One of the World's Biggest Miners Is About To Go Coal-Free

Bloomberg - Thomas Biesheuvel

• Rio Tinto is in the process of selling its last coal mines
• Rivals are sticking to or boosting exposure to dirtiest fuel

Photographer: Ian Waldie/Bloomberg

Just five years ago it would have been almost unthinkable that one of the world’s biggest mining companies would not dig any coal. It’s now likely to become a reality.
Rio Tinto Group, the world’s second-largest miner, has been steadily backtracking from coal to focus on better assets. It’s now looking for buyers for its remaining coal mines in Australia, and a sale will mark a complete exit from the fuel.
Rio’s potential coal-free future is in stark contrast with many of its rivals. Glencore Plc, the world’s top coal shipper, this year increased its exposure by agreeing to pay $1.1 billion plus royalties for a large stake in Australian assets sold by Rio. The fuel, which generates about 40 percent of the world’s electricity, is one of BHP Billiton Ltd.’s main strategies, while Anglo American Plc has pulled back on plans to sell out of the commodity.


While many miners are bullish on coal, the world’s dirtiest fuel has become a flashpoint for a growing movement of investors calling for miners to cut their exposure. For example, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund doesn’t invest in firms that make 30 percent of their sales from coal, while the Church of England sets the limit at 10 percent.
“People are picking different levels, whether they are divesting for ethical reasons or for business driven reasons,” said Helen Wildsmith, head of climate change at CCLA Investment Management, which manages money for the Church of England. “Having one of the big diversified miners without thermal coal does give investors more options.”

Rio’s Preference
Yet Rio’s decision is more to do with its coal mines not being able to compete with its other assets, rather than pressure from climate-change or divestment campaigns. Chief Executive Officer Jean-Sebastien Jacques has argued that even a mining firm as big as his only has so much managerial talent and money, and must focus those on more productive assets. It has also been able to sell coal mines for what it sees as good prices, allowing more cash to be returned to shareholders.
Even so, mining companies are increasingly having to consider how global proposals to curb greenhouse gases will impact the future of commodities they mine, said Wildsmith, who’s part of a team of investors that talks to firms like BHP and Rio about climate change.
“The big diversified miners are all trying to work out which commodities are going to be most disadvantaged in the future, and the low-carbon transition is one of the big uncertainties that they and other companies are facing,” she said. “We’re seeing more companies integrating their thinking on climate change scenarios into the macro-economic and cyclical scenarios that they work with.”
Benchmark prices for Australian coal jumped almost 90 percent last year as China moved to restrict the number of working days at coal mines, and have added another 3 percent this year.
It looks like Rio won’t have to worry about coal for too much longer. It sent out preliminary information on the Hail Creek and Kestrel coal mines to potential buyers last month and asked for indicative bids by early December, people familiar with the matter said in October.
The London-based miner has been shedding its Australian coal assets since dismantling its energy division in 2015. Earlier this year, it agreed to sell its Coal & Allied Industries Ltd. to China’s Yanzhou Coal Mining Co., before Glencore then bought a stake in the project. Rio has also sold other projects from Australia to Mozambique.

Links

• A QuickTake on coal’s past and future
• CO2 Pollution from Coal
• Coal demand 2001 - 2021
• Trump Bodes Well for Farms and Coal Mines; Trade Deals in Peril
• Climate Change A Global Push to Save the Planet

How Carbon Farming Can Help Solve Climate Change

The Conversation - David Burton

More carbon stays in the soil when farmers leave their fields alone between harvesting and planting. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations pledged to keep the average global temperature rise to below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to take efforts to narrow that increase to 1.5C. To meet those goals we must not only stop the increase in our greenhouse gas emissions, we must also draw large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
The simplest, most cost effective and environmentally beneficial way to do this is right under our feet. We can farm carbon by storing it in our agricultural soils.
Soils are traditionally rich in carbon. They can contain as much as five per cent carbon by weight, in the form of soil organic matter — plant and animal matter in various stages of decomposition.
But with the introduction of modern agricultural techniques, including the plow, soil organic matter content has dropped by half in many areas of the world, including parts of Canada. That carbon, once stored in the ground, is now found in the atmosphere and oceans as CO2 and is contributing to global warming.
The organic compounds found in soil are the glue that hold soil particles together and help give the soil structure. Like the walls of a building, this structure creates openings and passageways that allow the soil to conduct and store water, contain air, resist soil erosion and provide a habitat for soil organisms.
Plowing breaks apart soil aggregates and allows microorganisms to eat the soil organic compounds. In the short-term, the increased microbial activity releases nutrients, boosting crop productivity. In the long-term the loss of structure reduces the soil’s ability to hold water and resist erosion. Ultimately, crop productivity drops.

How can we make soil organic matter?
First and foremost, we need to disturb soil less. The advent of no-till and reduced tillage methods have allowed us to increase the carbon content of soils.
No-till and direct-seeding methods place the seed directly into the soil, minimizing the disturbance associated with seedbed preparation. The lack of disturbance allows the roots and crop residues from the previous crops to form soil organic matter. It reduces the degradation of the soil organic matter already present in the soil.

Farmers in Virginia check the outcome of their no-till farming practices. (USDA), CC BY

In Canada, we are already benefiting from reduced tillage. In the Prairies, no-tillage agriculture has increased from less than five per cent of the land area in the early 1990s to almost 50 per cent in 2006.
The situation is a bit more complex in Eastern Canada. The region’s soil type and climate make it less easy to build soil organic matter. At Dalhousie’s Atlantic Soil Health Lab, we are exploring the potential of various cropping practices to increase soil organic matter content in the soils of Atlantic Canada. While the potential to store carbon may not be as great as in Western Canada, the benefits of increased soil organic matter content are far greater because of the critically low levels of organic matter.
Secondly, we can use more diverse crop rotations. Forage crops — such as grasses, clovers and alfalfa — penetrate the soil with extensive root systems that lead to the formation of soil organic matter. Short rotations dominated by crops that have poor root systems (corn, soybeans) are not effective in building soil organic matter.
Farmers can also build soil organic matter by adding organic amendments such as animal manure, composts, forestry residues (wood chips) or biosolids to the soil.
Using the right amount of fertilizer is also important. Fertilizers can improve plant growth, lead to larger roots and add more plant matter to the soil in the unharvested portion of the crop. However, too much nitrogen fertilizer can result in the production of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide and offset the benefit of increased soil organic matter formation.

Farmers need economic incentives
Project Drawdown, a non-profit organization that researches solutions to global warming, has estimated that global farmland restoration (building soil organic matter) could remove 14 gigatones (billion tonnes) of CO2.
This would reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere below the current 400 parts per million — a level unpassed for several million years — while developing more fertile, resilient soils to feed people for years to come and keep forests intact.
These approaches seem like obvious solutions. Why are they not more widely adopted? The short answer is economics.
The benefits of drawing down CO2 and building soil organic matter play out over decades. But the costs associated with these practices often do not have increased returns in the short-term.
Farmers often make decisions in response to short-term economic pressures and government policies. Improved soil management is a public good. We need economic tools and short-term incentives that encourage producers to adopt these practices for the good of all.

Links

• Australia’s plantation boom has gone bust, so let’s make them carbon farms
• Carbon farming: a solution to global land degradation and poverty?
• Sharing economy sounds caring, but let’s put it to the ethical city test
• How one region is planning ahead to help farmers cope with climate change

Fiji Told It Must Spend Billions To Adapt To Climate Change

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

At COP 23 talks in Bonn, Fiji has called on developed nations to help the world’s most vulnerable build resilience to climate change

Fijian girl walks over flooded land in Fiji after severe tropical cyclone Winston in 2016. A new report predicts floods will occur every second year if global emissions aren’t abated. Photograph: chameleonseye/Getty Images

To prepare for the rising temperatures, strengthening storms and higher sea levels in the coming decades, Fiji must spend an amount equivalent to its entire yearly gross domestic product over the next 10 years, according to the first comprehensive assessment of the small island nation’s vulnerability to climate change, compiled by its government with the assistance of the World Bank.
Released half-way through the COP23 in Bonn, which Fiji is presiding over, the report highlights five major interventions and 125 further actions that it says are necessary to achieve Fiji’s development objectives, while facing the potentially devastating impacts of climate change. Combined those actions would cost about US$4.5bn over the next decade.
The report concluded that some parts of the country, especially those on low-lying outer islands, could be made uninhabitable by sea level rise and increased storm surges. It recommended existing towns and cities be made more resilient, but also for brand new and resilient greenfield sites to be constructed to house the growing population.
In light of the results, the World Bank and Fiji called for the world to lift its ambitions in fighting climate change, and also for the developed world to help the world’s most vulnerable people adapt and build resilience to climate change.
“The results of the [Climate Vulnerability Assessment] reinforce what we already know to be true – that the situation we face is urgent and the world needs to immediately raise its ambition to tackle this great threat,” said Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, Fiji’s attorney general and minister responsible for climate change in a foreword to the report.
But he said the report itself would assist in that happening, since it “provides a specific blueprint that quantifies the resources necessary to climate-proof Fiji, giving us a full account of the threat that climate change poses to our national development.”
Victoria Kwakwa, vice president, East Asia and the Pacific at the World Bank said the Paris Agreement was not just a commitment to keeping global temperature rise well below 2C, but “also a global commitment to help build resilience and adaptation capacity among vulnerable countries – especially those most at risk from climate change, such as Small Island Developing States.”
In the report, Fiji called on the world to take “drastic action that limits greenhouse gas emission while supporting action to enhance resilience.”
It notes that Fiji has limited capacity to manage those risks itself, and that investment from other nations was needed.
The biggest investment needed to build resilience in the country was into transport, where US$228m was needed each year, the report found. A detailed analysis in the report found specific parts of the road network that were critical for the country, and should be strengthened to protect against worsening storms.
Significant sums were needed to protect the country’s water, health and education facilities, housing and environmental assets.
“These investments and expenditures would have resilience-related benefits that extend over decades – far beyond their implementation period – as well as significant non-resilience benefits, improving the population’s well-being and development prospects,” the report found.
Fiji is expected to face as much as a metre of sea level rise by the end of the century, increasing the risk of coastal flooding, with flood events that currently happen only once a century expected to recur every second year if global emissions are not abated.
In just a few decades – by 2050 – the fraction of the country’s GDP lost every year due to tropical cyclones is expected to increase by up to 50%, reaching more than 6.5%. That estimate didn’t include the additional risk caused by sea level rise, which would magnify it further.
The report also concluded that some parts of the country, especially those on low-lying outer islands, could be made uninhabitable by sea level rise and increased storm surges.
It also highlighted the impacts climate change would have on Fiji’s health system, with water-borne diseases and respiratory diseases expected to worsen. “These health issues threaten the Fiji population and will challenge the health care system, and could also have a negative impact of some key sectors of the economy, especially the tourism sector, which is highly vulnerable to negative risk perceptions,” the report said.
Coming less than two years after Tropical Cyclone Winston devastated the country, killing 44 people and costing the economy 20% of its GDP, the findings are likely to raise some attention at COP23.
In a statement released with the report, prime minister of Fiji and current president of COP23 Voreqe “Frank” Bainimarama said: “As the president of the COP23 and on behalf of the small island nations, and building on the findings of this report, Fiji is asking the world for drastic action on climate change-building resilience through adaptation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions so that climate change does not impose a limit to our development and the aspiration of our people to live in their own lands.”
The talks going on this week and next at COP23 are focused on writing the “rulebook” for implementing the Paris Agreement – including how countries will be required to “ratchet up” their commitments to achieve the agreed aims.

Links

• Politicians and activists gather for COP23 Bonn climate talks - in pictures
• Bonn climate talks must go further than Paris pledges to succeed
• The COP23 climate change summit in Bonn and why it matters
• The three-degree world: the cities that will be drowned by global warming
• Fiji PM invites Trump to meet cyclone victims in climate change appeal – video
• Fiji becomes first country in the world to ratify Paris agreement
• Pacific islands make last-ditch plea to world before Paris climate change talks
• Fiji PM decries Australia's 'climate change deniers' in Turnbull cabinet
• Besieged by the rising tides of climate change, Kiribati buys land in Fiji

Climate Change: A Catalyst For Conflict

Deutsche Welle - Matthias von Hein

African ranchers are forced to seek new pastures after traditional grazing lands have dried up, putting them on a collision course with local farmers. In some areas, lands previously herded are being used for farming.

In mid-October, people in the central Nigerian village of Nkyie Doghwro desperately sought shelter in a schoolhouse. Yet they did so in vain. Ultimately, 29 of them lost their lives; the victims of an ongoing conflict between ranchers and farmers in the region.
Over the last 15 years more than 60,000 people have died in this forgotten conflict – almost four times as many as have been killed by the terror group Boko Haram.
Conflict between ranchers and farmers is a classic motif in Hollywood westerns. But conflict is also very much part of everyday life in many African nations – and the reality of it is far more brutal than that which is portrayed on the silver screen.
Such conflict becomes unavoidable when ranchers seek new pastures after traditional grazing lands dry up, just as it does when climate change forces farmers to plant in areas where cattle had previously been herded. Such conflicts feature in this year's edition of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) annual report.

Farmers in Nigeria are having increasing difficulty finding enough land to graze cattle

In an interview with DW, SIPRI director Dan Smith stressed the link between climate change and security: "The effects of climate change, alongside other social, economic and political components, contribute to the violence with which conflicts are resolved."
In 2012, several agencies within the United States' intelligence community prepared a report that predicted: "Many countries that are of strategic importance to the USA will suffer water shortages or flooding over the next 10 years."
The report added that such situations would increase the risk of instability or even lead to failed state status as well as contributing to regional conflict.

Climate change as a threat magnifier
That said, one cannot draw a direct connection between climate change and violent conflict, as the causes that lead to bloody conflict are often too complex to allow such mapping. Therefore, it is perhaps more helpful to think of climate change as a threat amplifier.
That is how Rob van Riet of the World Future Council describes the relationship between climate and conflict.
Van Riet expanded on that thought when speaking with DW: "Existing threats – like resource shortages, poverty, famine, terrorism or extreme ideology – are only amplified by climate change."

Water scarcity and food expense in Syria added to social chaos and fulled the conflict

SIPRI's Dan Smith also warns that the effects of climate change – from droughts to floods – are not simply local phenomena. He points out that extreme weather situations affect global food prices, and that those rising prices also fuel conflict. "Whenever global food prices go up we see demonstrations, rioting and ultimately lasting social and political instability in 30 or 40 countries at the same time," the SIPRI director observed.
When asked which regions most clearly illustrated that relationship, Smith pointed to North Africa and the Middle East: "Climate change can be clearly recognized within the complex mosaic of causes of conflict in Syria, Egypt and Yemen."
Rob van Riet also sees Syria as a prime example of climate change as a driver of conflict. In the mid-2000s, large numbers of farmers were forced to give up their livelihood and move to already hopelessly overpopulated cities as a result of the worst droughts the country had ever seen.
"Water became scarce and food expensive. The resulting suffering and social chaos added to ongoing conflicts that eventually spun out of control and ultimately led to the conflict that we are witnessing today," says the World Future Council climate expert.

Flooding in Karachi, Pakistan

Rob van Riet is also gravely concerned about how nuclear powers like Pakistan will deal with the effects of climate change. He says that Pakistan is especially vulnerable, which can be seen in the massive flooding that takes place there annually.
"Beyond the fact that such floods immediately deprive people of their livelihoods, they also have a direct influence on nuclear security," emphasized van Riet in a DW interview.

Fleeing from a changing environment 

The Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya houses almost 250,000 people

It is clear that the economic effects of climate change are dramatic, and that social effects are as well. The Berlin-based Mercator Research Institute on Climate Change (MCC) is currently analyzing the scope of economic damages caused by climate change.
Matthias Kalkuhl, who heads MCC's working group on economic growth and human change, is closely studying 1,400 regions around the world, and told DW: "On average, about 10 percent of a region's economic output – and up to 20 percent in tropical counties – is lost to sinking agricultural and labor productivity caused by climate change – those are substantial numbers!"
And Kalkuhl did not factor damages from extreme weather catastrophes such as hurricanes or long-term issues such as rising sea levels into the equation.
When entire regions become impoverished it can lead to mass migration, which can, in turn, lead to increased tensions within a country or even beyond its borders.
Speaking with DW, Kalkuhl points back to the discussions that accompanied the refugee debate in Germany when "roughly a million people arrived here within a relatively short period of time, throwing the political system into chaos. Therefore, it is very hard to predict how societies will cope with mass population movements."

Right-wing extremism in Germany has risen since the influx of refugees in 2015

So what can be done? The question grows even more complex due to the fact that, in a best case scenario, it would take decades to asses the effects of intelligent climate policy. Will we even see such measures enacted? SIPRI director Dan Smith thinks that an institution serving under the aegis of the United Nations is what is needed.
The institution, he says, would be tasked with assessing security risks. It would then pass its findings on to other UN organizations such as the Security Council, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs or the World Food Program.
"In one way or another, these organizations will all be affected by climate change related security risks over the next several years," says Smith.


Lobbying behind the scenes at UN climate talks

Links

• Climate change burden unfairly borne by world's poorest countries
• 'Climate change allows terrorists to thrive'
• Conflict as Lake Chad vanishes
• Climate Change Will Displace Tens of Millions in Next Decade: Report
• Climate change 'will create world's biggest refugee crisis'
• Climate change to displace‘tens of millions’

Graphs Of The Day: Australia The Global Climate Laggard

RenewEconomy - Sophie Vorrath

As the 23rd UN Climate Conference in Bonn nears the end of its first week, a new report has highlighted just how far Australia is lagging behind the rest of the world in its efforts to avert catastrophic global warming – and how bad it would be if everyone else was putting in such a woeful effort.
The report, the latest edition of the Climate Council’s signature bi-annual Critical Decade series, describes Australia’s emissions reduction target of 26-28 per cent on a 2005 baseline as “unusually weak,” and nowhere near its fair share in tackling global warming – a situation that boils down to “a decade of interference by vested interests” and a shortage of political courage.
“Australia is failing to tackle climate change with emissions rising and a lack of any coherent, national approach to reduce emissions in the short, medium or long term,” the report says. “We are known as a global climate laggard.”
So how far behind is Australia lagging? Here are a couple of charts that help put it in perspective.

This first, pictured above, shows a comparison of Australia’s commitments at the 2015 Paris climate conference to those of other OECD countries. As the Climate Council notes, this shows that Australia is far behind the level of climate action around the world, with a commitment “inconsistent with limiting temperature rise to no more than 2°C.”
“Compared to an average annual rate of emission reductions of 2.6% pledged by many developed countries, Australia’s proposed rate of emissions reduction is only 1.6% per annum,” the report says. “Worse yet, our emissions continue to rise!”

The second graph, above, is adapted from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “Burning Embers” diagram on 2014, which is based on a synthesis of “thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers to assess the degree of risk at increasing levels of global average temperature.”
What it shows, is that the Australian government’s approach, if adopted globally, would lock in a dramatic rise in global temperatures of around 4°C, “resulting in worsening extreme weather events and catastrophic damage to natural systems that support human life.”
As the report notes, there is a significant difference in the degree of risk between the 1.5°C and 2°C Paris targets, with higher risks of damage to natural ecosystems and more intense and/or frequent extreme weather events for the 2°C target.
“At a 2°C temperature rise, there is a high level of risk for 3 of the 5 categories – impacts on natural ecosystems, extreme weather events, and impacts on the most vulnerable. That is,
a 2.0°C temperature rise is not a “safe” level of climate change,” the report says.
“A 4°C temperature rise (business-as-usual) would lead to a vastly different world, with very high risks to many natural ecosystems and highly damaging impacts on the most vulnerable.”

Climate Council Key Findings

• Australia is failing to tackle climate change with emissions rising and a lack of any coherent, long-term national approach to reduce emissions in the short, medium or long term. We are known as a global climate laggard.
• Failure to rapidly and deeply reduce greenhouse gas emissions increases the risk of deteriorating human health and well-being, massive forced migration and conflict, crippling economic damage around the world, and the Earth’s sixth great extinction event.
• Australia is highly vulnerable to many of the consequences of a changing climate, from worsening heatwaves, droughts and bushfires, to devastating coral reef bleaching, and most of our population centres being exposed to sea level rise.
• Amongst the G20 countries, Australia’s emission reduction target – a reduction of 26-28% on a 2005 baseline – is unusually weak, nowhere near what is required for us to play our fair share in meeting 2°C Paris target.
• Renewable energy has already replaced ageing, polluting fossil fuels as the energy system of the future, with the installation of solar and wind systems globally doubling every 5.4 years.
• Maintaining this rate of renewable expansion could see the world’s energy systems completely eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.

Links

• Critical Decade 2017: Accelerating Climate Action (Report)
• Hot and Dry: Australia's Weird Winter
• Australia’s Renewables Race: Who’s Leading the Charge?
• Clean Energy Target: Poll of Australians
• COP 23 Factsheet
• Billion dollar boom: Queensland’s bright renewables future

Politicians And Activists Gather For COP23 Bonn Climate Talks - In Pictures

The Guardian

Bonn climate change conference

The world’s nations are meeting in Bonn, Germany, for the 23rd annual “conference of the parties” (COP) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which aims to prevent dangerous global warming. This year, Fiji plays president and meeting the Paris climate goals are top of the agenda.

Members of the Guardians of the Forest, a group of indigenous leaders who have been criss-crossing Europe by bus over the past two weeks. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

For the first time, this round of UN climate talks is being held by one of the small island nations that are most at risk from the sea-level rise and extreme storms that climate change is bringing. Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama (second right), is the COP president, though the summit is being held in Germany for practical reasons. Photograph: James Dowson/UNFCCC

Activists hold giant balloons labelled CO2 in front of the Neurath coal power plant during protests prior to talks. 2017 is set to be one of the hottest three years on record, provisional data suggests, confirming yet again a warming trend that scientists say bears the fingerprints of human actions. Photograph: Philipp Guelland/EPA

Climate change activists march to demonstrate against coal energy and other climate-related issues. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Not far from the UN talks, activists frustrated with slow progress by governments are turning up the heat at Germany’s opencast mines, highlighting the country’s failure to live up to its green pledges. Photograph: Omer Messinger/EPA

People arrive for the opening ceremony of the COP23 talks, which aim to meet the goals laid out in the Paris agreement two years ago. Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

The welcoming ceremony. Photograph: UNFCC

Fijians perform a traditional ceremony during the opening of the talks. The conference is under the presidency of the government of Fiji this year. Photograph: Ronald Wittek/EPA

Children take part in a climate march prior to the opening session. New data shows how the world would look if governments fail in their pledge to hold global warming to 2C. Photograph: Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

At the welcoming ceremony (l-r): Hoesung Lee, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Ashok-Alexander Sridharan, mayor of Bonn; UNFCCC executive secretary, Patricia Espinosa; Jan Szyszko, minister of environment, Poland, and incoming COP24 president; Frank Bainimarama, COP 23 president; Salaheddine Mezouar, Moroccan foreign minister and president of COP22; Barbara Hendricks, German environment minister, and Petteri Taalas, secretary-general, World Meteorological Organisation. Photograph: James Dowson/UNFCC

Fiji has renamed the talks from the bland “facilitative dialogue” to the “talanoa dialogue” after a Pacific island concept of using storytelling and talking as a way to make good decisions. Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Jason Box, professor in glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, joined a session on Arctic climate change and its global impacts via video call. Photograph: Courtesy of IIDS

Veteran climate scientist James Hansen and his granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, who is among 21 young plaintiffs bringing a lawsuit against the US federal government over its CO2 emissions. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Young bloggers from Brazil prepare climate change messages for social media. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Representatives of the Women and Gender constituency conduct an aerobics class to remind COP23 delegates to metaphorically “mind the gap” of gender inequality, and “reach” for a gender action plan. Photograph: Courtesy of IISD

Delegates read the Earth Negotiations Bulletin to keep track of progress. Photograph: Courtesy of IISD

The breadth of protest at the talks can be seen by these banners. Photograph: Ronald Wittek/EPA

Links

• The COP23 climate change summit in Bonn and why it matters
• Bonn climate talks will aim to meet goals laid out in Paris, says UN
• Bonn climate talks must go further than Paris pledges to succeed
• Rich nations accused over 'logging loophole' at Bonn climate talks
• California Gov. Jerry Brown delivers a blunt climate change message in Germany
• UN says 2017 set to be among top three hottest years, as Bonn climate talks seek action despite US stance
• COP23 climate change summit begins in Bonn
• Tiny Fiji looks for global impact at Bonn climate talks
• Bonn voyage: climate diplomats head into another round of talks
• Five things that should happen at the Bonn climate talks but probably won’t

Fight Climate Change By Suing Polluters, Says Scientist

National Geographic - Stephen Leahy

Prominent climate scientist James Hansen has a message for world leaders gathering in Germany for the United Nations conference on global warming.

A supercell thunderstorm strikes in South Dakota. Among the most severe storms, supercells can bring strong winds, hail, and even tornadoes. (See more extreme weather pictures.) Photograph by Jim Reed, National Geographic

Countries should sue the world’s biggest oil, coal and gas, and cement companies for damages resulting from climate change—says well-known climate scientist James Hansen.
Hansen, a former NASA scientist who warned Congress about the dangers of climate change in 1988, says global warming of 2°C, or even 1.5°C, is dangerous, risking sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. That would put major parts of coastal cities like New York underwater. He believes major impacts of climate change are happening faster than what is reported in even the latest science reports, including the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report released last Friday.
An enormous amount of money is urgently needed to dramatically slash emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), take existing CO2 out of the atmosphere, and for countries to cope with the impacts of climate change, Hansen argues. And that money should come from the companies that profited most from burning fossil fuels, Hansen will tell world leaders Tuesday in Bonn, Germany, at the annual United Nations climate negotiations.
Known as COP 23, negotiators from 197 countries are meeting this week to finalize details around the Paris Climate Change Agreement, including a process to increase emission reductions. The current reductions promised by countries under the Paris Agreement are only a third of what is needed to stay below 2C, according to the United Nations Environment Program.
“I tried to get an opportunity to address the negotiators but did not succeed. I will give my talk at a press conference,” Hansen told National Geographic in advance of the meeting.

Targeting “Carbon Majors”?
The companies that could be sued are known as the “carbon majors,” Hansen says. These are the 100 companies who have been the source of more than 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron are listed as among the highest carbon-emitting, investor-owned companies.
“The judicial system is the only way to get the funds needed to deal with climate change,” Hansen says. “Legislation won’t work because that’s where lobbyists rule.”
This legal action is comparable to the successful tobacco industry lawsuits that resulted in billions of dollars in settlements, he adds.

Legal Precedents
In fact, climate lawsuits are already happening. Last year, a Filipino government body called the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines accused 47 carbon majors of human rights violations because of their role in climate change. Three California coastal communities sued 31 fossil-fuel companies in July. Last month, four municipalities on Canada’s west coast asked Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and others to pay their share of the climate costs those communities are facing. There is now even a nascent movement called Climate Law in our Hands that helps communities go after these carbon-emitting companies.


Causes and Effects of Climate Change

Governments are also being sued. A Dutch citizens’ group won the first-ever climate lawsuit against a government in 2015. The courts agreed that the Netherlands government wasn’t doing enough to protect its citizens and made the unprecedented ruling that the country’s annual CO2 emission reduction target had to increase from 17 percent to 25 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels.
For comparison, 2015 (most recent available) annual U.S. emissions are four percent higher than 1990.
Hansen is involved in a 2015 lawsuit against the U.S. federal government, brought by 21 kids under the age of 21, including his own granddaughter. The case argues that the government’s failure to curb CO2 emissions has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. A trial will be held February 5, 2018 in the U.S. District Court of Oregon.
Another group of youth just filed a lawsuit against Governor Bill Walker of Alaska alleging that “the state is violating their constitutional rights by putting fossil-fuel production above the safety of their lives.”
Could Puerto Rico sue the carbon majors for the billions in damages caused by Hurricane Maria? Legal experts say this is a difficult question.
“You need to establish a sufficiently direct relationship between an act or omission by the entity sued and a significant impact,” says Jorge Vinuales, Professor of Law and Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge.
However, some cases along these lines are starting at the UN Human Rights Committee, says Vinuales, who said he couldn’t yet provide further details because they aren’t public. For low-lying, small island nations whose existence is threatened by rising seas, a better approach might be to bring an action against some major polluters before either the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, Vinuales says. “I'm quite confident that such a suit could be formulated in terms that could work,” he says.
A group of citizens could also try to sue carbon majors using transnational tort litigation. However, this approach may have been made more difficult by the fact that the U.S. climate delegation made sure the Paris Agreement included a paragraph that reduces the risk of litigation.

Future Solutions?
It has long been recognized that large amounts of funding is needed to help poorer nations cope with impacts of climate change and ramp up cleaner energy. In 2009, the U.S. and other developed nations agreed to step up financial support for developing nations to $100 billion a year by 2020.
In 2016 this support amounted to just $2.78 billion. For comparison, a recent report estimated that extreme weather—made worse by climate change—and the health impacts of burning fossil fuels cost the U.S. economy at least $240 billion a year the last ten years.
The World Meteorological Organization also announced that 2017 is very likely to be one of the top three warmest years on record, and likely the hottest year in the absence of the El Niño phenomenon.
As COP 23 in Bonn began this week, Malaysia and Vietnam were just beginning to assess the damage from last weekend’s powerful Typhoon Damrey that killed at least 60 people.
Global warming is already at 1C and there is much worse extreme weather to come unless carbon emissions are eliminated, says Hansen. To protect low-lying island nations and global shorelines, global warming needs to be less than 1C.
That means removing at least 100 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere through afforestation and changes in land management, he says. That alone will cost at least a trillion dollars.
Lawsuits against governments and carbon majors could force what Hansen and many climate activists have long advocated: a carbon fee or tariff system on fossil fuels to raise their cost and provide funding. “As long as we allow fossil fuels to be cheap energy, and not required to pay their costs to society, we cannot kick our fossil fuel addiction,” he says.

Links

• World's largest carbon producers face landmark human rights case
• Coastal Communities Sue 37 Oil, Gas and Coal Companies Over Climate Change
• Climate Law In Our Hands
• Juliana v. U.S. Climate Lawsuit
• 'Biggest Case on the Planet' Pits Kids vs. Climate Change
• Climate-Change Lawsuits
• Children Sue Trump Over Climate Change
• Portuguese Kids Hit Climate Lawsuit Crowdfunding Milestone
• How International Law Could Help Small Islands Tackle Climate Change
• How The Law Could Save The Planet
• Portuguese Children To Crowdfund European Climate Change Case
• Two Major Cities Demand Fossil Fuel Companies Pay For Climate Damages
• Environmentalists Get Win In US Coal-Climate Change Lawsuit
• The Guardian View On Climate Change: See You In Court
• Federal Court Rejects Latest Bids To Stop Adani
• Australian Coal-Power Allowable Pollution Would Be Illegal In US, Europe And China – Report