(AU) Too Hot, Heading South: How Climate Change May Drive One-Third Of Doctors Out Of The NT

The Conversation - Simon Quilty | Catherine Pendrey

from www.shutterstock.com

Authors Simon Quilty is Senior Staff Specialist, Alice Springs Hospital. Honorary, Australian National University Catherine Pendrey is Visiting researcher, Australian National University

A sizeable chunk of Northern Territory’s doctors are thinking about leaving the territory because of climate change, our new research shows.

Our study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health, shows for 34% of doctors in our survey, climate change is already, or is likely to, make them consider leaving the NT.

If they do, this would leave a large gap in the territory’s health-care system, which already suffers from a fast turnover of staff. These doctors would leave behind communities already suffering from the effects of climate change.

Extreme heat and getting worse

The two summers of 2018-20 were the hottest ever recorded in the NT.

From December 2019 to January 2020, temperatures were about 4℃ above the long-term average. And in late 2019, it was so hot, remote kidney dialysis centres struggled to cool water for their life-saving dialysis machines.

Summer 2018-2019 temperatures relative to every other summer since 1910. Data from AWAP (Jones et al 2009). Pandora Hope/BoM, Author provided

Some of the hottest conditions in 2019 were in the Katherine region, which shattered previous records. However, this shouldn’t have been a surprise.
In 2004 the CSIRO reported the average number of days over 40℃ in the Katherine region would increase by up to 35 days a year by 2030, due to climate change.

In 2019 there were 54 days of 40℃ or above in Katherine. This surpassed CSIRO’s predictions more than a decade earlier than projected.

Climate change is predicted to affect the NT in other ways. According to the territory government’s own report, the NT can expect warmer spells to last longer, more frequent fire weather, to have more intense/heavy rainfall, more intense tropical cyclones, and rising sea levels.

Norman Frank, Warumungu Senior Elder, on the impacts of climate change on Tennant Creek

NT has enough trouble retaining health workers anyway

Even without the effects of climate change, health workforce shortages in the NT have been significant challenges. The persistent challenges of attracting and retaining staff leads to high rates of churn. An entire clinic’s staff can turn over in just months, and the impacts can be shattering.

When Katherine’s only GP clinic closed last year, many people were forced to travel more than 300 kilometres to Darwin to see a family doctor.

For us doctors in the NT, knowing how hard it can be to recruit other doctors, summers like that of 2019-20 have raised the stakes. I’ve heard colleagues lament the impact of climate change and talk of moving south. Now we have the data to show how real this threat is.

We found out exactly the extent of the problem

We surveyed doctors working in the NT, with 362 responses, representing over 25% of the workforce.

Our study showed NT doctors believe climate change is a serious public health issue. A total of 85% indicated climate change is already or is likely to negatively impact their patients’ health; 74% believed climate change is already causing or likely to cause parts of the NT to become uninhabitable. And for 34%, climate change is already, or likely to, make them consider leaving the NT.

Extreme heat poses real risks, especially to the elderly and those with chronic conditions. Extreme heat is associated with increased rates of illness and death. Hot weather exacerbates existing heart, lung and kidney disease, and compounds mental illness.

For people living in the NT, the reality of this new and predictably worsening heat is tangible. Weekend sports are being affected, the period of relief in the cooler months is becoming shorter, and it’s uncomfortable simply going outside on very hot days. It is hard to contemplate living in a future NT hotter than it already is.

Why not move south?

One means of adapting to climate change is to move to cooler climates. But such migration is an option only for people with the means to move. People without such means will have no choice but to stay.

It is unlikely our findings about climate change affecting migration plans are confined to doctors, or to the NT. In Australia and globally, many regions are facing the dual burden of health workforce shortages and increasing exposure to climate risks.

In many of these regions, even small increases of out-migration could have significant impacts on health care.

It’s true most doctors in our survey did not think climate change would make them leave the NT, thought this unlikely, or were undecided. However, the 34% of our respondents who thought climate change might affect their plans represent 115 doctors, who we can’t afford to lose.

To address these issues, we need to urgently consider climate change when planning future health workforce needs. And we need to include health workers when Australia assesses the risk of climate change impacts.

These are vital if we are to ensure rural communities, in particular, have secure access to health care in the face of rapidly emerging climate threats.

Links

• As heatwaves become more extreme, which jobs are riskiest?
• Climate change is resulting in profound, immediate and worsening health impacts, over 120 researchers say
• How a rethink of emergency care is closing the gap, one person at a time
• 'Climigration': when communities must move because of climate change
• Is climate change exacerbating health-care workforce shortages for underserved populations?
• Heatwave and drought a dangerous mix for dialysis patients in remote communities
• The silent killer: Climate Change and the health impacts of extreme heat (pdf)
• Bureau of Meteorology: State of the Climate 2020
• World Health Organisation global strategy on human resources for health: Workforce 2030

How Children Are Taking European States To Court Over The Climate Crisis – And Changing The Law

The Conversation - Aoife Daly | Pernilla Leviner | Rebecca Thorburn Stern

Children join the 20th September 2019 climate strike in London, thought to be the largest climate strikes to date. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Authors Aoife Daly is Lecturer in Law, University College Cork Pernilla Leviner is Professor in Public Law, Stockholm University Rebecca Thorburn Stern is Professor of Public International Law, Uppsala University

Even before Greta Thunberg launched her school strike for climate at age 15, youth activists have been key players in public action on the climate crisis. Now they’re breaking new ground in court.

On November 30, six Portuguese children and young people brought a historic court case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Dubbed Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and Others – or the Agostinho case, for short – it argues that those states which fail to solve the climate crisis are breaching human rights.

In an exciting development last December, the ECHR agreed to fast track the case. The 33 European states - including the UK (which, post-Brexit, remains part of the ECHR system), France and Germany - now have to respond with information about how they will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are destabilising the climate.

This case is part of a growing body of systemic climate litigation, which targets broad state policies. Much of it involves youth applicants for a number of reasons, including the fact that so many children and young people are climate-educated and tech-savvy. Unlike other cases, however, this particular application makes the key argument that states are engaging in youth discrimination.

Youth burden

The applicants to the ECHR – one of whom is as young as eight years old – have argued that, as well as violating their rights to life and to private life, governmental failure to tackle the climate crisis constitutes discrimination. They justify this claim by stating that “children and young adults are being made to bear the burden of climate change to a far greater extent than older generations.”

Portugal is reportedly a climate change hot spot, with increasingly deadly heatwaves. The young people involved in this case were witnesses to the 2017 fires in which over 120 people died.

They point out how it is children and young people in particular who are affected in the long term as well as the short term. The heat precipitated by the climate crisis can make everyday life – from studying to exercise – very difficult. It makes them fearful for their futures too.

The next step in the case is for states to explain that, where their actions disproportionately affect young people, this is due to objective factors and not to discrimination. They must also outline how they are considering children’s best interests in their policies.

Possibilities for youth?

Most international human rights treaties have a provision protecting groups from discrimination. Agostinho appears to be the first time such a provision is being used to protect “youth” as a category in an international/regional court. Age discrimination provisions are generally understood as protecting older people.

“Youth” is generally taken to include those up to their mid-twenties, but the definition is not clear cut. Under-18s require particular attention as they are generally excluded altogether from discrimination law. This is likely due to a mistaken interpretation of the law, based on the blanket assumption that children cannot have the same rights as adults.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child outlines the rights to which under-18s are entitled, and it has certainly been successful in drawing attention to the rights and interests of children.

But its non-discrimination article - which mirrors other human rights instruments - is also almost always applied to minorities, gender and disabled children. It is rarely used, if ever, to protect children (as opposed to adults) as a group from discrimination.

Unfair discrimination can include laws and practices that exclude groups. It can also include those that ignore the unique needs of a specific group. The latter is what is being argued in this case. The claimants’ position is that climate policies place most of the economic and environmental burden on the younger generation. Too little attention is being paid to figuring out how to share that burden and reduce carbon emissions right now.

This same argument has been used by petitioners in other ECHR cases - for example, where the Netherlands gave insufficient consideration to women’s rights in the context of pension policies. The argument has never been used at the ECHR for “youth” as a group, until now.

Youth discrimination

As experts on children’s rights and international law, our current research brings a legal element to a new discipline sometimes referred to as childism – like feminism, but for children.

This climate case is far from the only instance when youth have faced unfair discrimination. In some states (including the UK), there are dramatically lower minimum wages for under-18s (indeed under 25s) for the same work. It is also little known that in the UK children are more likely to be poor or to experience violence than adults.

At least one child per week dies in the UK at the hands of another person, and that figure is likely to be higher as there are difficulties with identifying the death of a young child as homicide. Yet as with many states, the Equality Act 2010 in the UK for the most part excludes under-18s from its protection.

Some social science and psychology academics have argued that bad attitudes to children are much of the cause of the hardships and rights violations they face. For example, beliefs that it is acceptable to hit children for punishment (still essentially legal in England for parents) are likely to be linked to relatively high homicide rates for children in the UK, as there is a clear link between excessive physical punishment and abuse.

By tackling discriminatory attitudes and policies, we can start to combat the actions that harm children. If the rights violations of under-18s were more frequently framed as equality issues (and litigated as such), it would mitigate the disadvantage under-18s as a group suffer due to disenfranchisement.

It would likely prompt states to give greater consideration to children in policy-making. It would also increase perceptions of children in the public consciousness as human beings equal in worth to adults.

Whether or not the ECHR finds that states are discriminating against youth in the Agostinho case, the arguments these children and young people have made are groundbreaking. It should start a conversation about how and whether equality law can benefit children as a group.

Law is far from the only means to achieve progress for children’s interests, but it can be a crucial part of explaining what treatment is and is not acceptable. The potential for developing understandings of youth discrimination in the anticipated judgment shows just how exciting this legal development at the ECHR is.

Links

• How Children Are Taking European States To Court Over The Climate Crisis – And Changing The Law
• Children’s climate change case at the European Court of Human Rights: what’s at stake?
• It is time to accept that children have a right to be political
• European Court of Human Rights monthly round-up of case-law, news and publications (pdf)
• European Court of Human Rights is fast-tracking a climate case against 33 European States brought by 6 Portuguese youth
• Communication To The UN Committee On The Rights Of The Child (pdf)
• Why young climate activists have captured the world’s attention
• UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
• UN: Who Are the Youth?
• UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 
• From childhood studies to childism: reconstructing the scholarly and social imaginations
• Lethal Heating: Legal Posts

Carbon Dioxide Levels Are At A 3.6 Million Year High

Salon - Matthew Rozsa

Despite the lockdown resulting in a slight reduction in emissions, Earth is now at a geological highpoint for CO2

Carbon Dioxide Emissions (Getty Images)

Because the COVID-19 pandemic caused a massive economic slowdown, experts had hoped that the decline in transportation and manufacturing might slow greenhouse gas emissions at least a little.

Unfortunately, a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveals that one of the major gases behind climate change has reached its highest level in 3.6 million years.

The NOAA reports that the average amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, an increase by 2.6 ppm through the course of the year.

Climate scientists generally agree that in order for life on Earth to be minimally interrupted, Earth's carbon dioxide levels should remain under 350 parts per million. Yet since NOAA begin recording atmospheric composition data in 1960, there has not been a year in which carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere did not increase.

Likewise, in 2020, overall carbon dioxide emissions increased at the fifth-highest rate in the 63 years that NOAA has been recording. It was only surpassed by the rates of increase in 1987, 1998, 2015 and 2016.

A senior scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, Pieter Tans, said that if there had not been an economic slowdown, it would have been the highest increase on record.

As things current stand, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at a point comparable to the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when the temperature was 7 degrees hotter and the sea level was roughly 78 feet higher than today.

Another organization, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, released similar results on Wednesday, announcing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 417.4 ppm at their monitoring station in Hawaii .

These graphs depict the mean global atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide as analyzed from measurements collected by NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. Credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory.

The NOAA also reported a "significant jump" in the atmospheric burden of methane in 2020, with the annual amount increasing by 14.7 parts per billion (ppb) in 2020. Not only is this the biggest jump since methane levels began to be systematically measured in 1983, but it is also troubling because of how effective methane is at trapping heat.

Although there is much less methane than carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, it is 28 times more potent at trapping heat over the course of a century.

Still, the COVID-19 lockdowns had a minor effect on emissions.

"The estimates vary among the different groups doing these sorts of calculations, but the consensus seems to be about a 7% decrease [in greenhouse gas emissions] relative to 2019 levels," Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, wrote to Salon in December.

If climate change is not halted and/or reversed in the near future, experts agree that there will be serious and negative repercussions for all life on Earth, including humans.

There will be an increase in extreme weather events like hurricanes and blizzards, an increase in the amount of wildfires and a reduction in the amount of land that can be used to produce food.

All of this will lead to fierce competition for resources and mass population displacements, even as an increasing amount of the world's surface either too hot or too dry to be inhabitable.

President Joe Biden has said that he will prioritize fighting climate change in his presidency. Shortly after taking office, he said in a statement that "environmental justice will be at the center of all we do."

Links

• Despite pandemic shutdowns, carbon dioxide and methane surged in 2020
• Carbon dioxide levels are higher than they've been at any point in the last 3.6 million years
• The world reached a scary emissions milestone in March -- and it's only going to get worse
• Despite pandemic shutdowns, carbon dioxide and methane surged in 2020
• Did the pandemic stave off climate change? Here's what the science says
• Global Carbon Budget 2020
• Integrating geological archives and climate models for the mid-Pliocene warm period
• What is the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network?
• CarbonTracker-CH4 (methane)

(AU) We Can’t Wait For This Government. Let’s Beat Emissions Together

Sydney Morning Herald - Ketan Joshi

Citizens, industry and communities need to pick up the slack from our politicians, who dropped the reins long ago. Here’s how.

Citizen activists: there has been a wave of climate change protests across the country. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Author Ketan Joshi is an author and analyst based in Oslo, Norway. His recent book Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future (NewSouth Publishing) covers the past and next decades in Australian energy and climate.

There is a single emotion common to every climate discussion in Australia. It is not the sandbag of despair, or a sparkle of hope. It is the raw, unfiltered exasperation that comes from decades of inaction.

From the first climate negotiations in the late 1990s to the Paris climate agreement updates wrangled this year and last, Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition has mostly been in government.

It has mostly used that position to ensure fossil industries have the leeway to grow unhindered by responsibility for greenhouse gases discharged into our biosphere.

The people who dig up, transport, sell and burn fossil fuels are the proud beneficiaries of this subsidy-through-omission. An aggressive union of vested interests has created a haven for those who want to profit from an industry incompatible with human life.

“The resulting decades of inaction have eliminated our options for a gradual response,” Ian Dunlop and David Spratt, co-authors of Climate Reality Check 2020, wrote in The Canberra Times.

“The fact is that 10 per cent of the world’s population is responsible for half of the world’s carbon pollution, and Australia is firmly embedded in that 10 per cent. We have known about this inequity for three decades and done nothing to correct it.”

This is a deeply preventable catastrophe. Non-harmful alternatives to fossil fuels exist at a mature technological stage to eradicate the majority of Australia’s emissions, yet action has stalled. Inaction is common around the world, but Australia punches far above its weight in worsening the cause instead of enabling the solutions.

There is nothing stopping politically conservative parties from acting on climate. In Britain, the Conservative government has overseen a program of transformation, establishing clear, science-based five-year carbon budgets and attempting to shift the economy towards non-harmful alternatives to fossil fuels.

The country’s coal-fired power output has become a blip in annual totals. Germany’s conservative-led government, too, scraped in under its 2020 climate targets (albeit with help from the pandemic). Both are far from perfect or sufficient, but their shifts are injecting momentum into Europe’s broader, accelerating decarbonisation journey.

In terms of policy substance, Australia’s conservative leadership has only moved backwards since the days of Tony Abbott.

The marketing may have changed but the only systemic, long-running downward force on Australia’s emissions right now is the renewable energy industry, catalysed by the Renewable Energy Target of the ALP.

That target froze in 2020 (it would have been higher, had conservatives not fought aggressively to cut it in 2015), which means rising transport, gas mining and industrial emissions will all result in climbing totals.


Scott Morrison has expressed a “preference” to reach net zero by 2050. Yet we know exactly what someone with a preference to hit that goal would be doing in 2021.

They would be planning the closure of all coal power stations by 2030. They would be urgently commencing the transition from fossil-fuel cars to clean cars. They would be aggressively implementing energy efficiency schemes.

They would be figuring out ways to simultaneously wind down and decarbonise fossil fuel extraction, itself responsible for a sizeable chunk of Australia’s emissions (while protecting communities and workers reliant on the industry).

Hitting a 2050 target means doing the bulk of the heavy lifting prior to 2030, with a two-decade tail for the “hard to decarbonise” sectors. But power, transport, households and mining remain mostly untouched by the government’s policies.

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Morrison and his Energy and Emissions Reductions Minister, Angus Taylor, are not doing these things.

Their flagship climate policy is a lengthy, wonky technological document aimed at incentivising fossil gas, carbon capture, hydrogen and energy storage. It is one-hundredth of a complete policy.

What are the chances of an about-face before the 26th Conference of Parties meeting in Glasgow this November? Morrison may announce a 2050 net zero target, but it won’t result in any real change to what happens in 2021 or 2022.

The exasperation that inaction brings is often followed by a question: is there anything that can be done? The democratic process of lobbying for change in federal policy can’t ever cease but the past three decades suggest that, in parallel, a bottom-up drumbeat of change must be maximised.

This means realising a near-term future in which citizens, industry and communities pick up the slack and end up in the history books as the visionaries and leaders who took the reins from those who dropped them long ago.

Give the people what they want

The deepest well of currently unrealised decarbonisation potential in Australia is citizen participation. This isn’t just changing your light bulbs and walking to the shops. This is climate action on a notable scale, enacted through people, communities and organisations.

A simple example has been the growth of rooftop solar photovoltaic panels in Australia. Australia is easily a world leader in rooftop PV deployment, both in per capita terms and as a proportion of total electricity generation.

In 2020, solar out-generated wind power for the first time ever, generating 19.7 terawatt-hours on Australia’s National Electricity Market (9.7 per cent of total). Thirteen terawatt-hours of that was rooftop solar. That’s 40 per cent of the total energy output of Australia’s brown coal fleet in 2020.

Consider what happened here. Several million people collectively decided to transform their homes into a distributed modular power station fuelled directly by the organic fusion reactor at the centre of our solar system.

And though this change was seeded through federal (during Labor’s brief tenure) and state government schemes, Australia’s solar prowess has proven resilient both to the fading of those subsidies and even the onset of a global pandemic.

Plenty more change will be needed if Australia is to hit decarbonisation goals aligned with the Paris climate agreement. One recent estimate by Climate Analytics suggests the grid needs to be near zero carbon by 2030.

Australia went from around 10 per cent renewable to 26 per cent over the past 20 years. It needs to go from 26 per cent to 97 per cent in the next nine. That means more than just wind and solar.

“In order to reach a highly renewable grid, we need greater investment in enabling technologies, in particular energy storage, demand response and transmission,” says Marija Petkovic, founder and managing director of consultancy Energy Synapse.


Much of this infrastructure will be large-scale. “Investing in transmission and in particular, strengthening the interconnection between different states will be vital in reaching a highly renewable grid,” says Petkovic.

“Large infrastructure projects like this tend to move quite slowly. We anticipate that many of these projects will need to be fast-tracked to keep pace with coal closures and the transition to clean energy.”

The massive infrastructure changes required could be boosted significantly by expanding the power of citizen participation. Helen Haines, the independent MP for Indi, has highlighted this in her community energy plan for regional Australia – in which “everyday people develop, build or benefit from an energy project like a solar installation, a wind farm or a large battery”.

In welcome news, the much-maligned but inarguably helpful Office of the National Wind Farm Commissioner is being expanded to batteries and new transmission lines, which should ease development issues for both.

Under stress: Great Barrier Reef corals face multiple threats, especially from climate change. Credit: Dean Miller, GBR Legacy

Australia already has successful community involvement in large-scale renewable projects like the Sapphire Wind Farm and the Solarshare project.

But community batteries are a growing option too. Somewhere between household storage and Tesla’s shiny “big batteries”, community-scale systems can serve to link people directly with the energy transition without the requirement of personal wealth or home ownership.

The impact of community participation and ownership in energy cannot be underestimated. Denmark, a world leader in use of wind power in its grid, mandated community ownership. Germany, second only to the offshore wind-blessed Britain among the top 40 consuming countries, also leans heavily into community-owned wind.

Converting energy systems to zero-carbon options brings benefits far beyond emissions reductions. Cleaner air, cheaper energy and newer technology are all benefits that can flow to those near Australia’s new power generation systems, and well beyond those with rooftop space to spare.

Power beyond the grid

While Australia’s electricity grid is the most pressing first step on climate action, many other sectors must also be decarbonised. Transport, homes, industry, agriculture and – perhaps most significantly – Australia’s export of fossil fuels to other countries.

While public pressure, personal choice and corporate decision-making can accelerate change on domestic emissions, it is fossil fuel exports that remains the most challenging area. When the fossil fuel products extracted in Australia and sold overseas are burned, the consequent emissions far outweigh those from fuels burned within Australia.

It is odd how controversial it is to talk about emissions caused by the fossil products sold by Australia, but none of the protestations change the raw physicality of the harm to human life.

If there is little appetite to tackle domestic emissions within Australia’s government, there is outright hostility from both major parties to reducing fossil fuel exports. It is another component of Australia’s emissions that must be dealt with by citizens.

In March this year, a group of teenagers sued the Australian government for approving the expansion of a coal mine, on the grounds that it provides a product that damages the future health of young Australians. The emissions associated with the coal extracted from that expanded mine will easily wipe out the emissions avoided by all of Australia’s renewable energy over the past decade.

Young Australians have been badly marginalised in the debate, not just from federal policy but within many mainstream venues for national discourse on climate and energy.

“When it comes to climate justice, stopping the mine is part of that. We here in Australia may not be feeling the effects of climate change as much as those in Third World countries are, and they will continue to be the most affected,” says Bella Burgemeister, one of the eight young activists engaging in that legal action.

“When considering this coal mine we have to consider those around the world who will feel the effects first and worst.”

Young WA activist Bella Burgemeister is passionate about climate change.

Bella hits on the heart of the problem, when talking about what a better future might look like: a future “where children don’t have to march on the street or take our government to court, where our leaders just act like leaders and we can just act like kids”.

To pick up the slack of stagnant leaders is exhausting, and is robbing young activists of both the future and the present. What the actions of these young Australians signify is a move beyond the numbers and accounting of global climate agreements, and a more literal, physical approach to the problem.

Every time fossil fuels are left in the ground, it can be banked as a climate win grounded in physical reality. But every coal mine expansion worsens the climate problem, no matter which spreadsheets account for that harm.

What you can do to promote clean energy If you can, install solar, electrify your home (either when building a new one or retrofitting your existing one) and make your home more energy efficient (COVID-19 has shown that reduced demand turns the screws on fossil fuels in the grid like nothing else).  Investigate whether community energy is an option where you live, or consider donating to community energy groups and supporting them on social media.  Make a point of congratulating companies purchasing clean energy and let those dragging their heels know how you feel. The same goes for state and local governments. Lend your voice to campaigns against projects that extract or burn fossil fuels (or that enable either of those things).

Community participation in clean infrastructure and aggressive activism on key climate issues are emerging as the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to filling the void of federal climate action.

What will happen to our cities (and beaches) at 3 degrees of warming?

Once the government becomes truly isolated – domestically and internationally – they may have to begrudgingly accept the need to change, perhaps on the proviso that they get to revise history and pretend they were always on board. 

There remains the minuscule possibility of the government choosing to begin the big steps of decarbonisation today.

It would be miraculous, but the foundation of new energy on climate action is far more likely to be found in the hearts and minds of those with the most to lose, and the most to gain.

Links

• Scaling up Climate Action in Australia
• Net-zero emissions by 2050: leadership or climate colonialism?
• Decarbonisation Futures: Solutions, actions and benchmarks for a net zero emissions Australia
• Anjali Sharma breaking new ground in climate fight
• Independent MP Helen Haines pushes for regional profits from renewable energy boom 
• How Germany closed its coal industry without sacking a single miner
• Almost alone: Australia isolated on climate despite PM’s ambitions
• A disorienting sight to an Australian: How the UK got on with the climate change challenge
• Morrison government rules out subsidies in electric vehicle strategy

(AU) ‘Uniquely Unsuited’: Government Accused Of Stacking Climate Body With Fossil Interests

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

Climate groups have criticised the appointment of former Origin Energy chief executive Grant King to lead the Climate Change Authority, the independent body that advises the government on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In making the appointment, Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor described Mr King as a “thought leader” with 40 years of experience in energy, finance, infrastructure and sustainability who had already contributed to the government’s emissions reductions policy.

The newly appointed chairman of the Climate Change Authority, Grant King. Credit: Philip Gostelow

Also appointed to the board were Susie Smith, chief executive of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, and banker John McGee. Mr Taylor said due to his industry and policy advisory experience Mr King was “perfectly suited” to the role.

Innes Willox, chief executive of industry organisation Ai Group, said the new appointees had deep experience in climate and energy policy, and a revitalised Climate Change Authority might provide an alternative to the body proposed in Ms Steggall’s climate bill.

“But neither will work unless the government listens, trusts and responds to the advice offered,” he said.

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Barrier Reef doomed as up to 99% of coral at risk, report finds

Independent MP Zali Steggall, whose climate change bill is before a parliamentary inquiry, said the appointment was evidence that the government “continues to only listen to vested interests in fossil fuels.”

Dan Goucher of the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility said it was another example of the government “stacking” climate bodies with figures from fossil fuel industries.

“King is almost uniquely unsuited to any role at the CCA, much less its chairmanship,” he said.

“Under his leadership, Origin forcefully opposed credible climate policy. During his tenure on their boards, the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) campaigned to repeal the carbon tax, the only effective policy Australia has ever had to reduce emissions.”

The prominent marine biologist Professor Terry Hughes, known for his expertise on the Great Barrier Reef, said via Twitter that, “after trying but failing to abolish the authority when Tony Abbott was prime minister, the government had effectively achieved its goal by appointing representatives of the leading opponents of effective climate action.”

The Australia Institute’s Richie Merzian described the appointment as “grossly inappropriate”.

“As chief executive of Origin Energy Mr King was responsible for initiating Asia Pacific LNG, the largest Queensland coal seam gas LNG project which has resulted in well over 200 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions already, which will rise to well over one billion tonnes over the life of the project,” he said.

Mr King was the author of the so-called King Review, exploring sources of low-cost carbon emissions abatement.

John Connor, chief executive of The Carbon Market Institute, was less critical of the decision.

“These appointments mark the further resuscitation of an important independent institution, with the considerable carbon market and industry experience of Grant King and Susie Smith in particular,” he said.

“However, now the CCA is out of the emergency ward it needs to do the work needed of it in 2021, and join international best practice, which includes analysing and recommending policies for five-yearly carbon budgets in a transition plan towards net-zero emissions before 2050.”

Links

• Wikipedia: Grant King
• Grant King to overhaul the Climate Change Authority
• A ‘win’ for fossil fuels: green groups critical as former Origin Energy boss named chief of climate body
• Taylor slammed for “stacking gas lobbyists” on Climate Change Authority
• Former Origin and BCA head Grant King to chair ambitious renewables developer CWP
• Morrison to redirect climate funds to carbon capture and big emitters
• Taylor, department refuse to release findings of ‘expert panel’ into emissions reductions
• Angus Taylor’s secret consultation on emissions cuts stacked towards big emitters
• Taylor’s ‘expert panel’ in search of emissions reductions shuts out clean energy sector
• Coalition turns to fossil fuel lobby to lead “secret” review of climate policy
• Origin chief sides with Coalition, takes swipe at state renewable targets

(AU) A New Report Suggests Sea Creatures Are Fleeing The Equator!

The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon

Climate change is out of control! We’ll all be belly up soon

Cartoon by First Dog on the Moon

LARGE IMAGE

Links

• (AU) The Global Climate Disaster Misinfornado Will End Up Killing Way More People Than The Texas Ice Storms
• (AU) 2020 Was A Poisonous Sea Snake Lurking In The Foam-Covered, Storm-Lashed Beaches Of A Year 
• (AU) If You Think Covid Is Bad, Wait Until You Hear About The Climate Crisis
• (AU) It's Your Regular Arctic Death-Spiral Update With Brenda The Civil Disobedience Penguin
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(USA) Intelligence Forecast Sees A Post-Coronavirus World Upended By Climate Change And Splintering Societies

Washington Post - Shane Harris

Student activists carry posters and shout slogans as they march against climate change in New Delhi on March 19. (Altaf Qadri/AP)

U.S. intelligence officials have little comfort to offer a pandemic-weary planet about where the world is heading in the next 20 years.

Short answer: It looks pretty bleak.

On Thursday, the National Intelligence Council, a center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that creates strategic forecasts and estimates, often based on material gathered by U.S. spy agencies, released its quadrennial “Global Trends” report.

Looking over the time horizon, it finds a world unsettled by the coronavirus pandemic, the ravages of climate change — which will propel mass migration — and a widening gap between what people demand from their leaders and what they can actually deliver.

The intelligence community has long warned policymakers and the public that pandemic disease could profoundly reshape global politics and U.S. national security.

The authors of the report, which does not represent official U.S. policy, describe the pandemic as a preview of crises to come.

It has been a globally destabilizing event — the council called it “the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II — that “has reminded the world of its fragility” and “shaken long-held assumptions” about how well governments and institutions could respond to a catastrophe.

At the same time, the pandemic accelerated and exacerbated social and economic fissures that had already emerged. And it underscored the risks from “more and cascading global challenges, ranging from disease to climate change to the disruptions from new technologies and financial crises,” the authors write.

In language that will resonate with just about anyone who has tread water in the past year, the authors write of a “looming disequilibrium between existing and future challenges and the ability of institutions and systems to respond.”

Within societies, fragmentation is increasing — political, cultural, economic — and “large segments of the global population are becoming wary of institutions and governments that they see as unwilling or unable to address their needs,” the report says.

The effects of the pandemic will linger, and could shape future generations’ expectations of their governments, particularly as a warming world leads to new human conflicts, including, in the most dire scenario, global food shortages that spawn mass violence.

Global power was contested long before the pandemic, and those trends haven’t abated.

The report sees the international stage as largely being shaped by a rivalry between China and the United States, along with its allies. No single state is poised to become the dominant global force, the authors write. And competing powers will jockey for position, leading to “a more conflict-prone and volatile geopolitical environment.”

Technology, with all its potential to boost economies and enhance communication, also may aggravate political tension — as it already has.

People “are likely to gravitate to information silos of people who share similar views, reinforcing beliefs and understanding of the truth,” the report concludes.

Prediction is an inherently risky business, and intelligence practitioners are quick to emphasize that they can’t see the future. But the National Intelligence Council imagines five scenarios on a kind of sliding scale that may help tell us where the world is turning as we approach 2040.

On the rosiest end, a “Renaissance of democracies” ushers in a new era of U.S. global leadership, in which economic growth and technological achievements offer solutions to the world’s biggest problems and Russia and China are largely left in the dust, authoritarian vestiges whose brightest scientists and entrepreneurs have fled to the United States and Europe.

At the dark end of the future is “tragedy and mobilization,” when the United States is no longer the dominant player, and a global environmental catastrophe prompts food shortages and a “bottom-up” revolution, with younger people, scarred by their leaders’ failures during the coronavirus pandemic, embracing policies to repair the climate and tackle long-standing social inequality.

In this scenario, a European Union dominated by green parties works with the United Nations to expand international aid and focus on sustainability, and China joins the effort in part to quell domestic unrest in its cities affected by famine.

In between those extremes, the report imagines three other possibilities: China becomes a leading state but not globally dominant; the United States and China prosper and compete as the two major powers; and globalization fails to create a single source of influence, and the world more or less devolves into competing blocs, preoccupied with threats to their prosperity and security.

The present has a lot of say over the future. And there, the authors find reason for alarm.

“The international system — including the organizations, alliances, rules, and norms — is poorly set up to address the compounding global challenges facing populations,” the authors write.

But the pandemic may offer lessons on how not to repeat recent history. The authors note that although European countries restricted travel and exports of medical supplies early in the crisis, the European Union has now rallied around an economic rescue package. That “could bolster the European integration projecting going forward.”

“Covid-19 could also lead to redirection of national budgets toward pandemic response and economic recovery,” they add, “diverting funds from defense expenditures, foreign aid, and infrastructure programs in some countries, at least in the near term.”

But overall, the pandemic leaves the authors with more questions than answers — and humbled.

“As researchers and analysts, we must be ever vigilant, asking better questions, frequently challenging our assumptions, checking our biases, and looking for weak signals of change,” they write.

Their work is not all doomsaying. The forces shaping the world “are not fixed in perpetuity,” the authors say. Countries that exploit technology and planning, particularly those that plan ahead for the seemingly inevitable consequences of climate change, will be poised to best manage the crisis.

And countries that harness artificial intelligence could boost productivity and expand their economies in ways that let government deliver more services, reduce debt and help cover the costs of caring for aging populations.

Ultimately, the societies that succeed will be those that can adapt to change, but also forge social consensus around what should be done, the authors write. In a splintering world, that may be the hardest scenario to imagine.

Links

• Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios
• A More Contested World: A Publication Of The National Intelligence Council (pdf)
• To prepare for the next pandemic, the U.S. needs to change its national security priorities, experts say
• Climate change is a major threat to stability, spy agencies say
• (AU) Climate and  Policy Centre Security
• (AU) The rapidly emerging crisis on our doorstep 
• Study calls for urgent climate change action to secure global food supply