound of half a trillion dollars in relief money is bringing out the lobbyists. On Thursday afternoon, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, described the scene as a “trough” and mentioned a quote from a lobbyist in The Hill: “Everybody’s asking for something and those that aren’t asking for something only aren’t because they don’t know how.” Whitehouse added, “I fear that enviros don’t know how to ask, because, so far in this scrum, we haven’t heard much from them.”

The corporations will get assistance, but the Democrats have enough legislative power to insure that it comes with at least a few strings attached. If they attach those strings with even a modicum of care, they will have used this emergency to help solve the looming climate crisis in ways that were unimaginable just a few days ago. For busy legislators looking for a principle to enforce in handing out relief to corporations, here’s a shorthand: any bailout depends on your industry promising to meet the targets set in the Paris climate accords, and demonstrating in the next few months what that plan looks like.

Consider, say, the airline industry. It obviously is in need of relief, even if the biggest airlines spent ninety-six per cent of their proceeds over the past decade buying back stock, instead of, say, preparing for the future. On behalf of the flight attendants and pilots and mechanics the airlines employ, they should get it. But everyone who has to live on a rapidly heating planet should get something back in return. And since, at current rates of growth, by 2050, air travel threatens to eat up a quarter of the entire carbon the world can still emit and meet the climate targets set in Paris, that something should be a wholesale change in direction.

On Friday, some environmental groups proposed that “Congress must cap total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. airline fleets at 2020 levels, and overall emissions must fall at least 20% per decade thereafter.” (The Trump Administration has so far sidestepped Clean Air Act calls to regulate aircraft emissions.) And the airlines should act not by pledging to plant trees but by burning less jet fuel—by making flight routes more logical, and designing more efficient planes. Or take the banks: if they want a bailout, they should pledge an end to funding for expansionary fossil-fuel projects.

They don’t seem willing to rein themselves in—on Wednesday the Rainforest Action Network released an updated version of its “Banking on Climate Change” report, which shows that the four biggest U.S. banks continue to lead the way in funding global warming, with JPMorgan Chase reportedly having handed over more than a quarter of a trillion dollars to the fossil-fuel industry since the end of the Paris talks. Or take the fossil-fuel industry itself. It’s been dropping in value for a decade, as renewable energy takes most of the growth in demand, but the coronavirus crisis has hammered the price of oil. Trump promised to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve “right up to the top,” but the drillers will doubtless want more.

Yet, as Michael Brune, the head of the Sierra Club, told me, on Thursday, “the fossil-fuel industry is already heavily subsidized by the federal government, and they should not get yet another giveaway in any form, whether it’s low-interest loans, royalty relief, new tax subsidies, or filling the reserve.” More assistance should come only if these companies pledge to stop exploring for new oil, since climate scientists have made it clear that we can’t burn what we already have in our reserves.None of this is ideal.

In an ideal world, we’d use this moment to quickly enact a Green New Deal, employing all the suddenly unemployed Americans in building out our renewable-energy system and laying the high-speed rail tracks that would help curtail the need for short-haul aviation. But, for now, here’s a list of “5 Principles for Just COVID-19 Relief and Stimulus” that dozens of environmental groups have signed on to (350.org, which I helped found, is a signatory), which offers a guide for thinking about the “choices being made right now will shape our society for years, if not decades to come.”

These sorts of conditions are not without precedent: after the 2008 financial crisis, President Barack Obama used the government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler to force them, and by extension the rest of the automobile industry, to accept stringent new fuel-economy standards, which may have been the single biggest blow he struck against climate change during his tenure in office. (Needless to say, the Trump Administration has been hard at work wrecking this achievement.)

The principle is clear: taking money from society means that you owe society something. Trump and the Senate Republicans aren’t likely to enforce that principle, but, since the Democrats control the House, they will have a big say in the outcome. The question that climate-minded voters will ask for years to come is: Did you strike a useful bargain when you had the leverage?

Our goal can’t be simply a return to the status-quo ante, because that old normal was driving a climate crisis that will eventually prove every bit as destructive as a pandemic. With just a little courage from Democratic legislators, we could actually be building a world that is safer on every front.

Links

• The Coronavirus And The Climate Movement
• Annals of a Warming Planet: Welcome to The Climate Crisis Newsletter
• Banking On Climate Change
• (AU) What Role Did Climate Change Play In The Australian Megafires?
• The Coronavirus And The Climate Movement
• Coronavirus Response Should Be A Model For How We Address Climate Change
• What Machiavelli Would Do About Climate Change
• The War On Global Carbon