27/03/2019

The Rise Of Students Against Climate Change

Independent Australia -

Students striking against the lack of climate change policy are a strong voice against an ineffective government, writes Peter Henning.
A sea of placards were the voice of a generation wanting a better future (Screenshot via YouTube)
IT IS NOT OFTEN in Australian history that school students have been politicised to the extent of taking direct action on an issue. There have been other occasions, but they are fundamentally different from what is happening now in relation to the failure of the political system to address climate change.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, high school students who participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, against apartheid, on civil rights issues and against environmental destruction, for example, rallied in support behind a much broader movement without playing the key role in leadership.
The same is true of other public protests on a range of issues since then, such as saving the Franklin River, stopping old-growth logging, Aboriginal rights, gender equality — until now.
It is difficult to say at this point in time how this will play out because it is unprecedented for high school students to take the lead on an issue of such importance. The turnout on 15 March was clearly a shock to politicians and other authorities. In Melbourne, the police attempted for a brief period to keep the roads and tramlines clear at the top end of Collins Street but then gave up. They were simply overwhelmed by student numbers.


It was a sea of placards across the 20,000 people there and they dominated the space and told a story which is no flash in the pan.
People like Scott Morrison, Matthias Cormann, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, her Education Minister and other climate change deniers and delayers were variously “appalled”.  Take them back in time and they would have opposed the eight-hour day, the old-age pension and the abolition of slavery. As in the case of all organised attempts at reform from beyond the corridors of established political and economic power and influence extending back in time and place for generations, the age-old canard of people being manipulated by “professional activists/agitators” has been raised once again.
In the vacuous rhetoric of Morrison et al, we can hear the voices of Bjelke-Petersen with Reds under the bed, John Howard opposing Wik and Mabo and an apology to the stolen generations, Tony Abbott proclaiming that same-sex marriage will wreak havoc and Scott Morrison informing us that lumps of coal are lovely, divinely-created gifts.
When Greta Thunberg commented that the statement of the NSW Minister for Education “belongs in a museum”, she could have been saying the same thing about nearly every Liberal and National Party politician in Australia.
Such political opposition to students having a voice about their own future will only strengthen this generation’s view that the current political class are active agents against them, with little interest in anything except their own piece of cake.

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The placards were unequivocal in their overt contempt for the current Federal Government —
‘Governments are supposed to help. So where the bloody hell are you?’; ‘It’s time to change politics like we change PMs’; ‘Fossils should be in the ground not parliament’; ‘I can’t believe I’m marching for facts’; ‘I bet the dinosaurs thought they had time, too’; ‘School taught me that dinosaurs were extinct’; ‘If climate was a bank it would have been saved’; ‘The water is rising. Get your budgie smugglers ready’.
Young Australians articulating a clear understanding that the Federal Government is essentially ignorant and contemptible is somewhat different to anything we’ve seen before.
One student, 17-year-old Manjot Kaur of Sydney said:
“The action of striking is so important. Students are so afraid, so upset, so worried about their future that they’re literally sacrificing their education to show how serious this problem is. Because right now we aren’t treating it as a crisis. The act of striking is us saying this needs to be treated as an emergency.”
In Melbourne on 15 March, it was obvious that many schools fully supported the strike and encouraged students to wear their school uniforms with pride. On the other hand, some school principals threatened that those who participated could jeopardise their assessment results.

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Schools which threaten sanctions and punitive action in this way are contradicting one of their essential and fundamental educational purposes to develop democratic values, participation in public life and critical thinking in students.
Such schools are contributing to the development of a mindset which encourages silence, passivity and acquiescence in the face of overwhelming evidence that climate change is here with us now and that Australia is already being severely impacted.
Schools not actively promoting discussion of climate change are breaching their responsibilities as educational institutions, undermining educational standards, inhibiting access to vital knowledge and are engaged in the wilful promotion of ignorance.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has recently stated that government inaction “is rapidly moving beyond a purely partisan or moral issue — indeed, the threat is distinctly financial in nature”. The regulator predicts “economic and environmental disaster” to Australia under the current leadership vacuum.
As Greg Jericho wrote in The Guardian, the RBA is no longer equivocating about the threat to the economy, either, saying that:
“...the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects”.
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 According to Jericho:
‘This week really should mark the end of the line for anyone within politics or the media being able to spout climate-change denialism without being met with scorn and jeers. It also should mark the time when boldness and verve becomes the norm for any climate-change policy’. 
Former corporate coal boss Ian Dunlop has come out swinging against proposals for new fossil fuel projects in Australia, labelling them as ‘crimes against humanity’ which must stop immediately:
‘To halt our suicidal rush to oblivion, the community must ensure no leader is elected or appointed in this country unless they are committed to emergency action.’
The three main goals of the student campaign are to stop the Adani coal mine, no new gas or coal projects and 100 per cent renewables by 2030. The majority of informed Australians, including students, are well ahead of the main political parties. Energy Minister Angus Taylor inanely claims that Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target is ‘aggressively high’, when, in fact, it is too low. We are at the end of an era. Australia is at a crossroad it hasn’t faced since late 1941.
The students are right. Ian Dunlop is right. This is a crisis. People like Taylor belong in a museum. If the incoming Shorten administration displays the same flat-Earth blind stupidity, it will follow the current Morrison Government into irrelevance. We simply can’t afford any more gutless and ignorant Federal administrations. Time is too short.
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Why Fear And Anger Are Rational Responses To Climate Change

The Conversation - 

Cyclone Idai wreaks havoc in Mozambique. EPA-EFE/JOSH ESTEY
Not everyone cheered for the school children striking against climate change. In the US, democratic senator Dianne Feinstein accused them of “my way or the highway” thinking. German Liberal Democrats leader Christian Lindner said that the protesters don’t yet understand “what’s technically and economically possible”, and should leave that to experts instead. The UK’s prime minister, Theresa May, criticised the strikers for “wasting lesson time”.
These criticisms share a common accusation – that the striking children, while well-intentioned, are behaving counter-productively. Instead of having a rational response towards climate change, they let emotions like fear and anger cloud their judgement. In short, emotional responses to climate change are irrational and need to be tamed with reason.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – his moral philosophy had a lasting influence on how we view emotions and rationality. Johann Gottlieb Becker/Wikipedia
The view that emotions are intrusive and obscure rational thinking dates back to Aristotle and the Stoics – ancient Greek philosophers who believed that emotions stand in the way of finding happiness through virtue. Immanuel Kant – an 18th-century German philosopher – saw acting from emotions as not really agency at all.
Today, much of political debate is moderated with the understanding that emotions must be tamed for the sake of rational discourse. While this view stands in a long tradition of Western philosophy, it invites Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro to insist that “facts, reason and logic” can dismiss an emotional response to anything in debates.
However, the view that emotions aren’t part of rationality is false. There’s no clear way of separating emotions from rationality, and emotions can be rationally assessed just like beliefs and motivations.

Emotions can be rational
Imagine you’re walking in the woods, and a huge bear approaches you. Would it be rational for you to feel fear?
Emotions can be rational in the sense of being an appropriate response to a situation. It can be the correct kind of response to your environment to feel an emotion, an emotion might just fit a situation. Fear from a bear coming towards you is a rational response in this sense: you recognise the bear and the potential danger it represents to you, and you react with an appropriate emotional response. It could be said to be irrational not to feel fear as the bear walks towards you, as this wouldn’t be a correct emotional response to a dangerous situation.
Imagine you find out that a meteor will kill millions of people across the world, displace hundreds of millions more, and make life for the remainder of humanity much worse. The world’s governments neither put a defence system in place, nor do they evacuate the people threatened. Fear from the meteor, and anger at the inaction of governments, would be a rational response as they are an appropriate reaction to danger. And if you don’t feel fear and anger, you’re not appropriately responding to a dangerous situation.
As you’ve probably guessed, the meteor is climate change. The world’s governments aren’t addressing the causes of climate change or preparing to mitigate its impact. For the people of Mozambique, who are reeling from the devastation of Cyclone Idai, anger is entirely appropriate. Climate change is largely a product of economic development in richer countries, while the world’s poorest are bearing the brunt of its effects.
A woman and child take shelter in Beira City, Mozambique, after the passage of Cyclone Idai.
EPA-EFE/TIAGO PETINGA
Are emotions counter productive?
Regardless of how fitting an emotional response is, it may sometimes be unhelpful for what a person wants to achieve. Theresa May makes this point about the school strike: understandable, but young people missing valuable lessons makes it harder for them to solve climate change. As others have already pointed out, climate change demands rapid action – waiting until some vague point in the future when the children are old enough to do something is relinquishing responsibility instead of meaningful action.
It is, however, hard to deny that fear and anger sometimes lead people to choices they regret. However, dismissing emotional responses on this basis is too quick. There are many examples where fear and anger have triggered the correct response and created a motivational push for change. As Amia Srinivasan, an Oxford philosopher working on the role of anger in politics, puts it,
Anger can be a motivating force for organisation and resistance; the fear of collective wrath, in both democratic and authoritarian societies, can also motivate those in power to change their ways.
Young people take part in a climate strike in Edinburgh, Scotland. Lauren McGlynn, Author provided (No reuse)
 A lot of social change has happened because of anger against injustice, empowering the weak and oppressed, while causing those in power to fear they may be ousted leads to reforms and change. We do need scientific understanding of the climate crisis to solve it, but banning emotions from the debate and dismissing rational fear and anger about climate change may encourage people to do nothing.
So, not only are children, who are angry and scared about climate change, rational, they might be more so than the adults criticising them. Emotions play a bigger part in life beyond rationality – they mark values and indicate what people care about. Fear of the future and anger at inaction are ways young people can express their values. Their emotions are, in the words of feminist writer Audra Lorde, an invitation to the rest of society to speak.
Dismissing the emotions of school children not only invalidates their rational responses to a grave situation – it implicitly states that their values aren’t taken seriously, and that adults don’t want to reach out to them.

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These 8 Cities Are Taking Bold Steps To Get Rid Of Cars

Fast Company - Adele Peters

Cities around the world are starting to see that they’ll be cleaner, healthier, and just better overall if people–not cars–are the priority.
In downtown Cairo, it’s not uncommon to see streets clogged with cars. But in a proposed redesign for a central thoroughfare, they’re hard to spot. Instead, in the concept illustration for what looks like the Egyptian version of Amsterdam, a two-way bike lane, a sidewalk, and a plaza filled with palm trees replace the sea of street parking.
Similar changes are now happening in every part of the world. Some cities are going further, transforming larger swaths of space that were previously dedicated to cars and restricting when and where the most polluting vehicles can drive. For most cities, the primary reason for the change is air pollution, which now kills more people than smoking. It’s also a way for cities to tackle their climate change goals–and to deal with the fact that there just isn’t enough room on city streets for everyone to sit in a car of their own, especially as populations grow. Here are a few of the cities transforming fastest.

Oslo
Cyclists on Oslo City Bikes. Photo: Åsmund Holien Mo/Urban Sharing
In the city center of Oslo, former parking spaces on the street have been transformed into bike lanes, benches, and tiny parks. By the beginning of this year, the city had finished a process of removing 700 parking spaces as a way to incentivize people not to drive in the area, while adding some charging stations for electric cars and more parking for drivers who are disabled. At the same time, Oslo is improving public transit and making it easier to bike. The goal: to reduce pollution while making better use of limited public space. “Cities, like Oslo, have been built for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, says in an email. “I think it is important that we all think about what kind of cities we want to live in. I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars.”

Buenos Aires
Photo: ITDP/Fabrico Di Dio
On a massive boulevard in Buenos Aires that used to have 20 lanes of traffic, the center of the road is now dedicated to buses. When the city made the change a few years ago, commuting times shrank dramatically. Buses also no longer needed to use crowded side streets, which freed up around 100 blocks to become fully pedestrianized, or pedestrian-priority zones where cars are restricted and limited to six miles per hour. Since then, the city has continued to add new pedestrian zones in other areas, and is trying to keep people safe on all its streets. At busy intersections, paint and planters help reshape the street to make it safer for pedestrians, using the same kind of tactical urbanism that has also been used in cities like Boston to quickly test new changes. “It’s pretty inexpensive and it can be deployed quickly, so the public can judge if it actually improves the streets,” says Luc Nadal, technical director for urban development at the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, which worked with the city as it made its initial changes. “Usually, people adopt it fully. Local businesses find that foot traffic increases and that their business improves, and eventually permanent facilities can be implemented.”

London
Photo: Luke Stackpoole/Unsplash
As London grows over the next couple of decades, an extra 100,000-plus people will need to commute to the “Square Mile” in the heart of the city, and the area will also add an extra 3,000 residents. If all of those people drove, traffic wouldn’t move. To deal with the growth–and the air pollution problem it already has–the city is proposing a new plan that would eventually make half of the streets either completely car-free or “pedestrian priority,” meaning that cars (and bikes) would have to yield to people on foot. The city also wants to build protected bike lanes on most major streets. Where cars are allowed, the plan proposes a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit. It’s the latest in a long series of steps to reduce traffic. In 2003, the city pioneered a congestion charge, a fee that drivers pay if they enter central London during peak driving hours. In 2010, the city started opening its first “cycle superhighways” on busy routes. Since 1999, the volume of cars has dropped by about a quarter. The city will finalize its new transport strategy this spring.

Seoul
Photo: Flickr user Bryan
In the first year after the city of Seoul finished converting a highway overpass into a High Line-like pedestrian pathway in 2017, 10 million people used the path and business improved in the area, with sales increasing 42%. Now, the city plans to add new pedestrian zones. Some traffic lanes on major streets will be converted to bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes. The city is also starting to roll out new electric buses, and plans to have 3,000 by 2025, while it also improves bus routes to encourage more people to choose the bus over a car. A rating system for cars is designed to keep the most polluting vehicles out of the city center, and by 2020, only electric cars will be allowed.

Madrid
Photo: Flickr user Nicolas Vigier
Unless you happen to live in central Madrid, there’s a good chance you can’t drive there anymore. In November 2018, the city started rolling out sweeping restrictions across the city center to try to address its air pollution and traffic problems. Older, polluting vehicles are banned, but electric cars can still use the streets. There are exceptions: Residents of the neighborhood and disabled people can still drive more polluting cars, and emergency vehicles can still access the area. Taxis that run on gas or diesel can still drive in the area if they’re relatively new. But when the laws started taking effect, traffic quickly dropped 32%. The low-emissions zone is designed to be “a lung for the city in the heart of Madrid,” the city explains on its website. Inspired by the success, in late 2018 the Spanish government proposed banning any cars that aren’t zero-emissions vehicles from large city centers throughout the entire country.

Beijing
Photo: zhang kaiyv/Unsplash
To fight traffic congestion and cut pollution, Beijing has closed 23 major streets to non-resident cars, says Nelson Peng, an associate and director of the China practice at the urban planning firm Calthorpe Associates. Where drivers are allowed, they’re restricted based on license plates: If their license plate ends in a particular number, they won’t be allowed to drive on a particular day each week. The city also offers small financial incentives for people who choose not to drive an additional day. And because there is a lottery to get license plates in the first place,  most people who want cars can’t get them. Other Chinese cities also have restrictions on when and where people can drive. In a new district in Xiong’An, planners have considered banning private cars and only using self-driving cars that run on clean energy. Visitors to the area’s civic center currently leave their cars in a parking lot and take a bus to the center, where companies are testing new autonomous cars. “If China can successfully switch the [auto] industry to autonomous, clean vehicles, I can imagine permanent restrictions of old-style cars in large areas in the near future,” Peng says.

Paris
Photo: rabbit75_ist/iStock
In 2017, a busy highway next to the Seine River became a car-free pedestrian pathway and park. It’s one piece of the city’s ongoing work to cut pollution by reducing traffic. The city also restricts older, more polluting cars from entering the city on weekdays. By 2024, no diesel cars will be allowed, and by 2030, gas cars will be forbidden. Intersections are being redesigned to give people priority over cars, and bike lanes and public transit options are growing. “I was just there a few weeks ago, and it’s pretty impressive what they’re doing,” says Timothy Papandreou, founder of Emerging Transport Advisors, a consulting firm that works with cities. “You look at the hordes of people that are walking or riding a bicycle or taking a scooter down these riverbanks, and you quickly count the number of people–there’s no way you could move this number of people if they were all in their individual cars.”

Chennai
A bike share in Chennai. Photo: Flickr user ilugc in
Until recently, shopping on busy Thyagaraya Road in Chennai, India, meant navigating through throngs of cars and auto rickshaws. But the street is now transforming to a pedestrian plaza, which will be completed in the next few months. Before building the new plaza, the city ran two trials to block off traffic and give people the experience of a car-free pedestrian mall–something that is common in other parts of the world, but a new idea in Chennai. Nearby, the city also recently launched a new bike-sharing system. Chennai, like other cities in India, struggles with air pollution, in part from transportation. In 2017, the Indian government said that it wanted all new cars to be electric by 2030. Though it later scaled back that goal, it recently committed $1.4 billion in new incentives to help kick-start sales of electric and hybrid cars.

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26/03/2019

'Out Of Line': Top Australian Companies Accused Of Undermining Paris Deal

The Guardian - 

Action group Market Forces urges shareholders to divest holdings in 22 ‘uninvestables’
The companies reported to be ignoring the Paris climate deal are worth a combined $121bn and represent 7% of the ASX300 index. Photograph: Tim Wimborne/Reuters 
New analysis shows 22 of Australia’s largest companies are actively working to undermine the Paris agreement targets, betting shareholders’ money on strategies that assume global climate change action fails.
Investor action group Market Forces says those companies – worth a combined $121bn and representing 7% of the ASX300 – are “out of line and out of time” and has called on shareholders to divest their holdings.
Paris-alignment of ASX 300 companies by weight
The group’s legal analyst, Will van de Pol, said it was the first time Market Forces had “named names” and called out companies whose business strategies relied on the world failing to meet the Paris targets to restrict the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
“A handful of Australian companies are undermining efforts to limit global warming by pursuing new fossil fuel projects, or basing their business plans on energy projection scenarios that would doom the Paris agreement to failure,” the report says.
“These companies have now been given more than three years to align their business with the Paris goals, but have dismissed the notion.”
The list of “uninvestables” includes mainly resource and energy companies, but also diversified investment vehicles including WH Soul Pattinson and Seven Group Holdings.
The Market Forces study found that 199 ASX300 companies, representing 64% of total market capitalisation, faced heightened transitional climate risk but had not yet demonstrated business strategies consistent with the Paris agreement.
There were 143 companies with policies “not overtly inconsistent with Paris”, and just eight had aligned their strategy with the agreement.
Three companies – AGL, Origin and BHP – earned a reprieve from the list of the worst offenders, despite acting in a similar manner, because Market Forces said they had shown some progress towards aligning their goals with Paris.
In recent years, the boardroom has become an increasingly important front for climate activism.
This month, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, announced it would divest from firms that explored for oil and gas. Last month, Glencore said it would no longer back new coalmines in response to investor calls for the company to act on climate change.
Pressure is also increasing on Australian companies, though many still refuse to even consider the financial risk posed to their businesses by climate change.
In September, a report from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission said “the law requires” relevant companies to “include a discussion of climate risk” in their annual report.
In February, the Asic corporate governance council released new recommendations that directors and companies should make climate risk disclosures.
The Market Forces report singled out “coal cowboys” Whitehaven and New Hope, which it said had plans to establish new coalmines, or expand existing ones, based on forecasts that assume the failure of Paris.
Oil and gas companies Woodside, Santos and Oil Search had each “faced increased investor engagement over climate change in recent years, but this has done nothing to dissuade their plans to increase fossil fuel production”, the report said.
“Investors determined to play their part in the fight against runaway climate change must immediately reallocate capital away from these companies.”

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Australian Faces Free Trade Agreement Pressure To Cut Emissions

AFR - Ben Potter

Australia is set to come under increased pressure on climate change this year after French officials insisted the Morrison government's carbon emissions targets are not ambitious enough to fully comply with the Paris agreement.
The French officials' comments come at a sensitive time because Australia is currently negotiating a free trade agreement with the European Union, which EU negotiator Helena Konig and French President Emanuel Macron have said must include a clause requiring full implementation of the Paris agreement.
In a briefing in Paris the officials lavished praise on the role of Pacific Islands nations and New Zealand in climate change negotiations while slighting Australia's efforts with faint praise, and held out the hope of a stiffening of Australia's ambitions after the federal election.
Coal is expected to be Australia's largest export this year. Caria Gottgens
"New Zealand is playing a very constructive role in the fight against climate change. Australia is, well, it's slightly more complicated," an official said.
"Australia is as constructive as it can [be] in the climate change negotiations but frankly not ambitious enough in terms of its NDCs and ambitions. Hopefully it can become more ambitious over time."
NDCs – nationally determined contributions – are the commitments made by individual nations at the Paris talks.
In an apparent reference to the federal election expected to be held by May 18, for which Labor is campaigning on more ambitious carbon targets and leading in opinion polling, a second official said, "We know that things may happen in Australia this year, and we hope of course that the ambition of Australia will increase over time".

Europe's frustration
The remarks underline Europe's frustration with backsliding by countries such as the United States, which wants to pull out of the Paris agreement, Brazil, which is toying with pulling out, and Australia and other nations that claim the energy intensive nature of their economies entitles them to deliver smaller emissions cuts.
The Morrison government has stuck with the carbon targets agreed to at the Paris talks in 2015, which require Australia to reduce its carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. The target would be reduced to about 15 per cent if the government insisted on being able to carry forward the "overachievement" against past "Kyoto" targets, a tactic comparable nations have ruled out.
Public pressure is also increasing for more decisive action on climate change: The School Strike for action against Climate Change. Justin McManus
Australia's climate change negotiators must also return to the United Nations in New York in September to finalise the "rule book" for international carbon markets, which couldn't be agreed at the COPS24 talks in Katowice, Poland, last December despite pressure building for signatories to pursue policies that would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures.

Cut more carbon
Australia is expected to come up with new, improved emissions targets by 2020 under the Paris agreement, which contains an overriding agreement – beyond the individual nations' targets – to limit temperature increases to "well below" 2 degrees.
The French officials agreed with scientists who say existing commitments would mean global temperature increases of more than 3 degrees. But they were not ready to embrace a new target of 55 per cent emissions cuts recommended by an EU committee two weeks ago, which several European nations have pushed back against.
Scientists say temperature increases of 3 degrees and more would be more dangerous, with increased extreme weather events that insurers say could make insurance unaffordable.
Last September the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a scientific report that concluded coal power would have to be virtually eliminated and agriculture changed dramatically to achieve the 1.5 degree target and avoid more frequent dangerous heatwaves, droughts, floods and tropical cyclones as well as irreversible damage to coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef.
Coal is expected to be Australia's largest export this year, with sales of $67 billion across thermal and steel-making coal.
The French officials laid out a series of priorities for climate negotiations including getting the Paris agreement "fully implemented", raising national ambitions for carbon cuts and getting more ambitious commitments from the signatories by 2020.

No coal, no 'double counting'
They said the Group of 20 leading economies – which includes Australia, the US, Japan and Britain as well as France, German, other leading European nations and emerging giants India and China – must take the lead in cutting emissions because they are responsible for four-fifths of global emissions.
France has banned its development aid agencies from financing coal power, and the officials said they wanted the equivalent agencies of China and Japan - the largest funders of global coal power projects - to follow suit and support renewable energy instead, because of the benefits in terms of reduced carbon emissions and improved health outcomes that would likely result.
They noted that Australian officials played a constructive role in technical aspects of climate talks – such as rules for carbon markets and actions to mitigate damage to coral reefs.
But they said they were counting on a strong rule book on carbon markets to emerge from the UN talks in September to prevent any "double counting" – such as the tactic of carrying forward past overachievement – and maintain the integrity of the Paris agreement.
"That's what we mean by environmental integrity – real reductions in emissions, no double counting," an official said.

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Why Climate Change Risks Are 'Material' For Big Finance

Fairfax - Clancy Yeates

After a prod from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the financial regulator this month reminded superannuation funds that their job was to stay out of political causes, and stick to their knitting: looking after members' interests.
Then, the day after this warning was revealed, the very same regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), upped the pressure on our biggest financial institutions to take more action to deal with climate change risks.
Do those two directions from APRA sound like they might be in conflict? They shouldn't.
Financial businesses are under greater pressure to consider their exposure to climate change risks, which could include fossil fuel assets. Credit: Peter Braig
The pressure put on companies over climate action by many large superannuation funds has attracted plenty of attention lately, with some criticising super funds' role in pushing resources giant Glencore's to cap its coal output.
How the funds managing $2.7 trillion in retirement savings deal with social or environment issues is a debate that is worth having, as the clout of super funds will only grow in years to come. When it comes to climate change, however, the message coming from those who regulate our financial system could hardly be clearer.
They view climate change as a real and present business risk that financiers need to be putting high on the agenda – irrespective of the failure of our political system to really deal with the issue. The sooner more companies start viewing it this way, the better.
In the Reserve Bank’s first meaty comments on the topic, deputy governor Guy Debelle this month warned climate change could cause financial shocks, if companies didn't take these risks seriously in their planning.
Then, last week, APRA released its first survey of how 38 large banks, insurance companies, and superannuation funds are looking at climate risks.
It showed a third of these businesses viewed climate changes as a "material" risk to their businesses right now. More than half thought it would be a material risk at some point in the future.
The most common types of financial risks identified were damage to reputation, flood, regulatory action, cyclone, energy risks, and bushfires.
In a finding that's raised some eyebrows among observers, only about half of the general insurers — who are exposed to flood, bushfire, and cyclones — thought climate change was "material" for them at the moment.
More than 40 per cent of banks and superannuation funds also thought climate risks were material right now, and the vast majority thought they would be material risks in the future.
It's a safe bet those proportions will only rise in years to come, as regulators and investors raise the pressure on financial businesses to put more emphasis on climate change risks.
Emma Herd, who represents institutional investors with about $2 trillion as chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change, says the consistent message from regulators is that climate change risks are "material, foreseeable, and actionable."
“The key message for the businesses is don’t get distracted by the political debate. Look at what your regulators are telling you," she says.
Why are the regulators so concerned to see action on climate change?
No doubt part of it is a sense of trying to do their part to help us avoid catastrophic environmental costs for future generations, but their more immediate worries concern financial stability.
APRA board member Geoff Summerhayes, speaking in his capacity as chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum, last month said climate change was quickly moving from a "purely partisan or moral issue" to one that is "distinctly financial in nature."
Insurance companies are the most immediately affected by more frequent and severe natural disasters. Global insured losses in 2018 were only half of those of 2017, Sumerhayes said, but he added that "2018 was still the fourth most costly year on record".
Banks and financial markets would also be exposed to dramatic changes in the values of trillions in fossil fuel assets. There is a risk many of these assets could become "stranded" as a result of policies to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions, or from advances in renewable energy technology. That risk is especially relevant to big fossil fuel producers like Australia, and it's a reason why banks have been getting more wary about coal financing in recent years.
Longer term, banks' massive mortgage books could also be exposed to risks because of hazards made worse from climate change, such as floods or cyclones.
For several years, regulators have been pushing big financial institutions to collect and publish more data on such climate risks, and run scenarios on how they would fare under various "transition" scenarios.
Now, APRA says it wants to see a move from "awareness to action." It wants banks, insurers and wealth managers to look at climate risks just like any other part of their risk management framework — not as a social responsibility issue.
Bank of England governor Mark Carney, a global leader in this area, last week gave us a taste of where APRA and other local regulators will probably go. Carney said he expected climate risks to be given consideration at board level, and that the United Kingdom regulators would start conducting climate "stress tests" on insurers and banks.
Carney acknowledged these sorts of changes - which are likely coming here as well - won't be enough on their own to move the world to a low-carbon economy. That will be up to governments, and business.
But however dysfunctional our domestic debate is on climate change, it's abundantly clear the financial sector needs to give this issue growing attention.

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AustralianSuper targets dirty dozen in Climate Action 100+ push
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25/03/2019

Banks Funneled $1.9 Trillion Into Fossil Fuels Since Paris Agreement

CleanTechnica - 

A new report published this week shows that 33 global banks provided $1.9 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement at the end of 2015 and that the amount of fossil fuel financing has increased in each of the past two years.


The new report, Banking on Climate Change 2019, is the tenth annual fossil fuel report card and the first-ever analysis of funding from the world’s major private banks for the fossil fuel sector as a whole. The report was released Wednesday by Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Sierra Club, and Honor the Earth, and endorsed by over 160 organizations around the world.
In addition to finding that 33 of the world’s top banks are supplied $1.9 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the report also found that of that $1.9 trillion, $600 billion went to 100 companies that are most aggressively expanding fossil fuels, highlighting business-as-usual practices that fly in the face of the latest scientific warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which warned that “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
That same report not only outlined the dangers ahead if we remain committed to business-as-usual practices but also highlighted the fact that we need $2.4 trillion worth of clean energy investments each year up to 2035 to stave off the worst of the effects of climate change. That so much money is still being funneled towards the fossil fuel energy sector speaks volumes about how banks and energy companies are responding to the need for renewable energy.
“Alarming is an understatement. This report is a red alert,” said Alison Kirsch, Climate and Energy Lead Researcher at Rainforest Action Network. “The massive scale at which global banks continue to pump billions of dollars into fossil fuels is flatly incompatible with a livable future. It’s an insult to logic, to science and to humanity that since the groundbreaking Paris Climate Agreement, financing for fossil fuels continues to rise. If banks don’t rapidly phase out their support for dirty energy, planetary collapse from man-made climate change is not just probable — it is imminent.”
Tellingly, the report also found that the four biggest global bankers of the fossil fuel energy sector are all US banks — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America. This is not to say that banks in the rest of the world aren’t also making nuisances of themselves, with Barclays of England, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) of Japan, and RBC of Canada all continuing to heavily finance the industry. But, as highlighted by the authors of the report, “The massive economic weight of the US oil and gas industry can be easily seen in the fact that the top four bankers of climate change are all headquartered in the United States” and, further, two more US banks — Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — serve to fill out the top 12, meaning that “all six of the US banking giants are in the top dirty dozen fossil banks” and “account for an astonishing 37% of global fossil fuel financing since the Paris Agreement was adopted.”
US banking giant JPMorgan Chase is also highlighted in the report as “very clearly the world’s worst banker of climate change,” having funneled $196 billion into the fossil fuel industry between 2016 and 2018 “is nearly a third higher than the second-worst bank, Wells Fargo” — another US bank.
Total Fossil Fuel Financing by Year
LARGE IMAGE
“We’re faced with ever-worsening climate change impacts worldwide, and the latest IPCC report provides a stark 2030 deadline for the deep cuts in global CO2 emissions needed to avoid full climate breakdown,” said Johan Frijns, Director of BankTrack. “Yet banks continue to throw their billions at the fossil fuel industry while announcing minor policy tweaks here and endorsements of the latest toothless ‘responsible finance’ initiative there. One wonders what on earth it will take for banks to finally change course and fully abandon the fossil fuel sector. Campaigners will be demanding exactly this at this year’s upcoming bank AGMs, armed with this report’s shocking new findings.”
RBC of Canada was ranked fifth and is the world’s top banker of tar sands and funneled a total of $101 billion into the fossil fuel industry. England’s Barclays is the top European banker of fracking and coal and is the worst European bank for climate change, having poured $85 billion into fossil fuels and $24 billion into expansion. Japan’s worst fossil fuel bank was MUFG, which funneled $80 billion into fossil fuels overall and $25 billion into fossil fuel expansion specifically, while China’s top banker of coal power was Bank of China, qualifying it as the country’s worst banker of fossil fuels with $17 billion poured into expansion.
“At a time when science tells us we need to rapidly transition to clean energy, major American banks are placing themselves on the wrong side of history by continuing to offer a blank check to the fossil fuel industry,” concluded Ben Cushing, Sierra Club Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign Representative. “The global outcry for financial institutions to stop financing climate destruction will only grow louder and more powerful until these banks get the message and pull their support for dirty fossil fuels once and for all.”

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