(AU RMIT ABC Fact Check) Angus Taylor Says The Carbon Tax Destroyed One In Eight Manufacturing Jobs. Is He Correct?

RMIT ABC Fact Check - Principal researcher: David Campbell

Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor says one in eight manufacturing jobs were destroyed when the carbon tax was introduced. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

The claim

As climate change shapes up as an election battleground, the Coalition has accused Labor of trashing the economy when last in government with its 2012 climate policy, the carbon tax.

Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor has led the charge, claiming that the policy wiped out roughly 12 per cent of Australia's manufacturing workforce.

"When the carbon tax went into place in this country, one in eight manufacturing jobs was destroyed," Mr Taylor said during an October 2021 interview.

Is that correct? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict

Mr Taylor is wrong.

When the carbon tax went into place, manufacturing employed 947,500 people. 

By the time of its repeal two years later, that number had shrunk by 32,300 (3.4 per cent), with one in 29 workers affected.

Manufacturing job losses also continued in the years after the carbon tax was scrapped, though not on the scale claimed by Mr Taylor.

Manufacturing jobs were declining in Australia long before Labor came to government. (ABC News: Caroline Winter)

By contrast, roughly one in eight (127,000) jobs were lost across roughly six years of Labor government — a period that includes nearly five years before the carbon tax was introduced. Importantly, experts told Fact Check that these job losses could not be solely attributed to Labor or the carbon tax. 

For one thing, they said, manufacturing as a share of total employment had been falling for decades.

Moreover, the downward trend would have been exacerbated during Labor's term by both declining investment in the sector and the global financial crisis.

Cause and effect?

The Coalition has several times linked the carbon tax to the destruction of manufacturing jobs.

Fact Check: Greenhouse gas emissions

Angus Taylor's claim on what has happened with greenhouse gas emissions under the Coalition is problematic for a number of reasons. Read more

Referring to Labor, Mr Taylor told parliament in November 2021 that "one thing we can be sure of is that they're always going to love a carbon tax that destroys jobs".

"[W]hen those opposite were in power: one in eight manufacturing workers lost their jobs", he said.

"That was 128,000 Australians who lost their livelihoods. And, of that 128,000, 110,000 were apprentices. One in five apprentices lost their jobs, and that was a result that followed on from those opposite putting in place a carbon tax."

Similarly, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg claimed in December that the "last time [Labor] had a go at climate policy … we lost one in eight manufacturing jobs and Australians got the carbon tax".

What was the 'carbon tax'?

The "carbon tax" was Labor's short-lived carbon pricing mechanism, which reduced Australia's carbon footprint by forcing the nation's largest emitters to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions.

Introduced on July 1, 2012 under prime minister Julia Gillard, the scheme lasted just two years before it was abolished under Tony Abbott's new Coalition government. It ceased on June 30, 2014.

When the Coalition came to power in September 2013, Labor had been in government for nearly six years and the carbon tax in operation for 14 months. 

The available jobs data

Employment data from the ABS is a net figure which does not specify how many jobs were destroyed compared to how many were offset by job creation. (ABC News: Marco Catalano)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes employment data by industry each quarter, with figures available for February, May, August and November.

As these dates do not align with the July 1 introduction of the carbon tax, and because November 2012 reflects the first full quarter of ABS data, Fact Check has taken August 2012 as the starting point. (Taking May 2012 as the starting point does not alter the outcome.)

Generally speaking, Fact Check prefers trend data published by the ABS and has used the most recent available.

However, as the bureau stopped publishing its trend series in February 2020, this analysis also refers to seasonally adjusted data. The most recent available when Mr Taylor made his claim covers the period to August 2021.

It’s worth noting that the data provides a snapshot of net employment. It does not show whether manufacturing jobs lost were offset by others that were created, or vice versa.

So, what happened to manufacturing jobs?

According to the trend data, manufacturing employed 947,500 people in August 2012.

Mr Taylor claimed the carbon tax cost one in eight of them their jobs (12.5 per cent).

Are more Australians in jobs
than before COVID-19?

Fact Check looks into the claim of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg that Australia has "seen employment go above its pre-pandemic levels". Read more

The data shows that by August 2014, when the carbon tax was repealed, the industry had lost 32,300 people, or one in 29 workers (3.4 per cent).

The decline continued after the scheme was scrapped, with the industry shedding a further 29,500 workers by November 2015 and taking the total fall to 6.5 per cent.

Employment has since risen and fallen several times. At no point in the trend series did manufacturing fall to more than 7.3 per cent from its level when the carbon tax went into place.

Equivalent to roughly one in 14 workers, that lowest point came in May 2019, five years after the pricing scheme was repealed.

And while the seasonally adjusted series shows larger falls, none took employment to 12.5 per cent below August 2012 levels, as Mr Taylor claimed.

Rather, the lowest point was in November 2020, when manufacturing jobs were 11.1 per cent below August 2012 levels.



Fact Check contacted Mr Taylor's office for the source of the claim but did not receive a response.

However, the trend data reveals that manufacturing jobs declined by 127,000 (12.1 per cent) across Labor's entire term, from just over one million in November 2007 to 922,000 in August 2013. 

This suggests Mr Taylor may have attributed every job lost across roughly six years of Labor to the carbon tax.

What the experts say

So, is Mr Taylor justified in attributing the net loss of manufacturing jobs to the carbon tax alone?

Jeff Borland, a labour economist at the University of Melbourne, said it was "a ridiculous statement" to say that all 128,000 jobs lost under Labor were due to the carbon tax.

Not only were many of these jobs lost before the pricing scheme was introduced, he said, but also manufacturing employment had been falling well before Labor was in government, with the industry's share of total employment declining steadily since the mid 1970s.

This was a long-run trend "driven by completely separate factors" such as automation and globalisation, Professor Borland explained.



On top of that, Labor's term straddled the global financial crisis, which would have hit manufacturing particularly hard.

"[I]f you actually look at the data on numbers of people employed, recessions or downturns are always a period when the destruction of manufacturing jobs seems to be concentrated", Professor Borland said.

Alan Duncan, director of Curtin University's Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, told Fact Check that Mr Taylor's statement "doesn't pass scrutiny".

He supplied analysis showing that roughly 30,000 jobs were lost during the two years of the carbon tax, noting that "manufacturing jobs had been falling well before the carbon tax was introduced, with the initial decline driven by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009" and that investment in the industry had also fallen by nearly 40 per cent from the end of 2011 to mid 2014.

"The GFC and declining manufacturing investment are likely to have had a much larger effect on jobs in the manufacturing sector than the carbon tax," Professor Duncan said.



In an email to Fact Check, Frank Jotzo, director of the Australian National University's Centre for Climate and Energy Policy, said there was "no basis to ascribe any significant change in employment to the existence of the carbon price".

Moreover, he said it was "nonsensical to ascribe the entirety of employment changes during [2008 to 2013] to the carbon pricing mechanism that existed during [2012 to 2014]".

Links

• Angus Taylor, Hansard, November 23, 2021
• Angus Taylor, Doorstop interview, October 27, 2021
• Angus Taylor, Interview with 2HD, October 27, 2021
• Josh Frydenberg, Interview with Insiders, December 5, 2021
• Fact Check, Energy Minister Angus Taylor said greenhouse gas emissions have turned around by 1.1 billion tonnes under the Coalition, April 11, 2019
• Clean Energy Regulator, About the carbon pricing scheme, August 23, 2021
• ABS, Labour force, detailed, February 2020
• ABS, Labour force, detailed, August 2021
• Fact Check: Have greenhouse gas emissions turned around under the Coalition?

(USA NYT) Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll

New York Times - Amanda Hess

From “Don’t Look Up” to Greta Thunberg videos to doomsaying memes, we are awash in warnings that we are almost out of time. But the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it.

Doomscrolling through social media can be seductive when it comes to the climate crisis: It signals that we care about big problems even as we chase distractions. Credit...Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

Author Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the New York Times. She writes about internet and pop culture for the Arts section and contributes regularly to The New York Times Magazine.

I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation.

Across the ironized hellscape of the internet, we began “tweeting through the apocalypse” and blogging the Golden Globes ceremony “during the end times” and streaming “Emily in Paris” “at the end of the world.”

 Often the features of our dystopia are itemized, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty center, which is the destruction of the Earth through man-made global warming.

This style is native to Twitter, but it has migrated to earnest slice-of-life Facebook pages, to Netflix, to books. Lauren Oyler’s coolly funny novel “Fake Accounts” begins in this mode (“Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon”) and Bo Burnham’s depressed drama-kid Netflix special “Inside” ends in it, as Burnham shrugs off the rising oceans and sings, “You say the world is ending, honey, it already did.”

And it is darkly inverted on the Instagram account @afffirmations, where new-age positive thinking buckles under the weight of generational despair, and serene stock photography collides with mantras like “I am not climate change psychosis” and “Humanity is not doomed.”

Ours is a banal sort of apocalypse. Even as it is described as frightfully close, it is held at a cynical distance. That is not to say that the rhetoric signals a lack of concern about climate change. But global warming represents the collapse of such complex systems at such an extreme scale that it overrides our emotional capacity.

This creates its own perverse flavor of climate denial: We acknowledge the science but do not truly accept it, at least not enough to urgently act. This paralysis itself is almost too horrible to contemplate. As global warming cooks the Earth, it melts our brains, fries our nerves and explodes the narratives that we like to tell about humankind — even the apocalyptic ones.

This “end of the world” does not resemble the ends of religious prophecies or disaster films, in which the human experiment culminates in dramatic final spectacles. Instead we persist in an oxymoronic state, inhabiting an end that has already begun but may never actually end.

Faced with this inexorable decline, the fire-and-brimstone fantasies grow ever more appealing. The apocalyptic drumbeat of social media gestures at the hopelessness of our situation while supplying a kind of narcotic comfort for it. Some plead: Just hit us with the comet already.


Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

That brings us to the premise of “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy that he has said is an allegory for inaction on global warming. In it, an American astronomer (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a Ph.D candidate (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling toward Earth.

More chilling than this cosmic snowball is the fact that no one seems particularly concerned by its approach. Comet denialists hold rallies instructing people to “don’t look up,” but even those who accept the situation only gesture lazily at trying to stop it.

 A pop star (Ariana Grande) stages a grotesque benefit concert; a daytime television host (Tyler Perry) jokes that he hopes the comet takes out his ex-wife; his co-host (Cate Blanchett) is more interested in bedding the astronomer than heeding him. As she paws at him in a hotel corridor, her subconscious death drive becomes manifest, as she purrs: “Tell me we’re all gonna die!”

“Don’t Look Up” fails as a climate change allegory, because climate change resists metaphor. Even though I count among the film’s villains (all its journalists are bad), I do not feel as implicated as I should. For one thing, humans didn’t make the comet. Global warming is not approaching from space but oozing all around.

My attention is diverted not only by shiny pop stars but also by taxing responsibilities and traumas, many of which are themselves related to ecological collapse. I am terrified of how global warming will affect my son’s generation, but when I learned we would need to travel regularly to a hospital as Covid spiked in New York City, I bought a car.

But the greatest liberty “Don’t Look Up” takes with its source material comes at the end: The comet hits Earth at its appointed time, at which point nearly everybody dies. It is final, dramatic, easy to understand. So, nothing like our present situation.

Global warming is what the ecophilosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject, a concept that is too large to be adequately comprehended by human beings. (McKay’s production company is called Hyperobject Industries.) Its scale is not just world-historical but geological, and though it is already very bad, it will only fulfill its catastrophic potential many lifetimes from now. Its effects are distributed unequally; what I experience as an ambient stressor may cause strangers to suffer or die.

Global warming suggests that humans are powerful enough to destroy the world but too weak to stop it. Though we are driven toward world-changing innovation, we are inflexible, fearful of abandoning the destructive comforts we once saw as progress — our cars, our meats, our free next-day deliveries.

Knowing all this, isn’t it about time we do something? Hmmm. “Don’t Look Up” turns on one of the most vexing aspects of the crisis: Stating the data, shouting it even, often fails to move people, though the film is largely incurious about why. One of the stories we tell ourselves about global warming is that we need only “listen to the science.”

When this does not work, we are supplied with more science — more glacier drone shots, more projections of soaring temperatures, more scary stories about dead bees. In the book “Being Ecological,” Morton calls this “ecological information dump mode,” in which an expert commences “shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing facts.” But even this seemingly rational approach stokes an irrational fantasy: that we have a certain amount of time “left” to stop global warming — just as soon as we get our heads around what’s going on.

The word “apocalypse” is derived from the Latin for “revelation,” and our current predicament draws out the irony of that double meaning, as we mistake obsessing about the “end of the world” for acting on it. Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s 2020 cli-fi novel “Weather,” is an information person: a Brooklyn librarian who assists the host of a cult-hit global warming podcast called “Hell or High Water.”

The podcast is “soothing to me even though she talks only of the invisible horsemen galloping toward us,” Lizzie says. The more Lizzie doomscrolls about climate change, the more she turns away from the outside world, lurking on survivalist forums and planning her family doomstead.

“Weather” sketches a scene of intellectual preppers, hoarding information about global warming as if cramming for a cosmic test. But the more information they find, the more they are able to tailor it to satisfy their own egos. In “Weather,” a podcast listener waves off talk of melting glaciers and asks: “But what’s going to happen to the American weather?”

A parable unfolds along these lines in the final season of “Search Party”: The show’s crew of millennial narcissists found a Brooklyn start-up called Lyte, which manufactures an “enlightenment” pill with the unfortunate side-effect of turning people into zombies.

As the group’s craven pursuit of consumerist illumination inadvertently hastens the apocalypse, the egomaniacal imp Dory (Alia Shawkat) tries to explain that she just wanted to help people, but all that comes out is this: “I just wanted …”

Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. Credit...Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

We may not fully comprehend global warming, but we can feel it, and not just in the weather. A whole lexicon has arisen to attempt to describe its psychological impact: climate nihilism, climate grief, climate melancholia, eco-anxiety, pre-traumatic stress.

A global survey of young people, released last year, found that more than half of respondents between the ages of 16 and 25 “felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty” about it, and believed “humanity is doomed.”

In the 2020 Hulu documentary “I Am Greta,” the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg explains how knowledge of global warming nearly killed her. After watching a film in school featuring “starving polar bears, flooding, hurricanes and droughts,” she says, she became depressed and anxious, stopped speaking, and “almost starved to death.”

We are getting accustomed to the idea that global warming feels bad, and this provides its own sense of comfort, as if our psychological distress proves that we are taking the problem seriously. “Civilians love to panic,” says an epidemiologist in Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “To Paradise,” which is partially set in an unbearably hot, totalitarian future Manhattan ruled by blinkered scientists.

“Survival allows for hope — it is, indeed, predicated on hope — but it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull.” In our response to global warming, we resemble the frog who does not hop from the heating water until it’s too late. Except we are aware that the water is boiling; we just can’t imagine leaving our tumultuous little pot.

Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily represent progress, as “we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control.” Even YouTube videos of climate conferences can slip into this role.

As we frame an activist like Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us.

The internet is often criticized for feeding us useless information, and for spreading disinformation, but it can enable a destructive relationship with serious information, too. If you’re a person who accepts the science, how much more do you really need to hear? The casual doomsaying of social media is so seductive: It helps us signal that we care about big problems even as we chase distractions, and it gives us a silly little tone for voicing our despair.

Most of all, it displaces us in time. We are always mentally skipping between a nostalgic landscape, where we have plenty of energy to waste on the internet, and an apocalyptic one, where it’s too late to do anything. It’s the center, where we live, that we can’t bear to envision. After all, denial is the first stage of grief.

Links - New York Times Climate Change Articles

• The Way We Talk About Climate Change Matters, Bill Nye Says
• Court Revokes Oil and Gas Leases, Citing Climate Change
• John Kerry, U.S. Climate Envoy, Tells Top Polluters ‘We Must All Move Faster’
• ‘Build Back Better’ Hit a Wall, but Climate Action Could Move Forward
• Here’s How Climate Change and Covid Are Transforming Skiing
• Tracking Climate Change in 193 Countries
• How Spiking Energy Prices Complicate the Fight Against Global Warming
• Judges Increasingly Demand Climate Analysis in Drilling Decisions
• How One Ski Town Rallied in a Warming World

(The Guardian) ‘Carbon Footprint Gap’ Between Rich And Poor Expanding, Study Finds

The Guardian - Helena Horton

Researchers say cutting carbon footprint of world’s wealthiest may be fastest way to reach net zero

The least wealthy half of the UK’s population accounts for less than 20% of final energy demand. Photograph: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters

Wealthy people have disproportionately large carbon footprints and the percentage of the world’s emissions they are responsible for is growing, a study has found. In 2010, the most affluent 10% of households emitted 34% of global CO₂, while the 50% of the global population in lower income brackets accounted for just 15%. By 2015, the richest 10% were responsible for 49% of emissions against 7% produced by the poorest half of the world’s population.

The wealthiest 10% of people are responsible
for nearly half the world's CO2 emissions

Guardian graphic. Source: Emissions-inequality.org

Aimee Ambrose, a professor of energy policy at Sheffield Hallam University and author of the study published in the journal Science Direct, says cutting the carbon footprint of the wealthiest might be the fastest way to reach net zero.

In terms of energy demand in the UK, the least wealthy half of the population accounts for less than 20% of final demand, less than the top 5% consumes. While their homes may be more energy-efficient, high consumers are likely to have more space to heat. They also own and use more luxury items and gadgets.

Ambrose said the cost of living crisis was likely to make those on middle to low incomes reduce their carbon consumption by holidaying in the UK, if at all, and by using less fuel. However, those who consume the most are unlikely to have to make such changes.

“It is much easier for richer consumers to absorb these increases in costs without changing their behaviour,” said Ambrose. “Unlike the less wealthy, the thermostat won’t be turned down and the idea of not jetting off on a long-haul flight to find some sun is out of the question.

In most countries, before Covid-19, less than half of people reported flying at least once a year while more than half of emissions from passenger aviation were linked to the 1% of people who fly most often.

“In many ways, the rich are being largely insulated from the spike in energy costs,” said Ambrose. “But addressing excessive personal consumption is something that isn’t on the agenda for the government and policymakers. This is bad news for the planet and our prospects of reaching net zero.”

She said the resulting policy neglect of high consumers was a “missed opportunity” to address inequality and opportunities for carbon reduction.

“Price mechanisms may force low-income households to cut back consumption to dangerous levels,” Ambrose added. “Moreover, high consumption and large carbon footprints are spatially concentrated in high-income cities and suburbs – while their negative effects, such as air pollution, typically spill over into less affluent areas.”

Links

• Rising temperatures threaten future of Winter Olympics, say experts
• Climate crisis could wipe 1% a year off UK economy by 2045, say ministers
• Global heating linked to early birth and damage to babies’ health, scientists find
• Plants at risk of extinction as climate crisis disrupts animal migration
• ‘The ducklings might not survive’: readers’ concerns over early spring
• Fury as EU moves ahead with plans to label gas and nuclear as ‘green’
• 2021: a year of climate crisis in review
• Asad Rehman on climate justice: ‘Now we are seeing these arguments cut through’

(USA CBS News) Earth Is Likely Just A Decade A Way From Hitting 1.5°C Of Global Warming — And Scientists Say It Will Be "Catastrophic" For Coral Reefs

CBS News - Li Cohen


Study: Climate Change "catastrophic" for coral reefs

The United Nations has warned the continued use of fossil fuels is hurtling the planet to 1.5°C of global warming, relative to 1850-1900 levels, a threshold that will result in "unprecedented" extreme weather events.

According to new research, climate change will also result in coral bleaching that will be "catastrophic" for reefs, and potentially, the marine life that live around them.

Bleaching can occur from a change in ocean temperature, pollution, overexposure to sunlight and low tides. Any of these influences can stress coral and causes it to release the algae that live in its tissues.

The loss of algae, corals' primary food source, causes the coral to turn white and makes it more susceptible to disease.

Reefs are "among the most biologically diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth," serving as a vital resource for an estimated 25% of all marine life, which depend on reefs for their life cycles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Roughly half a billion people also depend on reefs for food, coastal protection, tourism and fisheries' income.

But as climate change continues to negatively impact the planet, it will "overwhelm" those reefs, researchers said, and almost none of them will be able to escape a grave scenario.

The latest study, published in PLOS Climate on Tuesday, focused on thermal refugia, areas of coral reefs that can maintain the temperatures that coral reefs need to survive, even as nearby ocean temperatures increase.

Presently, about 84% of reefs are thermal refugia and have had enough time to recover between heat waves that bleach, and kill, coral reefs.

Once the planet hits 1.5°C of warming, researchers said, just 0.2% of Earth's thermal refugia will have enough time to recover between extreme heat events, and more than 90% of those reefs will suffer "an intolerable level of thermal stress."

At 2°C, researchers found, no thermal refugia will remain, and all coral reefs will be exposed and vulnerable.

This study was published the same day that other researchers concluded that marine heat is the "new normal" for oceans.

The only areas researchers believe might be able to survive the 1.5° threshold are small regions in Polynesia and the Coral Triangle where lower rates of warming are anticipated. But even those regions would no longer be suitable if Earth hits 2°C of warming.

"Our finding reinforces the stark reality that there is no safe limit of global warming for coral reefs," lead author of the study Adele Dixon said in a statement.

And the world may just be years away from watching this unfold.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in August that the world is likely to hit the 1.5°C of warming threshold in the early 2030s. As the IPCC explained, global warming of 1.5°C will result in more frequent and more intense extreme heat events.

It usually takes coral reefs about a decade to grow back and be fully functional again after a severe coral bleaching event, but under the predicted climate scenarios, they will not have enough time to recover.

Humans' excessive rates of deforestation and overuse and burning of fossil fuels, which greatly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and heat within Earth's atmosphere, are the primary driver for the anticipated outcome of global warming.

The researchers proposed some measures that can be put into place to help the ailing reefs, including removing stressors such as fishing and tourism, and helping coral migrate to more suitable environments.

But they added that such measures may only be beneficial in the short term, and that the true culprit — global warming — must be addressed, and quickly.

Scott Heron, a physics professor at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia, said that the study confirms that people must urgently take "significant action" on greenhouse gas emissions.

The Paris Climate Agreement has the majority of nations committed to staying below the 1.5°C level, but researchers of this study said that limiting global warming to that change "will not be enough to save most coral reefs."

"Coral reefs are important for the marine creatures that live on them and for over half a billion people whose livelihoods and food security rely on coral reefs," research supervisor Maria Beger said.

"We need to not only deliver on Paris goals - we need to exceed them, whilst also mitigating additional local stressors, if we want children born today to experience reef habitats."

Links - CBS News Climate Change Articles

• MoneyWatch: Gas stoves impact climate, health
• Climate change could be "catastrophic" for coral reefs
• Dozens of elephant seals recruited to be oceanographers
• Extreme marine heat is the "new normal" for oceans, study finds
• Growing call to divest from fossil fuels
• Gas stoves worse for climate than previously thought, study shows
• Federal judge blocks big Gulf of Mexico oil lease sale
• Congress is giving billions to carbon-capture technology. Will it work?
• "Mega" iceberg releases 152 billion tons of water into ocean
• Nonprofit links farmers with surplus produce with those in need
• Massive coral reef found in Tahiti "twilight zone"

(Independent Australia) Fossil Fuels Put Climate Crisis Price Tag In The Billions

Independent Australia - Elliott Negin

Governments across the USA are suing major climate polluters for the damage caused by their ‘intentional, reckless and negligent’ actions, writes Elliott Negin.

ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy have been major contributors to global warming (Image by Dan Jensen)

FOUR YEARS AGO, Boulder, Colorado, sued ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy – owner of the only oil refinery in the state – for climate change-related damages and adaptation expenses.

Author Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Boulder and its co-plaintiffs, Boulder County and San Miguel County, home to Telluride, estimated the damage caused by extreme weather events would cost them more than U.S.$100 million (AU$140,335,428) by 2050.

As it turns out, they overestimated the time span — and underestimated the price tag.

At the end of December, the Marshall Fire devastated Boulder County, laying waste to more than 6,000 acres and incinerating more than 1,000 homes and seven commercial buildings at a projected cost of U.S.$1 billion (AU$1.4 billion), making it Colorado’s most destructive fire in terms of property loss.

Fossil fuel giants hit by court rulings
over climate impacts

Three of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies have suffered significant blows in quick succession.

The Marshall Fire was hardly the only one – or even the largest – in Colorado since the three communities filed their lawsuit, which is still pending in a state court.

In fact, four of the five biggest Colorado fires by acreage have occurred since then, ranging from 108,000 to nearly 209,000 acres.

Both ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy – an Alberta, Canada-based company – have a large carbon footprint in Colorado.

ExxonMobil has produced more than one million barrels of oil from Colorado deposits, according to the Colorado communities’ complaint, and its subsidiary XTO Energy currently produces 60 million cubic feet of natural gas per day from 492,000 acres in Rio Blanco County.

There are also 95 Exxon and Mobil gas stations in the state. Altogether, the company’s production and transportation activities in Colorado were responsible for more than 420,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions between 2011 and 2015, according to the complaint.

Meanwhile, Suncor’s U.S. headquarters is based in Denver and its oil refinery, which produces 98,000 barrels of refined oil per day, is less than five miles (eight kilometres) from downtown.

Suncor’s gas stations, which sell Shell, Exxon and Mobil brand products, supply about 35% of the gasoline and 55% of the diesel sold in the state, according to a 2016 Denver Business Journal article.

Farmers claim win over fossil fuel industry

Legislation in favour of farmers' water bore rights has given them the upper hand over coal seam gas companies.

According to the complaint, Suncor’s Colorado operations were responsible for some one million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2016 alone, equivalent to the annual output of more than 217,000 typical passenger vehicles.

The Colorado communities contend that ExxonMobil and Suncor were aware that their products caused global warming as early as 1968, when a report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. oil and gas industry’s largest trade association, warned of the threat burning fossil fuels posed to the climate.

Regardless, ExxonMobil and Suncor not only continued to produce and market fossil fuel products without disclosing the risks, the communities’ complaint charges, but they also engaged in a decades-long disinformation campaign to manufacture doubt about the reality and seriousness of climate change.

‘Defendants’ actions have already caused or contributed to rising temperatures in Colorado,’ the complaint states. ‘Colorado has seen average temperatures rise by 2.5 degrees [Fahrenheit] over the last 50 years, with over a 2 degree [Fahrenheit] rise since 1983.’

Those higher temperatures have extended what used to be a four-month-long fire season in western states to six to eight months, if not all year round, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Wildfires are starting earlier, burning more intensely and destroying larger areas of land than ever before.

The corporations making big money,
paying no tax and laughing at us

The latest ATO annual transparency report reveals one-third of large companies are paying zero tax.

The three plaintiffs want ExxonMobil and Suncor to pay ‘their share’ of the damage caused by their ‘intentional, reckless and negligent conduct’.

That share could amount to billions of dollars to help cover the cost of an increasing number of heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, intense precipitation and floods.

Boulder’s April 2018 lawsuit was not the first U.S. climate-related case against the fossil fuel industry.

New York City and eight coastal California cities and counties, including San Francisco and Oakland, had already filed similar lawsuits against ExxonMobil and other oil and gas companies, seeking compensation for damage to their communities.

As of today, at least 27 states, counties and cities have sued major fossil fuel companies for climate-related fraud or damages, or both — and with good reason.

The cost of climate change-related disasters is continuing to climb.

Indeed, the Marshall Fire was just one of the 20 climate and weather disasters in 2021 that resulted in at least $1 billion in damages, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, just two shy of the record-breaking 22 in 2020 and significantly more than the average of 6.3 large-scale U.S. disasters per year between 2000 and 2009.

All told, last year’s billion-dollar disasters resulted in U.S.$145 billion (AU$203.5 billion) in damages – 52% higher than in 2020 – and 688 deaths.

The common denominator in these escalating numbers? Climate change.

Rachel Licker, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said:

“The fingerprints of climate change were all over many of the billion-dollar events that hit the United States in 2021. We’re essentially watching longstanding climate projections of the past come true.”

The Harsh Economics of Climate Change 12min 02 sec

Links

• Farmers claim win over fossil fuel industry
• Uniform resource rent tax for a better future
• Shareholders could reap benefits of Morrison's Ampol bailout
• Fossil fuel giants hit by court rulings over climate impacts
• NSW Government misleading with 'green hydrogen' claims

(AU SMH) In the climate fight, your wallet is more powerful than your vote

Sydney Morning Herald - Andrew Charlton

Author Andrew Charlton is a managing director at Accenture, adjunct professor at Macquarie University and co-director of the e61 Institute for economic research. He was an economic adviser to Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd.

Climate change is set to animate the upcoming federal election, with major parties selling their green credentials and a raft of climate-focused independents threatening to capture seats from Goldstein in Melbourne to Wentworth in Sydney.

But frustrated by decades of political inertia, Australians are waking up to a new type of climate activism: the power of their own money.

Consumer spending is the cause of more than two-thirds of total global emissions. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Consumer spending is the ultimate cause of more than two-thirds of total global emissions.

We have always had some information to help us make eco-friendly choices at the shops, such as Energy Star ratings on appliances, fuel efficiency ratings on vehicles and packaging indicators on recyclable products.

But we are witnessing a wave of new information and business transparency that will enable consumers to wield their spending as a precision climate weapon.

The Commonwealth Bank now helps customers analyse the emissions produced by each of their individual transactions to help them understand and reduce their environmental footprint.

Australian shopping app Greener has helped its users cut 30 per cent of their carbon footprint by connecting them with sustainable merchants. Google has begun to introduce new product features to give people greener options when they travel and shop.

In Europe, for instance, Google Maps now shows you the most fuel-efficient route as well as the fastest.

Google users in the United States can see the carbon emissions for every flight they book and quickly find lower-carbon options.

Australian environmental data service PurposeBureau tracks the carbon emissions of every Australian business. Some of the data is startling.

For example, did you know that each dollar you spend at your butcher funds more carbon emissions than those you spend filling up your car at the petrol station? Or that getting a brick wall built in your garden could generate 10 times more emissions than having your pipes fixed by a plumber?

Ethical investing

Ethical super outperforms mainstream options

It’s not just your spending, but also your savings that can help save the planet. Ensuring that your superannuation is invested in sustainable businesses can have a huge climate impact.

Research from the UK shows that making sustainable investment choices can have 21 times more impact on your carbon footprint than giving up flying, becoming vegetarian and switching your energy provider combined.

 Here in Australia, fintech startup Acacia Money helps members rate the sustainability of their investment portfolio.

And climate-friendly superannuation options such as Future Super promise to ensure your nest egg isn’t funding fossil fuels.Businesses are responding to the new consumer empowerment.

Brands are rushing to compete for the “conscious dollar” and appeal to the growing army of sustainability-focused customers.

For example, if you buy a jumper from trendy knitwear company, Sheepinc, you can tap your smartphone against the tag for a full history of how it got to you.

Spoiler alert: it was woven on a 100 per cent solar-powered machine and delivered to you by a carbon-neutral logistics firm.

Sustainable shopping: There's an app for that

If you buy a pair of shoes from the hot New Zealand-American footwear company, Allbirds, you’ll find a number stamped prominently on the inside sole.

That’s not the shoe size, it’s the kilograms of carbon emissions used in its manufacture.

In case you are wondering, the average Allbirds shoe generates 7 kilograms of emissions, less than half the CO2 of typical joggers.

Big companies are also making major sustainability pivots. While many companies are pledging to get to “net zero”, some are going even further.

Microsoft has committed to not only eliminating emissions, but to reverse its historical emissions. Their goal is to eliminate all the carbon the company and its suppliers have emitted since its founding in 1975.

Importantly, new global rules will crack down on companies that are all talk and no action on sustainability. The United Nations Glasgow climate summit last year launched the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) which will replace a patchwork of voluntary disclosure practices with “baseline” global standards to lift transparency and crack down on greenwashing.

Eight in 10 Australians say sustainability is important to them, but until recently they didn’t have the information to act on their preferences.

That is starting to change.

While our votes will matter in the next election, we don’t have to wait for politicians to act.

We have the power every day to vote climate with our wallets

Links

• Australia’s top cricketers make the baggy green even greener
• (AU The Guardian) David Pocock Leads 250 High-Profile Australian Athletes In Climate Campaign
• No climate change refuge for coral reefs: study
• (AU ASPI) Out Of The Cave: Climate Change In An Election Year
• (AU The Guardian) Make No Mistake – Labor And The Coalition Have Starkly Different Climate Policies
• (AU SMH) Climate Wars To Die Down In Federal Election As Major Parties Dodge Risks

(AU SMH) Australia’s Top Cricketers Make The Baggy Green Even Greener

Sydney Morning Herald - Laura Chung

Australian men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins has launched a campaign to have cricket clubs around the nation install solar panels to drive down their costs and reduce carbon emissions, declaring that it is time for the sport to do its bit to tackle climate change.

 Cummins, who on Thursday announced the creation of Cricket for Climate and its solar panel project Solar Clubs, is just the latest sporting star to throw his weight behind climate action.

Australian men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins has launched a campaign to have cricket clubs install solar panels to drive down their costs and reduce carbon emissions. Credit: Getty

In December, former Wallabies captain David Pocock announced he would run for Senate in the ACT with a focus on climate action, while last month the Australian Open parted ways with fossil fuel sponsor Santos after an activist campaign.

350 Australia chief executive officer Lucy Manne, who spearheaded the move on Santos in which 7500 people signed a petition asking for the partnership to end, said it was important that fossil fuel companies were not allowed to “sportswash” their image.

“A sporting group promoting fossil fuels today is as irresponsible as a medical group promoting cigarettes in 1930,” she said, echoing similar sentiments aired by Mr Pocock last month.

Cummins feels a personal responsibility as well as a public duty to act.

Aerialist performs on three-tonne iceberg over Sydney Harbour to raise climate change awareness. 1min 30sec

“In recent times, I’ve been thinking about what the future looks like, and that involves looking at my own footprint and how I live my life,” he told the Herald.

“We are playing international cricket, travelling around the world on planes and that has a big footprint. I started looking at what actions I could take to offset some of that and came up with the idea of solar panels on top of my junior club.

“I have memories of 45 degrees days in Penrith, and I thought what could happen if we could capture some of that solar energy.

“The longer we take to take action, the more it’s going to be irreversible,” Cummins said. “We’re not the ones who will be hard hit – it’s the next generation. Being a dad drives that home.

“We have to be conscious because kids look up to sports stars, whether we like it or not; we help shape their ideas of the world and we need to take that seriously.”

Despite green shoots in the sports sector, the resource sector remains influential. Gina Rinehart, the minerals magnate and Australia’s richest person, has been an active player in the Australian sporting scene, providing direct funding for athletes in swimming, rowing, artistic swimming and beach volleyball.

Her company, Hancock Prospecting, is now an official partner of the Australian Olympic Committee, which trumpeted the deal last week as a game changer for the movement in Australia ahead of Paris in 2024 and an inbound home Games in Brisbane in 2032.

Extreme weather

Brutal heat in Australia by 2040 will change the shape of summer sport

ANU Emeritus Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society Will Steffen said sport was just one of many sectors fighting the climate crisis, with many businesses, state and local governments and community members adding their voices.

However, the federal government was a “laggard”.

“Sport has an enormously powerful role to play,” he said. “It puts the Commonwealth government to shame. They are leaving it up to individual leaders, like sportspeople, like local governments, to get emissions down.”

Climate change is worsening extreme weather in Australia, with the country already having warmed by 1.4 degrees, faster than the global average.

By 2040, summer temperatures on hot days in Sydney and Melbourne will be approaching 50 degrees, making summer sport as it is played at present untenable, according to a report by the Climate Council pubFlished last year.

At the elite level, heat has become a risk to crowds as well as players, it shows, with almost 1000 spectators at the 2014 Australian Open being treated for heat exhaustion.

The Climate Council head of research Simon Bradshaw said Solar Clubs was a good example of how sporting clubs could be part of helping the climate crisis.

“Rising temperatures put much more than our ability to play sport at risk, affecting our health, livelihoods, and the ability to enjoy the things we love,” he said. “Australia has been falling behind the rest of the world in the race to move beyond fossil fuels and cut greenhouse emissions.”

“However, Australia has an incredible opportunity to shift to a cleaner economy and play its part in tackling the global climate crisis. By changing the way they power events and build venues, Solar Clubs are taking a big and important step. Australians love our sport and the outdoors, and we need our sporting clubs to help lead the way to a cleaner future.

“[This] shows just how fast businesses and communities are acting on climate, and how the federal government is failing to match what’s happening on the ground here.”

Great Barrier Reef

‘Second to none’: Australia responds to UNESCO’s Great Barrier Reef warning

For Solar Club recipient Penrith Cricket Club president Paul Goldsmith, the solar panels will make a huge difference to the club’s electricity bills which are about $17,000 a year.

“As well as reducing carbon emissions, this new solar system will save us more than $3000 every year, which can be redirected into much-needed resources and future focused projects, like junior development,” he said.

There are plans to expand the project to cover all 4000 junior clubs around the country and some of Australia’s best cricketers, including Steve Smith, David Warner, Shane Watson and Rachel Haynes, are throwing their support behind the project.

“If players, sporting administrators and clubs work towards a common goal to put sustainability at the front of their plans, then Australian cricket has the opportunity to play its role in slowing global warming and mitigating the existential threat that cricket faces,” Australian Cricketers’ Association chief executive officer Todd Greenberg said.

“We can’t sit around for other people to do [something], we all have a responsibility,” Cummins said. “I am in a privileged and lucky position to be able to try and make some changes.”

Links

• (AU RenewEconomy) Conservatives Want Australia’s Cricket Captain To Shut Up About Climate
• (AU The Guardian) ‘We All Have A Role’: More Than 260 Australian Rules Footballers Sign Up To Climate Campaign
• (AU The Guardian) David Pocock Leads 250 High-Profile Australian Athletes In Climate Campaign
• (AU ROAR) Cricket Must Start Preparing For Climate Change
• Major Climate Polluters Accused Of Greenwashing With Sports Sponsorship
• (AU) Sport Set To Reckon With Impacts Of Climate Change, And Encouraged To Act Now