28/07/2021

(AU ABC) Human Rights Issue Or 'Green Lawfare'? Citizens Take To The Courts To Fight Climate Change

ABC Radio National - Antony Funnell, Future Tense

More than 17,000 co-plaintiffs successfully brought a case against oil producer Shell in the Netherlands. (Getty: Peter Boer/Bloomberg)
They don't fit the activist stereotype — some are farmers, some are from the suburbs, some are retired, and some are still going to school.

Melbourne University's Jacqueline Peel calls them "next generation" litigants, ordinary citizens tired of political promises and eager to hold governments and companies to account.

Many see climate change as a human rights issue and they're being assisted in their legal ambitions by a coterie of academics, lawyers and even judges.

But there are also critics, who warn of "green lawfare" judicial activism and a threat to the democratic ideal of the separation of powers: that governments, not the courts, should determine national policy.

Climate change impacts everyone Environmental law expert, Jacqueline McGlade, says the judicial landscape around climate change is changing rapidly.

"In the last two or three years we've doubled the number of cases that have been brought forward."

And those cases are being heard in court rooms across the globe from the United States to Pakistan to Australia, focused not just on current environmental threats, but on the risks to future generations, she says.

"Everybody knows that climate is going to impact everyone .... [it will] impact our fundamental human rights to life, to water, to food and so on, and that's how it is connected."

As an example, Professor McGlade nominates a case brought before Brazil's highest court in September 2020.

Amazon deforestation rises
to 12-year record

"The government was failing to properly administer the Amazon Fund, the mechanism that was set up to combat deforestation.

"The Supreme Court accepted that lawsuit last year and directed the government to actually provide information on why it wasn't managing the fund properly."

Then in March, the Federal Court of Australia ordered that Environment Minister, Sussan Ley, had a duty of care to protect young people from "emissions of carbon dioxide into Earth's environment".

The case was brought against the minister by eight students and a nun and involved plans to expand a Northern NSW coal mine.

The group who bought a case against the Environment Minister say they were motivated by their passion for climate justice. (ABC News: Brendan Esposito)
A multinational in the dock The most internationally significant judicial decision of recent times occurred in a District Court in the Netherlands in May. It involved the giant multinational gas and oil producer Shell on the one side, and more than 17,000 co-plaintiffs on the other.

"It was about Shell's accountability for the emissions it releases into the atmosphere and making sure that it was making appropriate reductions in those emissions over time," says Professor Peel, who believes the decision could set a global precedent.

"We've seen these kinds of actions against governments to hold them accountable for their emissions reduction targets [but] this was the first case in the world where you are seeing this kind of action being brought against a company."

The case has pricked the attention of industry across the world, she says.

"It's often said in relation to litigation that you probably only need one successful case to change the atmosphere in a boardroom.

"It puts companies on notice that they could be sued on similar grounds and could be held liable for the damages associated with the climate harms caused by their emissions."

A 'redistribution of power' Australian lawyer David Morris, from the non-profit legal service the Environmental Defenders Office, is also seeing the rapid growth in climate change-related lawsuits, but he says many litigants struggle to understand and navigate judicial processes.

He works directly with individuals and communities to help them frame and prosecute their cases. He describes it as a "redistribution of power".

 "It really goes to the integrity of our system, the idea that a small community group can stand up against the might of a major mining company or a government department and then win in court.

"It really ensures the integrity of our processes too. It ensures that when ministers are making important decisions which might have consequences over many decades, indeed well into the future, that they follow proper process."

Mr Morris says connection with country is increasingly being used as a litigation tool.

"Local community groups are often motivated by a deep love of place and a desire not to see that place destroyed.

"We see it increasingly in the work we do with traditional owners, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, the deep connections that those people have to country and the impacts that they see from particular projects but also that they see from the growing impacts of climate change."

Push back Yet official antipathy toward climate-related litigation is also on the rise.

Ms Ley has appealed the recent Federal Court ruling made against her, arguing that she doesn't have a duty of care to protect Australian children from climate harm.

Suing for change on climate
She and others in the Morrison government have repeatedly accused environmental organisations of waging "lawfare" against fossil fuel companies.

"We've often seen quite adverse reactions from politicians to a lot of the climate litigation," says Professor Peel, "partly because it does reflect badly on the progress that politicians are making or not making in dealing with the challenge."

She says some in the judiciary are also cautious about hearing climate-related cases.

"There is a long-running debate in the legal sphere about what the role of judges should be, whether they should have a strong role in developing the law and taking it forward to address new circumstances and challenges. Or whether those functions should be best left with policymakers and parliaments."

But she says the framing of many "next generation" cases can be persuasive.

"You're seeing judges more willing often to go into that space because they think of it as an issue of justice where the law has a particular role to play.

David Estrin from the International Bar Association rejects any notion of "judicial activism".

While governments have a primary role in determining a nation's environmental laws, he argues, courts play an essential role in holding them to account when their actions fail to remain within the limits of the law.

"This mandate to the courts to offer legal protection, even against the government, is an essential component of a democratic state under the rule of law," he says, quoting a 2019 ruling by the Netherlands Supreme Court.

Professor Peel argues a further increase in litigation is inevitable as long as there remains a perception that governments and companies aren't moving fast enough on climate change or aren't adhering to their own commitments.

And David Morris predicts the next decade will see a significant shift in thinking.

"You will start to see an evolution of the jurisprudence in these spaces, so an evolution of the judges' thinking," he says, "or of the court's findings in respect of some of these cases, which to date have been novel." 

"And what you'll see is a growing body of knowledge, a growing body of reasoning that starts to place very real pressure on companies and governments who fail to act swiftly."

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(Reuters) Extreme Weather Renews Focus On Climate Change As Scientists Update Forecasts

Reuters - 
A man holding a baby wades through a flooded road following heavy rainfall in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China July 22, 2021. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo
As scientists gather online to finalize a long-awaited update on global climate research, recent extreme weather events across the globe highlight the need for more research on how it will play out, especially locally.

The list of extremes in just the last few weeks has been startling: Unprecedented rains followed by deadly flooding in central China and Europe. Temperatures of 120 Fahrenheit (49 Celsius) in Canada, and tropical heat in Finland and Ireland. The Siberian tundra ablaze. Monstrous U.S. wildfires, along with record drought across the U.S. West and parts of Brazil.

"Global warming was well projected, but now you see it with your own eyes," said Corinne Le Quere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia.

Scientists had long predicted such extremes were likely. But many are surprised by so many happening so fast – with the global atmosphere 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than the preindustrial average. The Paris Agreement on climate change calls for keeping warming to within 1.5 degrees.

Residents are silhouetted as they watch the Blue Ridge Fire burning in Yorba Linda, California, U.S. October 26, 2020. REUTERS/Ringo Chiu/File Photo

"It's not so much that climate change itself is proceeding faster than expected -- the warming is right in line with model predictions from decades ago," said climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. "Rather, it's the fact that some of the impacts are greater than scientists predicted."

That suggests that climate modeling may have been underestimating the "the potential for the dramatic rise in persistent weather extremes," Mann said.

Over the next two weeks, top scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will finalize the first installment of its sixth Assessment Report, which will update the established science around greenhouse gas emissions and projections for future warming and its impacts. Government representatives are also taking part in the virtual two-week meeting.

The report will expand on the last such IPCC report in 2013 by focusing more on extreme weather and regional impacts.

A lone boat sits perched on a mound near Hensley Lake as soaring temperatures and drought continue to affect livestock and water supplies in Madera, California, U.S. July 14, 2021. Picture taken with a drone. REUTERS/David Swanson/File Photo

"As I speak, it is clear that extreme weather is the new normal. From Germany to China to Canada or the United States: wildfires, floods, extreme heat waves. It is an ever growing tragic list," said Joyce Msuya, Deputy Executive Director of the U.N. Environment Programme, during the event's opening ceremony on Monday.

"2021 must mark the beginning of the era of action, and it must be the year where science reigns supreme," she said.

When released on Aug. 9, the report will likely serve as a guide for governments in crafting policies around the environment, greenhouse gas emissions, infrastructure and public services. The report's release was postponed several months due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Lingering unknowns

While climate modeling has evolved over decades to where scientists have high confidence in their projections, there are still uncertainties in how climate change will manifest -- particularly at a local scale. Answering these questions could take many more years.

The June heat wave that killed hundreds in Canada would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change, scientists from the World Weather Attribution network determined.

But those temperatures -- as much as 4.6 degrees Celsius higher than the previous record in some places -- might also have resulted from new atmospheric changes that are not yet captured by climate models.

"In the climate models, this does look like a freak event," said the study's co-author Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford. "The climate models do simulate such rare events and don't suggest there is something else going on, but of course that could mean the models are just not correct. This is really something we and the scientific community need to look into."

A child looks on as water floods through a fence in Wessem, Netherlands, July 16, 2021. REUTERS/Eva Plevier/File Photo
One area of mystery is how the Earth's four main jet streams respond to shifting temperatures.

The jet streams are fast-flowing air currents that circle the globe -- near the poles and the tropics -- driving many weather patterns. They are fueled by temperature variations.

Some studies have suggested climate change may be slowing down parts of the northern polar jet stream, especially during the summer.

That can cause heat waves by trapping heat under high-pressure air, as seen in Canada in June, or it can stall storms for longer in one place, potentially causing flooding.

A key research challenge is the fact that extreme events are, by definition, rare events so there is less data.

There is "tantalizing evidence" that the warming has introduced new, unexpected factors that have amplified climate change impacts even further than previously understood, but more research is needed, said Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology.

"From my perspective, the jury is still out on that," he said. "Whichever the answer is, the policy prescription is the same. We need to get ourselves off of CO2 emissions as soon as is practical."

More immediately, though, countries need to realize that extreme events are here to stay, even if the world can rapidly reduce emissions, scientists say.

"There's almost no strategy for adapting to a changing climate," Le Quere said. "Governments are not prepared."

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(USA NYT) Climate Crisis Turns World’s Subways Into Flood Zones

New York Times - Hiroko Tabuchi | John Schwartz

Swift, deadly flooding in China this week inundated a network that wasn’t even a decade old, highlighting the risks faced by cities globally.

 The heaviest rainfall on record in parts of central China triggered heavy flooding. Rescue workers assisted people trapped in buses, houses, and buildings. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images  1m19s

Terrified passengers trapped in flooded subway cars in Zhengzhou, China. Water cascading down stairways into the London Underground. A woman wading through murky, waist-deep water to reach a New York City subway platform.

Subway systems around the world are struggling to adapt to an era of extreme weather brought on by climate change. Their designs, many based on the expectations of another era, are being overwhelmed, and investment in upgrades could be squeezed by a drop in ridership brought on by the pandemic.

“It’s scary,” said Sarah Kaufman, associate director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University. “The challenge is, how can we get ready for the next storm, which was supposed to be 100 years away,” she said, “but could happen tomorrow?”

Public transportation plays a critical role in reducing travel by car in big cities, thus reining in the emissions from automobiles that contribute to global warming. If commuters become spooked by images of inundated stations and start shunning subways for private cars, transportation experts say it could have major implications for urban air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Some networks, such as London’s or New York’s, were designed and built starting more than a century ago. While a few, like Tokyo’s, have managed to shore up their flooding defenses, the crisis in China this week shows that even some of the world’s newest systems (Zhengzhou’s system isn’t even a decade old) can also be overwhelmed.

Retrofitting subways against flooding is “an enormous undertaking,” said Robert Puentes, chief executive of the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonprofit think tank with a focus on improving transportation policy. “But when you compare it to the cost of doing nothing, it starts to make much more sense,” he said. “The cost of doing nothing is much more expensive.”

Adie Tomer, a Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution, said subways and rail systems help to fight sprawl and reduce the amount of energy people use. “Subways and fixed rail are part of our climate solution,” he said.

Credit...Merakizz, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The recent flooding is yet another example of the kind of extreme weather that is consistent with changing climate around the world.

Just days before the China subway nightmare, floods in Germany killed some 160 people. Major heat waves have brought misery to Scandinavia, Siberia and the Pacific Northwest in the United States. Wildfires in the American West and Canada sent smoke across the continent this past week and triggered health alerts in cities like Toronto, Philadelphia and New York City, giving the sun an eerie reddish tinge.

Flash floods have inundated roads and highways in recent weeks, as well. The collapse of a portion of California’s Highway 1 into the Pacific Ocean after heavy rains this year was a reminder of the fragility of the nation’s roads.

But more intense flooding poses a particular challenge to aging subway systems in some of the world’s largest cities.

In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has invested $2.6 billion in resiliency projects since Hurricane Sandy swamped the city’s subway system in 2012, including fortifying 3,500 subway vents, staircases and elevator shafts against flooding. Even on a dry day, a network of pumps pours out about 14 million gallons, mainly groundwater, from the system. Still, flash flooding this month showed that the system remains vulnerable.

“It’s a challenge trying to work within the constraints of a city with aging infrastructure, along with an economy recovering from a pandemic,” said Vincent Lee, associate principal and technical director of water for Arup, an engineering firm that helped upgrade eight subway stations and other facilities in New York after the 2012 storm.

Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

London’s sprawling Underground faces similar challenges.

“A lot of London’s drainage system is from the Victorian Era,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London. And that has a direct impact on the city’s Underground system. “It’s simply not capable of dealing at the moment with the increase in heavy rainfall that we’re experiencing as a result of climate change.”

Meanwhile, the crisis in China this week shows that even some of the world’s newest systems can also be overwhelmed. As Robert E. Paaswell, a professor of civil engineering at City College of New York, put it: “Subways are going to flood. They’re going to flood because they are below ground.”

To help understand how underground flooding works, Taisuke Ishigaki, a researcher at the Department of Civil Engineering at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan, built a diorama of a city with a bustling subway system, then unleashed a deluge equivalent to about 11 inches of rain in a single day.

Within minutes, floodwaters breached several subway entrances and started to gush down the stairs. Just 15 minutes later, the diorama’s platform was under 8 feet of water — a sequence of events Dr. Ishigaki was horrified to see unfold in real life in Zhengzhou this week. There, floodwaters quickly overwhelmed passengers still standing in subway cars. At least 25 people died in and around the city, including 12 in the subway. .

Dr. Ishigaki’s research now informs a flood monitoring system in use by Osaka’s sprawling underground network, where special cameras monitor aboveground flooding during heavy rainfall.

Water above a certain danger level activates emergency protocols, where the most vulnerable entrances are sealed off (some can be closed in less than a minute) while passengers are promptly evacuated from the underground via other exits.

Japan has made other investments in its flooding infrastructure, like cavernous underground cisterns and flood gates at subway entrances. Last year, the private rail operator Tokyu, with Japanese government support, completed a huge cistern to capture and divert up to 4,000 tons of floodwater runoff at Shibuya station in Tokyo, a major hub.

Still, if there is a major breach of the many rivers that run through Japanese cities, “even these defenses won’t be enough,” Dr. Ishigaki said.

Image Credit...Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images



Credit... Robert Evans/Alamy
Mass transit advocates in the United States are calling for pandemic relief funds to be put toward public transportation. “The scale of the problems has become bigger than what our cities and states can address,” said Betsy Plum, executive director of the Riders Alliance, an advocacy group for subway and bus riders.

Some experts suggest another approach. With more extreme flooding down the line, protecting subways all of the time will be impossible, they say.

Instead, investment is needed in buses and bike lanes that can serve as alternative modes of public transportation when subways are flooded. Natural defenses could also provide relief. Rotterdam in the Netherlands has grown plants along its tramways, enabling rainwater to be soaked up by the soil, and reducing heat.

“During the pandemic you saw the way people got around on their bicycles, the most resilient, least disruptive, low cost, low carbon mode of transit,” said Anjali Mahendra, director of research at the World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, a Washington-based think tank. “We really need to do much more with connecting parts of cities and neighborhoods with these bicycle corridors that can be used to get around.”

Some experts question why public transportation needs to be underground in the first place and say that public transit should reclaim the street. Street-level light rail, bus systems and bicycle lanes aren’t just less exposed to flooding, they are also cheaper to build and easier to access, said Bernardo Baranda Sepúlveda, a Mexico City-based researcher at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, a nonprofit organization.

“We have this inertia from the last century to give so much of the available space above ground to cars,” he said. “But one bus lane carries more people than three lanes of cars.”

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27/07/2021

(The Guardian) Plans Of Four G20 States Are Threat To Global Climate Pledge, Warn Scientists

The Guardian -  |  | 

‘Disastrous’ energy policies of China, Russia, Brazil and Australia could stoke 5C rise in temperatures if adopted by the rest of the world

Massive wildfires have gripped the US. Photograph: Josh Edelson/Getty

2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26)
Glasgow November
Quick Guide

22-23 July
G20 ministerial meeting, Naples
Energy and climate ministers of G20 countries meet under Italy’s presidency of the G20 to discuss progress on decarbonisation. The International Energy Agency will present its forecast that the world’s annual carbon dioxide output will reach a record high in 2023 because governments have invested only 2% of the global rescue funds for Covid-19 into clean energy.

25-26 July
COP26 ministerial meeting
Alok Sharma, the UK president of the COP26 talks, has invited ministers from more than 40 countries to discuss pathways to an agreement at COP26, in an effort to resolve some of the outstanding issues. Patricia Espinosa, UN climate chief, will issue a plea to governments to come up with strong national plans for cutting emissions this decade.

9 August
Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change
The world’s authority on climate science will publish the first part of its next major comprehensive assessment. It is expected to heighten scientific warnings that the world could be headed for a series of “tipping points” that will lead to catastrophic and irreversible heating, with devastating consequences if greenhouse gas emissions are not urgently curbed.

14-30 September
UN general assembly
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres will make the climate crisis and the road to COP26 a key priority for the annual UN meeting. This could be the moment when China comes forward with its plans for COP26. President Xi Jinping surprised the world when he used last year’s UNGA to announce a net zero target for 2060. He may decide to set out a new target for China’s 2030 emissions.

30-31 October
G20
Italy is co-host of COP26 alongside the UK, and holds the revolving presidency of the G20 group of the world’s leading economies, including industrialised and developing countries. All eyes will be on the leaders of the G20 countries in a last-ditch attempt to forge consensus ahead of Glasgow.

1 November
COP26 begins in Glasgow
A key group of leading G20 nations is committed to climate targets that would lead to disastrous global warming, scientists have warned.

They say China, Russia, Brazil and Australia all have energy policies associated with 5C rises in atmospheric temperatures, a heating hike that would bring devastation to much of the planet.

The analysis, by the peer-reviewed group Paris Equity Check, raises serious worries about the prospects of key climate agreements being achieved at the COP26 summit in Glasgow in three months.

The conference – rated as one of the most important climate summits ever staged – will attempt to hammer out policies to hold global heating to 1.5C by agreeing on a global policy for ending net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

The EU and UK have outlined emission pledges that could bring the world close to these aspirations.

However, those of China, Russia, Brazil and Australia – which remain reliant on continued fossil-fuel burning – would trigger temperature rises of 5C if followed by the rest of the world.

This dramatic discrepancy reveals a deep division over the energy and environment policies of the world’s richest nations.

“Without more ambition from China, Brazil, Russia and Australia, COP26 will fail to deliver the future our planet needs,” warned Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF.

The stark difference between the climate plans of different G20 nations – who together are responsible for 85% of all global carbon emissions – was underlined last week in Naples, when a meeting of member states’ energy and environment ministers ended with the group failing to agree on a package of commitments to tackle climate change.

“The G20 is failing to deliver,” said the online activist network Avaaz.

The G20 meeting had been viewed as a critically important staging post leading up to COP26 and its failure to find common ground underlines the crucial differences that divide nations in the group and indicate it is not going to be easy to secure a meaningful accord in Scotland.

This point was backed by Yann Robiou du Pont, the lead researcher for the Paris Equity Tracker analysis.

“The research underlines what many of us fear: major economies are simply not doing enough to tackle the climate crisis and, in many cases, G20 countries are leaving us on track [for] a world of more heatwaves, flooding and extreme weather events.”

A world that would be 5C hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution, when fossil-fuel burning began in earnest, would be one in which a quarter of the global population would face extreme drought for at least one month a year; rainforests would be destroyed; and melting ice sheets would result in dangerous sea-level rises.

In addition, loss of reflective ice from the poles could cause oceans to absorb more solar radiation, while melting permafrost in Siberia and other regions would release plumes of methane, another pernicious greenhouse gas. Inevitably, temperatures would soar even further.

By contrast, scientists say that if temperature rises can be kept below 1.5C, then the worst impacts of climate change could be prevented – though they also point out that temperatures have already risen 1.2C, leaving the world facing very tight margins to avoid the worst impacts of global warming over the next 30 years.

The extent of the climate crisis has also been highlighted this month with extreme weather events causing devastation across the world: deadly floods have swept through Germany, Belgium and China, while massive wildfires have gripped the US and Siberia. Global warming has been implicated in every case.

“Ahead of COP26, we now need to see action and we owe it to the most vulnerable countries to rally together. Failure to deliver on our commitments is not an option and we must not be found wanting,” said Alok Sharma, the former UK business secretary who is now president of COP26.

Sharma last week was strongly critical of countries such as “big emitters” Russia and China who must do more to tackle climate change, he warned.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries committed to submit new climate plans every five years with a goal to limit global warming to well below 2C, aiming at 1.5C, compared to pre-industrial levels. However, earlier this year, the United Nations issued a “red alert” over current climate plans, warning they were “nowhere close” to meeting the Paris goals.

The International Energy Agency recently said that if the world was to stay within 1.5C of warming, all further development and exploration of new fossil fuel sources should cease from this year.

President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, told the Observer that the US was carefully considering the implications of the IEA report. “I know that people are very heavily aware of the need to shift our programmes and policy [in a way that] really robustly embraces that,” he said.

“Everybody in the world need to be working on this. We need to think differently. We should be pushing hard in a different direction [from fossil fuels].”

He said Biden was also working to ensure the US and China were aligned on the need to stay within 1.5C.

“The first thing [Biden] hopes about China is that China recognises the reality of where we all are, and where China is, and what we need to do to get this job done. China is a global leader with a special responsibility to make sure we are all meeting [climate goals]. We want to find common ground.”

He said there were no plans for a US-China summit, such as President Barack Obama conducted with China’s President Xi Jinping ahead of the Paris conference, but said such a meeting was “not out of the question”.

He added: “A lot of conversations with China have not yet arrived at agreement.”

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(AU SMH) Renewables Drive Australian Emissions Lower As Wind Records Blown Away

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions extended their declines into the first three months of 2021, driven lower by a roaring renewable energy sector that set fresh records during this past windy weekend.

According to independent consultants Ndevr, modelling shows national emissions totalled 119.77 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (MT CO2-e) in the March quarter. That was 2.9 million tonnes lower than the previous three months, and 7.5 million tonnes – or almost 6 per cent – down from a year earlier.

Blowing up a storm: record levels of wind energy generation this week in Australia. The rise of renewables is delivering the bulk of emissions reductions in Australia. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

The figures, which precede official numbers due by August 31, show renewable sources of electricity such as wind, solar and hydro exceeded 30 per cent of the National Electricity Market (NEM) in the March quarter.

The increase alone shaved off 1.4 MT CO-e from the nation’s emissions tally, with the total now below 40 MT CO-e, or about a third of the total.

“Renewables are the big driver,” Matt Drum, Ndevr’s managing director, said. “Transport also dropped off, and remains relatively low because of COVID”, especially the aviation sector.

Increasing renewable generation
and reducing electricity emissions
 Source: Ndevr Environmental
EmissionsAustralian emissions fall again
due to renewables and COVID-19
The rising proportion of electricity generated by renewables has more than compensated for the trend towards higher emissions from sectors such as heavy industry, particularly the LNG sector. 

Large polluters, such as Orica, are showing signs of “serious investment” in large-scale emissions reduction activity that should nudge that sector lower too. “It’s not just noise and fluff. We’re starting to see it on the ground,” Mr Drum said.

Australia’s emissions trajectory is likely to come in for closer scrutiny ahead of the global climate summit planned for Glasgow in November.

The Morrison government has so far resisted signing up to a goal of carbon neutrality – where any greenhouse emissions are nullified by offsets elsewhere – by 2050.

Australia will also likely come under pressure to raise its near-term ambition of cutting 2005-level pollution by 26-28 per cent by 2030.

Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor was approached for comment on Ndevr’s projections.

Electricity emissions decrease while transport
and stationary emissions trend upwards
Source: Ndevr Environmental



The struggling coal-fired power sector, beset by problems such as an explosion at a plant in Queensland in May and more recent floods in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, should also extend the slide in emissions from the power sector, Mr Drum said.

In another sign of renewables’ advance, wind energy smashed generation records three times in less than a week, according to Dylan McConnell, an energy expert at the University of Melbourne.

Last Tuesday, wind farms generated 5.899 gigawatts for the NEM, a record that endured until Saturday evening when generation exceeded 6GW for the first time, climbing to 6.12GW.

That peak, though, lasted barely 24 hours, with wind turbines notching a fresh record of 6.428GW at 8.05pm (AEST) on Sunday evening.
 All-up renewables were providing about 14GW of power to the NEM during Sunday, meeting more than half the demand. “[It’s] not quite a record, but getting close,” Dr McConnell said.

That power came in handy after Alinta’s Loy Yang B tripped on Saturday night, temporarily knocking 580-megawatts of capacity out.

The renewables sector, meanwhile, will launch on Monday its first national campaign to draw attention to its expansion with an eye to the next federal election.

Photovoltaic modules ready to be installed at a solar farm on the outskirts of Gunnedah in northern NSW. Credit: Bloomberg


Future Power
What's a 'just transition' and can you switch
to green energy without sacking coal workers?
The Renewable Energy Is Here Now campaign aims to highlight the contribution already made by the sector but also the potential for much larger emissions reductions including supplying 100 per cent of power.

“We know most Australians support renewable energy, but the climate debate has meant that a minority of loud voices have misled the public, resulting in some Australians feeling uncertain about a future powered by clean energy,” Kane Thornton, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, said.

“This campaign is about ensuring all Australians are certain about the facts and feel part of the exciting transition already taking place.”

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(AU ABC) How The Carbon Tax Has Come Back To Haunt The Australian Government

ABC - Ian Verrender

The ill-fated Australian carbon tax lasted just two years but data suggests it had an immediate impact. (AAP: Mick Tsikas)
It was an off-the-cuff comment after a few drinks, delivered with a belly laugh from a then-senior minister a few years back.

"The difference between Labor's policy and ours is that Julia Gillard introduced a scheme where big polluters paid Australian taxpayers. Tony changed it so that Australian taxpayers pay big polluters," the minister said.

That policy, of course, was the carbon tax.
10 years of climate policy inertia

Introduced in 2012 by the Gillard government, it was dumped by the Abbott government as soon as it came to power and replaced with a more than $3 billion taxpayer subsidy, doled out to applicants that promised to cut carbon emissions.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

But the joke now is on us and the tragedy is that it will cost us dearly.

Australian businesses are about to be whacked with a carbon tax.

Not by Canberra, but by Brussels and Washington with the increasing possibility that Ottawa, Tokyo and even London may follow suit, free trade agreements aside.

In the third turn of the wheel, Australian polluters will end up paying foreign taxpayers just for the privilege of exporting their goods.

It's a development that will hurt profits, cost jobs, and hit our export volumes and ultimately the tax take of our own government.

En masse, much of the developed world has begun mulling the idea of putting a price on carbon emissions.

They've also woken to the idea that there's no point introducing a carbon price at home if renegades like Australia don't follow suit.

So, to level the field, goods from any country without a carbon price, such as Australia, will be hit with a carbon tax.

Where did this come from?

It's all happened within the space of a few weeks.

One minute, the European Union was announcing its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the next, the United States began making similar noises.

Trade Minister Dan Tehan was aghast.

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"Australia is very concerned that the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is just a new form of protectionism that will undermine global free trade and impact Australian exporters and jobs," he said.

The only problem with that argument is that Australia explored the very same option back in 2012 during the carbon tax's brief life.

It was recognised then that corporations may simply shift production offshore to avoid the impost.

Oddly, despite the rapid deterioration in relations between Canberra and Beijing, our largest trading partner may end up as one of our biggest allies in this brewing storm.

For while Beijing just last Friday launched the world's largest carbon market, many believe that at best it will be ineffective and, at worst, a sham.

Its national carbon market has far too many credits, so its carbon price is way too low — around one 10th the EU carbon price.

Not only that, big energy users like steel are excluded.

Unless prices rise dramatically, there is little likelihood of any shift in behaviour or impact on emissions and the fear is that the entire strategy is little more than an artifice.

Why price carbon anyway?

Many decisions in our life come down to price.

Even when money isn't involved, we often calculate whether the benefits of embarking on a certain course of action outweigh the potential costs.

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When it comes to public policy, we learned long ago that if you want to change behaviour, say to limit the health impact of smoking, one of the easiest ways to do that is to tax goods and services — in the case of smoking, tobacco.

The higher the tax, the fewer individuals will smoke, and the less likely people will take up smoking at all.

That has a double impact on government finances.

The government brings in more revenue, at least until people give up.

More importantly, the health system costs less to run, as a harmful health factor is eliminated.

In the early 1980s, when scientists first twigged that carbon emissions were harming the environment, a group of American economists from Harvard argued that climate change was a cost that was not being recognised.

Not only was it barely visible, the real damage was only likely to be seen in generations to come, way beyond the normal investment horizon.

The fossil fuel industry railed against the proposal of a carbon tax in the US. (AP: Ben Margot/File)
Back then, they argued that a tax on carbon emissions from all sources was the most efficient way to deal with the problem and, for a while, Washington was in agreement.

It didn't take long, however, for the fossil fuel industry to take up arms against the proposal.

That's when Republicans shifted stance.

Instead of a tax, they preferred a complex market-based trading system that put a price on carbon.

The end result is that the US has never introduced a national system although various US states have carbon prices.

That's all about to change.

Here at home, there was agreement on both sides of the House that a carbon price was needed.

In 1997, then-prime minister John Howard grappled with ways to deal with carbon emissions but took almost a decade before he finally announced an emissions trading scheme in 2006.

Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007 on a platform of addressing climate change but his emissions trading scheme initiative disintegrated under the weight of political bickering between his government, the Coalition and the Greens.

From then on, climate change became toxic as then-opposition leader Tony Abbott flicked the switch from science to ideology.

Does a carbon tax work?

There's an easy answer to that.

The ill-fated Australian carbon tax lasted just two years.

But as the graph below indicates, it had an immediate impact.

Annual CO2 emissions in Australia between 1900 and 2019.
(Supplied: Global Carbon Project; Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre)

Emissions dropped almost immediately after it was introduced as businesses moved to technologies that emitted less.

That price signal had an impact.

When it was dumped in 2014, carbon emissions began to rise again almost immediately.

Emissions have since levelled, possibly because of the shutdowns of some large coal-fired power stations during the past two years.

While economists believe carbon taxes are the preferred way to price emissions, politically they've been a hard sell.

No-one likes paying more tax.

According to the World Bank, about 45 countries are covered by a carbon price but few use a carbon tax.

Even the Gillard government's carbon tax was due to revert to a market-priced trading system similar to Europe's.

There's no such reluctance, however, when it comes to whacking a tax on foreigners, as we are about to discover.

What industries will be affected by the border taxes?

Mark Carney, the former head of the Bank of Canada and more recently the Bank of England, delivered a blunt assessment of our prospects last week at a conference organised by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors.

Now the United Nations special envoy on climate change and finance, Mr Carney said the world was trending towards enforcing climate policy through trade action and Australia needed to ramp up its response.

The EU legislation is still in a rough form but will include aluminium, iron, steel, cement, natural gas, oil and coal.

The immediate impact of the carbon border taxes is unlikely to inflict major damage on Australia.

Japan plans to reduce its coal imports and the EU will tax coal higher. (Flickr: eyeweed)
Europe takes just 3 per cent of our total exports and, while our sales to the US are substantially higher, they're not carbon intensive.

The biggest problem will arise if the US imposes carbon border taxes on Chinese made goods.

As our biggest export destination, particularly for iron ore, any action against the Middle Kingdom will have an immediate impact on us.

Given the rapidly escalating tensions between the superpowers, that is highly likely.

Then there is our second biggest trading partner.

Japan late last week announced it was radically revising its emissions target ambitions and announced an accelerated plan to decrease imports of coal and LNG, two of our biggest exports.

The federal government has long been opposed to any form of carbon pricing and has yet to even commit to net zero emissions by 2050.

But the events of the past few weeks may force its hand.

Otherwise, it risks being caught on the wrong side of history at great cost to the economy.

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