Climate Change Is A Global Injustice. A New Study Shows Why.

Vox - Umair Irfan

The US is second only to India when it comes to the economic cost of global warming.

The United States stands to pay the second-highest social cost of carbon in the world. Shutterstock

All efforts to fight climate change face the money test: Are the benefits of stopping global warming — and avoiding sea level rise, heat waves, and wildfires — greater than the costs?
The dollar balance we arrive at should be one of the biggest factors in deciding what we’re willing to do to tackle the problem, whether that’s shuttering all coal plants or building thousands of nuclear reactors.
Some groups have taken a stab at calculating what climate change will cost the world, or conversely, how much humanity would save by becoming more sustainable. Earlier this month, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate tallied the number at a truly massive $26 trillion in savings by 2030.
Getting a slice of those savings requires figuring out which actors stand to lose the most as the climate changes, whether that’s countries, companies, or even individuals.
And this is where the idea of the social cost of carbon comes in. It’s a policy tool that attaches a price tag to the long-term economic damage caused by one ton of carbon dioxide, hence the cost to society. It’s related to a carbon tax (more on that below), and it serves as a way to distill the vast global consequences of climate change down to a practical metric.
Critically, it’s also the foundation of US climate policies, including the Clean Power Plan. Revising this number down has been a key part of the Trump administration’s strategy to roll back environmental rules. Under Obama, the social cost of carbon was set at $45 per ton of carbon dioxide; under Trump, it’s as little as $1.
A new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates the social cost of carbon down to individual countries. This adds an important bit of nuance because climate change is going to cost some countries more than others, a fact that’s lost when you try to tabulate a global average.
The team found a global social cost of carbon vastly higher than many previous estimates, drawing on more recent climate projections and more robust macroeconomic models. The results also highlighted the fundamental injustice of climate change: Many of those who contributed the least to the problem stand to suffer the most. And the study has a stark message for the United States: The economy stands to pay one of the highest prices in the world for its emissions.

We’re drastically underestimating how much climate change will cost the global economy
Even if you’ve just skimmed climate policy discussions in recent years, you’ve likely come across the idea of a carbon tax. In short, a carbon tax helps attach the consequences of climate change to the greenhouse gas sources that are driving it. Ideally, it would push economies toward sustainability by making dirtier energy sources and industries more costly relative to their alternatives.
Though a tax is just one way to price emissions, most economists and scientists agree that pricing in some form is the sine qua non of fighting climate change. (My colleague David Roberts has written extensively about the limits of a carbon tax and the recent Republican carbon tax proposals.)
How high you set your carbon tax is a function of how aggressively you want to clean up your act and how much damage you’re expecting if you don’t. The former is an objective that’s set by policymakers, but the latter, in theory, has an empirical value. This is the social cost of carbon.
The lead author of the Nature Climate Change study, Katharine Ricke, an assistant professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, explained that calculating the social cost of carbon requires coordinating several variables.
“You need to make assumptions about socioeconomic progress and changes in the world that are going to happen out a century in the future,” she said. “You need to contend with uncertainty about how climate change is going to look.”
The social cost of carbon is an imperfect measure: It focuses on broad changes in the economy rather than abrupt shifts from extreme weather or disasters. It also requires making many arguable assumptions. However, it’s still a useful tool in estimating the costs and benefits of different ways to fight climate change.
To account for this variability, Ricke and her team looked at a range of greenhouse gas emission scenarios, as well as several different economic damage models and multiple social discount rates.
The results showed that the world has been drastically undervaluing the potential economic damages from climate change. The median global social cost of carbon came out to $417 per ton, an order of magnitude more than prior estimates of $40 per ton.

India is poised to pay the highest social cost of carbon. Russia may not pay one at all.
Drilling down into individual countries, the researchers spotted disparities in the economic consequences of climate change.

The social cost of carbon for individual countries in dollars per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Nature Climate Change

Countries at northern latitudes, like Russia, face a negative social cost of carbon. This implies that the warming wrought by climate change will actually boost the economies of these countries. Warming can improve agriculture or reduce heating demands in the far north, for example. However, Ricke cautioned that these costs were calculated based on macroeconomic factors within countries; they don’t account for things like international trade, which may suffer in a warming world.
The model also doesn’t account for direct consequences of climate change, like sea level rise flooding coastal areas or thawing permafrost causing roads to buckle. In fact, northern latitudes are among the fastest warming regions in the world. These effects will impact the economies of northern countries, but they aren’t baked into the economic model used in this study.
“We recommend taking the negative social cost of carbon values with a grain of salt,” Ricke said. “These estimates likely represent a lower bound.”
On the other hand, the findings are especially alarming for India. It has the highest social cost of carbon in the world, at $86 per ton. Coming in second is the United States at $48 per ton.
“The thing that drives the high social cost of carbon in the US to a great extent is the fact that we just have such a big economy, so we have a lot to lose,” Ricke said. This value coincidentally aligns with the number the Obama administration came up with, but there’s a crucial difference. Ricke explained that the government’s numbers included social costs to the rest of the world from US emissions; the number Ricke calculated does not. If the team were to include everything in the Obama formula, then the social cost of carbon for the United States would be even higher.
As journalist David Wallace-Wells pointed out on Twitter, this shows that fighting climate change makes sense for the United States, even for purely selfish reasons:

IMAGE

Calculating the social cost of carbon is merely the starting point for climate policy
Suppose every country in the world suddenly wakes up tomorrow in ecstatic cahoots on climate change and decides to implement a carbon tax at the level of their respective social costs of carbon. Will that solve climate change?
Not even remotely.
“If countries were to price their own carbon emissions at their own [country-level social cost of carbon], approximately 5 [percent], a small amount, of the global climate externality would be internalized,” the researchers wrote.
That’s because there are some countries that emit very little and will be hit hard by climate change, while others emit a lot and won’t see as many damages. So for a country to set a meaningful carbon tax, or any other price on carbon, it has to include damages caused to other countries, as former Obama adviser Jason Bordoff wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Unlike other regulated pollutants that have almost entirely domestic consequences, CO2 impacts are global, and climate change is a “tragedy of the commons” problem. A ton of CO2 contributes equally to climate change regardless of where it comes from. If all nations looked only at the impact of a ton of CO2 on their own nations, the collective response would be vastly inadequate to address the true damages from climate change.

This wonky chart (bear with me) from Ricke’s study explains the dilemma:

A figure comparing the social cost of carbon within a country to its share of global emissions. Nature Climate Change

The chart compares a country’s social cost of carbon to its share of global emissions. The radiating lines show the ratios of a country’s share of global emissions to its share of the damages.
The United States is almost balanced, with its high social cost of carbon roughly proportional to how much carbon dioxide it emits. But India pumps out just 6 percent of global greenhouse gases and will bear more than 20 percent of the global economic burden from climate change. In other words, India faces almost quadruple the damages of global warming compared to its contribution to the problem. Zoom in further and you’ll notice that many of the wealthiest countries in the world stand to bear the lowest costs of climate change.
This is part of why the global social cost of carbon, $417 per ton, is so much higher than it is for any individual country. The costs of climate change are greater than the sum of their parts. Yet it also shows that many of the wealthiest countries, which contributed the most greenhouse gases, stand to be the best insulated from its costs.
That makes climate change a global justice concern. In limiting global warming, wealthy countries face a moral imperative to look beyond their borders and GDPs, pushing even harder to cut their own emissions. The social costs of carbon also show why climate change really has to be tackled as a global problem rather than by individual nations. But as long as countries like Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany face little financial fallout, that policy case becomes much harder to make.

Links

• We could shift to sustainability and save $26 trillion. Why aren’t we doing it?
• Unlocking The Inclusive Growth Story Of The 21st Century
• Global Commission on the Economy and Climate
• Arctic Is Warming Twice As Fast As World Average

For The First Time, Scientists Prove Human Activity Is The Top Cause Of Warming Antarctic Waters

National Observer - Kelsey Litwin

Researchers take part in a 2006 sampling expedition around Antarctica on the SA Agulhas. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart 

Neil Swart had barely begun his master’s degree at the University of Cape Town when he embarked on a three-month voyage to the South Pole.While aboard a ship meant to resupply South Africa’s research facilities in Antarctica, enduring rocky waters and waves reaching 10 metres tall, Swart deployed instruments to record the Antarctic Ocean’s temperature.

"We have to get to zero emissions at some point in the future if we were to stabilize the climate,” said Environment Canada scientist @Neil_C_Swart #climateaction #climatechange #oceans

At the time, Swart thought of himself as a volunteer helping further “someone else’s science.” He didn’t expect that 13 years later, the data he collected would allow him and a team of researchers to identify human activity as the number one cause of rising water temperatures in the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean.
“It’s kind of nice to see it come full circle,” Swart, now a researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told National Observer in an interview.
Along with other scientists from the department, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, Swart found that changes seen in Southern Ocean temperature are directly tied to ozone depletion and human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to regular temperature variations or responses to natural climate changes, such as volcanic eruptions or changes in the sun.
Their findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience on Monday.

Researchers on the SA agulhas (left to right) Mike Funke, Sebastian Swart, Natalie Burls and Neil Swart hold an "Argo float," which Swart says is an instrument that dives 2,000 metres down while measuring ocean temperature and salinity. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart on Facebook

Serious consequences for the ocean
While the connection between human-made greenhouse gas emissions and rising global ocean temperatures has long been understood, this is the first time it has been proven specifically for the waters that surround Antarctica, explained Swart.
Since industrialization, the ocean has absorbed nearly 40 per cent of human-made greenhouse gas emissions. The Southern Ocean, according to Swart, is responsible for absorbing the majority of those emissions.
“The Southern Ocean is the single most important region globally taking up the heat associated with global warming,” he said. As a result, it plays a huge role in mitigating the effects of climate change.
“If it weren’t providing these services, so to speak, we would be experiencing far more CO2 increases in the atmosphere. So understanding changes in this region is really critical.”
The consequences of human-induced warming in that region are not minor, he added.
"By driving an intense warming of these southern waters, we’re increasingly destabilizing the Antarctic ice sheet,” he said. That contributes to well-documented increases in sea level, affecting coastal populations, he explained, and “the warmer ocean water becomes, the less effective it becomes at absorbing CO2.”

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Link: Human Causes Only Plausible Source of Warming in Southern Ocean

Swart explained that as the ocean’s ability to absorb climate-warming carbon dioxide decreases, global temperatures stand to increase, all of which could lead to greater weather extremes, such as more heat waves and changes in or stronger precipitation events.
To attribute the rise in ocean water temperature in the region to human activity, Swart and his team used simulations based off historical data and recent observations. By removing contributing factors from their simulation, the researchers were able to pinpoint the the cause as being man-made greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion.
Fossil fuel production and consumption are some of the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases. In 2015, 26 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions came from the oil and gas industry.
In a 2012, Swart and Andrew Weaver – then a climate scientist, now an MLA in British Columbia and head of the province’s Green Party — published a controversial article in the journal Nature Climate Change. The pair suggested coal was a bigger threat to climate change than oilsands, while stressing that there was a need to move toward non-greenhouse gas emitting sources of energy and avoiding new fossil fuel infrastructure. After their research was used by pro-oilsands advocates to justify calls for expansion, the two scientists later reiterated that all fossil fuel use needs to be regulated to reduce global warming.

An Antarctic Ocean ice shelf is captured during a 2006 sampling expedition and resupply mission, during which Neil Swart and his colleagues collected the data that was eventually published in the Nature Geoscience report on Sept 24, 2018. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart

‘Zero emissions’ only way to stabilize climate
“It is very clear that to limit warming to any given (global temperature) target…there’s a finite amount of CO2 emissions that we’re allowed to make, kind of like a budget we’re allowed to spend,” said Swart.
“If we go above that, we will exceed that target threshold. We have to get to zero emissions at some point in the future if we were to stabilize the climate.”
While it’s a lofty goal, Swart said ozone depletion is a good example of a climate problem tackled by policy. The Montreal Protocol, which took effect in 1989, helped eliminate the production of chlorofluorcarbons, a chemical that contributed the depletion of the ozone layer and was once commonly found in refrigerators and aerosol sprays. In the decades since, there has been significant decrease in ozone depletion.
Last November, an amendment was added to the protocol to reduce production of hydrofluorocarbons, which are used similarly to chlorofluorcarbons. Titled the Kigali Amendment, it will come into effect on Jan. 1, 2019.
“As a result, the consequences of (ozone depletion) are not going to be as severe as they would have been if we hadn’t taken action,” said Swart.
“I think that provides a good model for the case with CO2 – that we also have to take some kind of similar action which ultimately deals with the problem.”

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Link: Recent Southern Ocean warming and freshening driven by greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion

The Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change is one of the federal government’s attempts to take such action. The strategy, which was introduced in December 2016, is meant to significantly reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It intends to do so, in part, through a carbon tax scheme, which Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta have all opposed.
Canada has also committed to the Paris Agreement, along with 194 other countries in December 2015. Though not legally binding, in doing so, Canada also pledged to take action to limit a global temperature increase of 2 degrees this century.

Links

• Antarctic ice could melt rapidly, adding three feet to sea level rise by 2100, study warns
• What’s Causing Antarctica’s Ocean To Heat Up? New Study Points To 2 Human Sources
• NASA launches Satellite To Precisely Track How Earth's Ice Is Melting
• At This Rate, Earth Risks Sea Level Rise Of 20 To 30 Feet, Historical Analysis Shows
• Planet At Risk Of Heading Towards “Hothouse Earth” State
• New Antarctica Map Is Like ‘Putting On Glasses For The First Time And Seeing 20/20’
• Domino-Effect Of Climate Events Could Push Earth Into A ‘Hothouse’ State
• Earth At Risk Of 'Hothouse Climate' Where Efforts To Reduce Emissions Will Have No Impact, Study Finds
• How Scientists Tracked Antarctica's Stunning Ice Loss
• Antarctica Has Lost 3 Trillion Tonnes Of Ice In 25 Years. Time Is Running Out For The Frozen Continent

World 'Nowhere Near On Track' To Avoid Warming Beyond 1.5c Target

The Guardian - Oliver Milman

Exclusive: Author of key UN climate report says limiting temperature rise would require enormous, immediate transformation in human activity

Avoiding a temperature increase of more than 1.5C will be ‘extraordinarily challenging’, says the report’s author. Photograph: Matt Brown/AP 

The world’s governments are “nowhere near on track” to meet their commitment to avoid global warming of more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial period, according to an author of a key UN report that will outline the dangers of breaching this limit.
A massive, immediate transformation in the way the world’s population generates energy, uses transportation and grows food will be required to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C and the forthcoming analysis is set to lay bare how remote this possibility is.
“It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5C target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that,” said Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which will be unveiled in South Korea next month.
“While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.”
In the 2015 Paris climate pact, international leaders agreed to curb the global temperature rise to 2C above the era prior to mass industrialization, with an aspiration to limit this to 1.5C. The world has already warmed by around 1C over the past century, fueling sea level rises, heatwaves, storms and the decline of vulnerable ecosystems such as coral reefs.

Shindell would not share exact details of the IPCC report, but he said that the more ambitious 1.5C goal would require a precipitous drop in greenhouse emissions triggered by a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, particularly coal, mass deployment of solar and wind energy and the eradication of emissions from cars, trucks and airplanes.
Even then, emerging technology will be required on a global scale to capture emissions at the source and bury them in the ground or remove carbon directly from the air.
“The penetration rate of new technology historically takes a long time,” Shindell said. “It’s not simple to change these things. There aren’t good examples in history of such rapid, far-reaching transitions.”
The fading prospect of keeping the global temperature rise to below 1.5C has provoked alarm among leaders of low-lying island nations that risk being inundated should the world warm beyond this point.
“Every country must increase the ambition of their existing targets,” said Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, which announced a plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050 at the UN general assembly in New York this week. “If we can do it, so can everyone else.”
The UN general assembly has again pitted the world’s countries against Donald Trump when it comes to climate change, with the US president using his keynote speech to praise “clean coal”. Trump has vowed to exit the Paris accord, a stance that Emmanuel Macron, the French president, told the UN should be met with consequences such as a refusal by countries to enter into trade deals with the US.
“It’s a lot more difficult without the US as a leader in climate change negotiations,” Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s environment minister, told the Guardian. “We have to find solutions even though the US isn’t there.”
Elvestuen said countries, including Norway, which is one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, need to transition away from fossil fuels, embrace electric cars and halt deforestation.
He admitted these changes had not happened quickly enough since the Paris deal. Last year, global greenhouse gas emissions rose slightly again after a short period of stasis.
“We are moving way too slowly,” Elvestuen said. “We have to do more of everything, faster. We need to deliver on policies at every level. Governments normally move slowly but we don’t have the time.”
“The 1.5C target is difficult, but it’s possible. The next four to 12 years are crucial ones, where we will set the path to how the world will develop in the decades ahead. The responsibility in doing this is impossible to overestimate. To reach the goals of the Paris agreement we need large structural changes.”
A difference of 0.5C in temperature may appear small but the IPCC report, which is a summary of leading climate science, is expected to warn there will be major impacts if warming reaches 2C.
“Even 1.5C is no picnic, really,” said Dr Tabea Lissner, head of adaptation and vulnerability at Climate Analytics.
Lissner said a world beyond 1.5C warming meant the Arctic would be ice-free in summer, around half of land-based creatures would be severely affected and deadly heatwaves would become far more common. “0.5C makes quite a big difference,” she said.

Links

• While economic growth continues we’ll never kick our fossil fuels habit
• World on track for 3C of warming under current global climate pledges, warns UN
• What would a global warming increase of 1.5C be like?
• EU says 1.5C global warming target depends on ‘negative emissions’ technology
• Paris climate talks: vulnerable countries demand 1.5C warming limit
• Global warming likely to breach 2C threshold, climate scientists conclude
• World is warming quicker than thought in past decade, says Met Office
• Chinese government adviser warns that 2C global warming target is unrealistic

Will 2018 Be The Year Of Climate Action? Victorian London’s ‘Great Stink’ Sewer Crisis Might Tell Us

The Conversation - Chris Turney

As extreme weather events, like Hurricane Florence, become more common it is time to ask what it will take for the world to finally tackle climate change. Encouragingly, there may be a historical precedent: Victoria London’s handling of the ‘Great Stink’, where growth had turned the River Thames into an open sewer. EPA/JIM LO SCALZO

In the late 19th century, the irrepressible Mark Twain is reputed to have said in a speech:

Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.

He’s said to have borrowed that quote from a friend, but if Twain were alive today he would no doubt have more to say on the subject. In a time when we are becoming increasingly accustomed to extremes in the climate system, the events of this year have risen above the background noise of political turmoil to dominate the global headlines.
While global leadership in dealing with climate change may be depressingly limited, I can’t help but wonder if 2018 will be the year our global tribe feels threatened enough to act.
Encouragingly, there may be a historical (and largely unknown) precedent for tackling climate change: Victoria London’s handling of the “Great Stink”, where growth had turned the River Thames into an open sewer.

Climate system extremes
2018 is breaking all manner of records.
In January, the eastern USA and western Europe fell under persistent frigid Arctic conditions brought about by a weakening of the polar vortex.
Six months later, the north has been experiencing exceptional hemispheric-wide summer warming and drought, most likely amplified by a weakening of Atlantic Ocean circulation – the latter (ironically) being expressed by unusually cool surface ocean waters.
In recent weeks, Florence, Mangkhut and Helene have become the latest household names to mark a succession of storms battering the USA, Asia and Europe this year.

A pastoralist stands at the bottom of one of his empty dams on his property at Langawirra Station north of Broken Hill, New South Wales in 2018. AAP Image/David Mariuz

Closer to home, New South Wales is now suffering a state-wide drought, along with other regions in Australia. Early wildfires and the threat of more to come has resulted in the earliest government total fire ban on record.
As the crisis deepens, it’s worth reflecting on Victorian London’s “Great Stink” sewage problem - where things finally got so bad that authorities were forced to accept evidence, reject sceptics, and act.

A ‘deadly sewer’
In the Victorian age, London’s growth had turned the River Thames into an open sewer. Conditions were so bad they inspired many to write on the risks to public health.

‘The silent highwayman’, an 1858 cartoon from Punch magazine, commenting on the deadly levels of pollution in the River Thames. Wikimedia, CC BY

Charles Dickens provided a lurid description in Little Dorrit, describing the Thames as a “deadly sewer” while the scientist Michael Faraday wrote to The Times of London that:

if we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a hot season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.

An 1855 cartoon from Punch Magazine in which Michael Faraday gives his card to ‘Father Thames’, commenting on Faraday gauging the river’s ‘degree of opacity’. Wikimedia

In 1854, medic John Snow demonstrated the source of cholera in the London suburb of Soho was a local water pump. To test his ideas, officials removed the handle on the pump, and the number of cases all but disappeared.

Sewage sceptics
But there was an intransigence about meeting the threat. Ignoring scientific evidence, “sewage sceptics” held the view that poor air quality – so called “miasma”– was the cause of the frequent outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.
They convinced the government to reject the evidence, considering there to be “no reason to adopt this belief”. The scale of the sewage problem in London was considered too large to be solved, possibly encouraged by political pressure from the thriving water industry that delivered direct to those who could afford it. For several more years, this view persisted.
That was until the year of the “Great Stink”.

The ‘Great Stink’ arrives
In the summer heatwave of 1858, the Thames’ sewage turned noses across London. Conditions were so bad, teams of men were employed to shovel lime at the many sewage outlets into the capital’s river in a vain attempt to stop the smell.
Even the national legislators were not spared, with the windows of the Houses of Parliament covered in lime-soaked sack cloths. Serious thought was even given to relocating government outside London, at least until the air had cleared. The conditions created a heady stench that cut through the politically charged rhetoric of the day, and forced a rethink.
Within nine years of the “Great Stink”, the 900-kilometre London Sewage Network was constructed - an engineering marvel of the Victorian age. The politicians at the time weren’t immediately convinced the new infrastructure would help public health but the disappearance of disease accepted as the norm for the capital convinced even the most ardent of sceptics. No one talks about miasma as a real thing anymore.
The Great Stink of 1858 overturned beliefs founded on misinformation. A challenge considered impossible, was solved.

Our generation’s ‘Great Stink’
Fast forward 160 years and the recent spate of climate headlines is on the back of an increasing trend towards greater extremes, with all the associated human, environmental, and financial costs.
In August of this year, the Actuaries Climate Index – which monitors changes in sea level rise and climate extremes for the North American insurance industry since the 1960s – reported that the five-year moving average reached a new high in 2017. This year promises to continue the trend and is no single outlier.
Will 2018 be the year when the world does something about climate change?
Will 2018 be our generation’s “Great Stink”?

Links

• Lowy Institute Poll shows Australians' support for climate action at its highest level in a decade
• While nations play politics, cities and states are taking up the climate challenge
• Google searches reveal where people are most concerned about climate change
• Climate change will reshape the world’s agricultural trade
• Great Barrier Reef Foundation chief scientist: science will lie at the heart of our decisions
• Eulogy for a seastar, Australia’s first recorded marine extinction
• Antarctica’s ‘moss forests’ are drying and dying
• Vital for life, heat and power – what you never knew about salt water
• Lack of climate policy threatens to trip up Australian diplomacy this summit season
• Australia’s UN report card: making progress, could do better on inequality and climate
• For Pacific Island nations, rising sea levels are a bigger security concern than rising Chinese influence

UN Chief Blasts Lack Of 'Strong Leadership' On Climate

New York Times - Associated Press

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
Photo: BRAZIL PHOTO PRESS / AFP

UNITED NATIONS — The head of the United Nations blamed lack of leadership Wednesday for the world's failure to take tough decisions needed to stop global warming, warning that a key goal of the Paris climate accord is at risk.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres bluntly told leaders gathered in New York that unless current emission trends for greenhouse gases are reversed by 2020, it will be impossible to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The target was set in the 2015 Paris agreement, but the U.N. says government commitments so far only achieve a third of the emissions cuts needed.
"Why is climate change faster than we are?" he asked. "The only possible answer is that we still lack strong leadership to take the bold decisions needed to put our economies and societies on the path of low-carbon growth and climate-resilience."
Guterres' comments echo those of climate researchers, who say the world could miss even the less ambitious goal of the Paris accord of keeping temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century compared with pre-industrial times.
The U.N. chief challenged governments to end fossil fuel subsidies, help shift toward renewable energy and back a price for carbon emissions that reflects their actual cost. A recently published report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found the cost of taxes and permits for carbon emissions among dozens of leading economies is over 76 percent below the estimated actual cost of 30 euros ($35.21) per metric ton.
Guterres said climate-related disasters already cost the world $320 billion last year, a figure likely to grow with increased warming.
He singled out the world's 20 leading and emerging economies — known as the G-20 — saying they account for about 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
As Guterres spoke at the United Nations, across town corporate leaders and government officials announced a range of programs intended to pump billions of dollars in public and private funds into what's often referred to as the "green economy," which aims to reduce the environmental impact of business.
Among them, the World Bank announced it would invest $1 billion in battery storage systems for developing and emerging economies. World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said the Washington-based institution expected to raise an additional $4 billion for the venture to triple battery storage capacity in developing countries by 2025.
French President Emmanuel Macron cautioned against governments and companies "greenwashing" unacceptably high carbon emissions with big-figure promises, citing the pledge by rich countries to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor nations tackle global warming.
That target is unlikely to be met, especially if the United States — which under President Donald Trump announced its withdrawal from the Paris accord — doesn't contribute its share.
Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, told the meeting of her recent visit to small Pacific island nations that are already suffering the effects of climate change.
"None of us can opt out of severe weather events or rising sea levels, so nor should we have the ability to opt out of action either," she said.
New Zealand is one of several countries considering enshrining in law a goal of ending all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The coming months will see a flurry of negotiations over the rules that countries will have to follow as part of their commitment to the Paris accord. Signatories have set themselves a deadline of agreeing to rules by the time leaders meet in Katowice, Poland, in December.

Links

• Speech by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres | UNFCCC
• Nations backslide on climate protection promises
• UN Secretary-General Calls for Rapidly Scaled up Climate Finance
• World must act by 2020 to avoid runaway climate change, UN chief

In A Country So Dry Even Cows Take Showers, Climate Change Gets Ignored

Bloomberg - Michael Heath | Emily Cadman | Jason Scott

Australia’s government is as far from a plan of action as it’s ever been.

Farmer Leeanne Oldfield and her dog Jett at her farm in Wandandian, New South Wales, Australia.

Photographer: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg

From cooling showers for cows to airport runways designed for higher sea levels, businesses and parts of Australia’s A$2.7 trillion ($2 trillion) pension industry are starting to find ways to live with rising temperatures.
In the world’s driest inhabited continent, enduring a devastating drought that arrived in mid-winter, private action to prepare for climate change contrasts with years of division on energy and environmental policies. Australia’s latest climate casualties are its farmers, who are being forced to slaughter livestock and watch crops wither amid one of the worst droughts on record.
Leeanne Oldfield has abandoned expansion plans and the few dozen malnourished sheep that remain of her 300-strong flock can’t even drink from the dam anymore, as it has gone dry.
“In good years, this is usually full to the brim with water,” says Oldfield on her farm three hours’ drive from Sydney, pointing to the muddy pit where the dam should be. Frustrated by a lack of government action, she’s helped organize donations of truckloads of hay and grain to other farms.

Oldfield at the dried up freshwater dam on her farm.

Photographer: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg

“Farmers in this country are getting desperate, they’re on their knees,” said Oldfield.
Dry conditions are set to continue with eastern states including New South Wales — the most populous and the powerhouse of the economy — the worst affected. Economists estimate the drought could cut as much as 0.75 percent from gross domestic product growth.

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Dry Nation

Australia receives less rain

than any other inhabited continent

  

Source:
Department of Atmospheric Science, 
University of Wyoming

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Shortly after taking over as prime minister last month, Scott Morrison got on a plane and toured a drought-stricken farm in Queensland, announcing measures to aid the stressed agricultural sector. Yet as for broader climate policy, Australia appears as far away as it has ever been from a consensus on what should be done.
“The staggering thing is we aren’t leading the world,” said John Hewson, former leader of the now ruling Liberal Party who has worked as an economist for the Reserve Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “We should be showing them what can be done and the business opportunities from that in terms of investment, in terms of jobs, in terms of growth, are very significant. And they’ve just been cast aside like they don’t matter."
The road block: politics. Morrison came to the prime ministership after months of toxic infighting over energy policy saw Malcolm Turnbull lose a leadership vote that resulted in the nation’s sixth change of leader in 11 years. The new prime minister — who once brandished a chunk of coal in parliament as a show of allegiance to that sector — quickly ditched Turnbull’s contentious plan to lock in carbon emission reductions, leaving the government with no settled energy policy ahead of an election that must be called by May.

Coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef. 

Source: Kyodo News via Getty Images

With Australia battling bush fires in winter and the Great Barrier Reef facing slow destruction due to coral bleaching, voters want action. An Australia Institute poll this month showed that 73 percent of Australians are concerned about climate change, up from 66 percent last year. And just over half of people surveyed think governments aren’t doing enough.
Poisonous politics is also hitting business. Australia’s total investment in clean energy soared to a record $9 billion last year, largely driven by a rush to fulfill a government target that winds down in 2020. Investment will fall off a cliff over the coming years unless there is a major change in government policy, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Under the Glare
Australia is one of the most vulnerable developed countries to climate change
- yet also has the financial muscle to respond

Note: Ranking among developed economies.
Source: HSBC

“The government has revived the default approach the Liberal-National coalition has had on emissions since the 1990s: do as little as possible, hope that economic developments reduce emissions without policy intervention, deny that there are any policy issues, and defer as many issues as possible to another day,” said Kobad Bhavnagri, head of BNEF research for Australia. “It’s akin to having one’s fingers crossed and head buried in the sand.”
For Australia’s pension funds, the lack of certainty surrounding climate policy is a problem because they often need to plan decades ahead. With infrastructure assets in particular, which investors may wish to hold indefinitely, ensuring they’ll still be operational and profitable in a changed climate is vital.
“Climate change is here and the impacts are being felt,” said Emma Herd, chief executive officer of the Investor Group on Climate Change, whose members control about A$2 trillion in investments. “Large sections of the private sector are moving in concert with global change and not being driven by domestic regulatory pressures.”
Meantime, Australian firms are developing cutting-edge tools that allow investors to model how climate change will impact precise areas where they have an asset, says Herd. Nick Wood, director of consultancy Climate Policy Research, says the private sector’s attitude has “definitely changed.”

Forget Paris
Australia is projected to miss its global commitments on current policies

Note: Y axis = carbon emissions (MtCO2e)
Source: Climate Analytics, Ecofys and NewClimate Institute

IFM Investors, a A$111 billion infrastructure fund, has taken steps to safeguard assets against environmental change. It part owns Brisbane Airport, which built a new water side runway 1.5 meters higher than regulation demands. The fund is also offering lower berthing fees at its ports to less-polluting ships.
Construction & Building Unions Superannuation, a A$46 billion Australian fund, has committed to making all of its properties have net zero emissions by 2030.

A sheep drinks from what remains at the freshwater dam at Oldfield's farm.
Photographer: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg

“While Australia is locked in a policy quagmire on climate action, the world is moving on and this makes sound investment and economic sense,” said Kristian Fok, CBUS’s chief investment officer.
On her dairy farm 700 kilometers inland from Sydney, Ruth Kydd says there is only one answer: prepare now. To prevent dairy production dropping as cows become heat stressed, she’s installed sprinklers for them to cool off under, and stored at least six months supply of feed. That's put her in a stronger position than many to fight the drought.
“All our decisions have a long-term aspect to them, otherwise it’s not worth investing the money,” she says. How the climate will look in a decade or more “is always in the back of your mind.”

Links

• Energy Policy Captive To Lobbyists And 'Mad Ideologues', Tim Flannery Says
• Why Australia Is Heading For Epic Failure On Carbon Emissions
• Morrison Now Officially Worse Than Abbott On Climate Change
• Australia's Rank On Global Development Index Hurt By Climate Change Inaction
• Australia Has No Climate-Change Policy — Again
• The Global Fight Against Climate Change Just Stalled. The Clock To Restart It Is Ticking
• Australia On Track To Miss Paris Climate Targets As Emissions Hit Record Highs
• Australia Tried To Water Down Climate Change Resolution At Pacific Islands Forum: Leader
• Global Warming Tops The Agenda As Climate Brings Down A Third Australian Prime Minister
• Is Climate Change Supercharging Drought In Australia?
• Australia Wilts From Climate Change. Why Can’t Its Politicians Act?

Fear Climate Change — And Our Response To It

Bloomberg - Tyler Cowen*

Global warming will be expensive, and humanity’s irrational reaction may make it even more so.

The signs are getting clearer. Photographer: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

The potential costs of climate change, already the subject of heated debate, may actually be understated.
It’s not just the potential disruptions to weather systems, agriculture and coastal cities; it’s that we may respond to those problems in stupid and destructive ways. As the philosopher and cartoon character Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Consider how poorly we have responded to many non-climate-related problems. In the case of Brexit, for example, the Leave movement was arguably responding to some real problems. The European Union bureaucracy is too stringent, and perhaps the U.K. did not have an ideal arrangement with immigration.
But Brexit is careening toward disaster, with no good plan on tap, the two major parties in splinters, the British pound declining, the Irish “Good Friday” agreement at risk, and the U.K. seriously talking about food stockpiles and other emergency measures.
It would have been better if the British had responded to their country’s problems in a less extreme way, or simply learned to live with the problems they had. Instead, they voted for a rash and poorly thought-out remedy.
Similarly, you might think that supporters of President Donald Trump have legitimate concerns about illegal immigration and U.S. unwillingness to stand up to China. Still, that did not require a presidential “remedy” that has brought chaos and corruption to the White House and U.S. foreign policy alike.
In short, the world increasingly appears to be reaching for extreme and imprudent remedies to admittedly complex problems. These overreactions do not seem to be mere accidents, but arise from some pretty fundamental features of polarized politics — namely, that discourse has become less rational and technocratic.
When it comes to climate change, all this plays out in interesting ways. In the U.S., imagine that many Florida residents have to leave their residences permanently, due to fiercer storms or rising sea level. The rational approach might involve well-functioning insurance markets, some public-sector transfers and compensation, and better infrastructure planning.
The idea would be to limit the number of such moves or at least to lower their cost. That could prove very costly but essentially manageable.
But that is probably not what we will get. Instead, the debate may well radicalize Florida politics, which has consequences for national politics as Florida is a swing state. On the federal level, an infrastructure bill would invariably direct too much money to wasteful new projects in less populated states. Everywhere, the harsh, non-sympathetic tone of the debate will further corrode American politics.

Forced migration
Looking outside of the U.S.: Imagine that climate change forced or induced the migration of many people from Bangladesh. An ideal international reaction would involve foreign aid plus the cooperative parceling out of refugees to different countries.
Circa 2018, following the crises in Syria and Libya, does anyone really expect such a rational outcome? A more likely, though admittedly speculative scenario, is clashes on the border with India, the further radicalization of Indian politics (“build a wall”), refugee camps full of hundreds of thousands of people, and more extremist terrorism in Bangladesh.
I am struck by the costs of climate change suggested in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, hardly a source of denialism. Its cost estimate — “1 to 5% of GDP for 4°C of warming” — is relatively reassuring. After all, global GDP is right now growing at more than 4 percent a year.
If climate change cost “only” 4 percent of GDP on a one-time basis, then the world economy could make up those costs with less than a year’s worth of economic growth. In essence, the world economy would arrive at a given level of wealth about a year later than otherwise would have been the case. That sounds expensive but not tragic.
Unfortunately, that is not the right way to conceptualize the problem. Think of the 4 percent hit to GDP, if indeed that is the right number, as a highly unevenly distributed opening shot.
That’s round one, and from that point on we are going to react with our human foibles and emotions, and with our highly imperfect and sometimes corrupt political institutions. (Libertarians, who are typically most skeptical of political solutions, should be the most worried.)
Considering how the Syrian crisis has fragmented the EU as well as internal German politics, is it so crazy to think that climate change might erode international cooperation all the more? The true potential costs of climate change are just beginning to come into view.

*Tyler Cowen is professor of economics at George Mason University. His books include “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”

Links

• New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World
• The Climate-Change Debate Has Shifted, Not Ended
• Viewing Climate Change as a Geopolitical Risk
• France's Macron on Climate Change, EU Challenges and Reforms
• BOE Warns of Banks Doing Too Little, Too Late on Climate Change
• Even in Dry Australia, Politics Mean Climate Change Gets Ignored
• Big Oil Warns of Backlash as It Makes Vow on Climate Change
• How We’re Making Climate Change Even More Expensive
• What Companies Can Do to Combat Climate Change
• Standard Chartered to Stop Financing New Coal Power Plants