When “Creatives” Turn Destructive: Image-Makers And The Climate Crisis

New Yorker - Bill McKibben

If money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns, then P.R. campaigns and snappy catchphrases are the kindling. Illustration by Lia Liao

Author  Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker's newsletter on the environment.

Past sins are past no more: an overdue historical recalibration is under way, with monuments being pulled down, dorms renamed, restitution offered. People did things, bad things; even across the span of centuries, they’re being held to account, and there’s something noble about that. The Reverend Robert W. Lee IV, for instance, recently backed the removal of his famous ancestor’s statue from Richmond, Virginia. The memorial, he wrote, “is a hollow reminder of a painful ideology and acts of oppression against black people. Taking it down will provide new opportunities for conversations, relationships and policy change.” Such a response raises an uncomfortable question: What are we doing now that our descendants will need to apologize for? Might we be able to get ahead of the sin this time?

The most urgent practical question currently facing the species is almost certainly whether we can rapidly transform our energy systems and stop pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Chief executives of oil companies keep the conflagration going, but the industry doesn’t work alone. Last year—before the final fully intact ice shelf in Canada collapsed into the Arctic Ocean; before record fires killed or displaced nearly three billion animals across Australia; before the world measured its first reliable hundred-and-thirty-degree-Fahrenheit temperature, in Death Valley, California; before that state faced the largest fires in its history; before at least five tropical cyclones spun at once through the Atlantic—I wrote about the role that banks, asset managers, and insurance companies have played in supplying the capital required to keep the fossil-fuel industry humming. In the months since, those industries, pressed hard by activists, have begun to shift; giants such as BlackRock have announced sweeping new policies, even if they’re still far from matching their rhetoric with action.

Now I want to focus on another industry that buttresses the status quo: the advertising, lobbying, and public-relations firms that help provide the rationalizations and the justifications that slow the pace of change. Although these agencies are less significant monetarily than the banks, they are more so intellectually; if money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns, then P.R. campaigns and snappy catchphrases are the kindling.

Climate change is sometimes compared to the Holocaust or to slavery, because all three have killed and degraded human lives on an almost unimaginable scale. But the comparisons are, at their root, wrong, at least on moral terms—among many other things, for most of the more than three centuries that people have been burning fossil fuels, they had no idea that they were damaging the future. Coal and oil and gas were seen as—and, at one time, probably were—more liberating than oppressing for the societies that burned them, despite the pollution they produced. It was just around three decades ago that the heat-trapping molecular structure of carbon dioxide, and hence the “greenhouse effect,” became a pressing public issue, and, by that time, fossil fuel was one of the world’s largest industrial enterprises. The burning of fossil fuel wasn’t evil in its origins, in other words—no one need feel guilty for having been a part of it, which is good, because all of us in the rich world are, even if we have solar panels on the roof and a Tesla in the garage.

By this point, however, we know precisely how dangerous the continued combustion of hydrocarbons is. And we have seen that there are affordable alternatives to them. Indeed, solar and wind power can now be produced more cheaply than fossil-fuel energy. And we’ve seen great investigative reporting lay out the fact that the big oil companies have known of the causes of climate change since at least the nineteen-eighties, and worked actively to deny them or cover them up. Clearly, that was immoral. So what do we say in 2020 about the people who are still helping the oil majors and the gas utilities in their efforts to slow a transition to clean energy?

I’m not talking here about coal miners or natural-gas pipeliners or people who work at filling stations, much less people who drive cars or heat their homes—they participate in a world that they didn’t create. But lobbyists and P.R. firms develop promotional campaigns for the industry, and people are starting to hold them accountable for it. In August, Storebrand, a ninety-one-billion-dollar asset manager based in Norway, divested from companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron precisely because of their lobbying activities. “Climate change is one of the greatest risks facing humanity, and lobbying activities which undermine action to solve this crisis are simply unacceptable. The Exxons and Chevrons of the world are holding us back,” Jan Erik Saugestad, Storebrand’s chief executive, said.

What’s interesting about many of the current P.R. campaigns is that they don’t involve classic climate denial. Outside of the Trump Administration and the right wing of the Republican Party, that’s now a dead letter. You could no more persuade a Madison Avenue agency to argue that carbon dioxide is harmless than you could persuade it to argue that Black lives don’t matter. Instead, these campaigns often look for ways to leverage people’s environmental concern in service of precisely the companies that are causing the trouble.

Let’s start with a completely charming series of online ads that B.B.D.O. put together, in 2019, for Exxon. B.B.D.O. is one of the iconic ad agencies (it was frequently mentioned on “Mad Men”), responsible for everything from “Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry” (DuPont) to “Ring Around the Collar” (Wisk detergent). Building on a YouTube craze for videos showing cooks preparing tiny cakes and hamburgers, a creative team put together a series of four Web ads called “Miniature Science.” In the second ad, algae is grown in little dishes, cultivated in a tiny seawater pond, and kept circulating by a minuscule paddle wheel. After a few days, the algae is drained from the pond, and a pocket-size pestle crushes its cell walls to free its oil. Once the paste has been mixed with traces of hexane, sodium hydroxide, and methanol, it produces “a low-emission biofuel.” In the next installment, the mixture is used to propel a boat around a bowl. This algae biofuel, a sprightly narrator notes, could power “entire fleets of ships tomorrow.” In fact, the ad contends, algae could fuel “the trucks, ships and planes of tomorrow.” It concludes, “This is big.”

But it’s not big. The algae tech dates back more than a decade, when a number of oil companies invested relatively small sums in the project. In 2009, Exxon partnered with a company called Synthetic Genomics to conduct research and figure out how to scale production; the oil giant estimates that, between 2008 and 2018, it invested about two hundred and fifty million dollars into biofuel technology. Some five years after that partnership began, Exxon was spending about a hundred million dollars a day trying to find and develop new sources of oil and natural gas and on other costs. Considering this, the algae money represents a rounding error: a few days’ worth worth of capital expenditures from a company still fully committed to its legacy products. And, in any event, by the time B.B.D.O. was producing Exxon’s ads, most other companies had ceased work on algae biofuel, because it had become obvious that it would never make economic sense. As the industry newsletter Oilprice.com put it, you’d need oil to trade at five hundred dollars a barrel—more than ten times its current price—for algae to ever compete with it. As a result, Exxon itself has essentially conceded that this technology won’t amount to much. The company’s latest forecast put off until as late as 2025 the date for actually producing algae fuel, and even then it will be producing just an estimated ten thousand barrels a day, or roughly 0.2 per cent of its refinery capacity. Meanwhile, a trial at Swansea University, in Wales, showed that, if you wanted to supply, say, ten per cent of Europe’s transport-fuel needs with algae, you’d need growing ponds three times the size of Belgium. According to one blog, you’d need ponds covering eighteen per cent of the agricultural land in the United Kingdom just to cover Britain’s transportation habits.

But, if algae has underachieved scientifically, it has dramatically overachieved as a greenwashing tool. The B.B.D.O. Web ads were the least of it; there were also TV campaigns and print ads from agencies such as Universal McCann. “If you look on ExxonMobil’s Facebook or Instagram, you’d think that algae is all they’re thinking about all the time,” Zoya Teirstein, a reporter for Grist, told the Harvard Political Review. According to Kert Davies, the director of the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center, Exxon began running algae ads during the 2016 Olympics, and has spent more than fifty million dollars buying TV time to tout the biofuel’s wonders. Another example: a long “paid post” prepared with the Times’ brand marketing team (the editorial and news staffs were not involved) which aims to explain “how scientists are tapping algae and plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future.” As a researcher explains, “Eventually, we want to power something the size of UPS or FedEx’s global fleet with renewable diesel. That would be pretty aspirational. It’d be a real ‘We did it’ moment.”

In fact, both UPS and FedEx are busily electrifying their delivery-truck fleets. (Amazon and Ikea, too.) As experts have been saying for years, a working climate future depends on the rapid electrification of almost everything—because, if something runs on electricity, it can be powered by the sun and the wind. A decade ago, that was still a hopeful idea, but, in recent years, as the price of solar and wind power has plummeted, it’s become an eminently practical one. It’s already true for domestic consumption, and increasingly it’s even the case for heavy industry, including steel production. Here is the energy expert Saul Griffith speaking to Ezra Klein, of Vox: “We don’t really have a vision for how to create the same amount of liquid fuels as we do today to drive our cars. So really the only answer if we’re going to continue to have a lot of cars is to electrify them. Similarly, we don’t really have an answer to providing heat to our homes that’s zero carbon unless we electrify. It’s really the only pathway that’s viable to get to zero carbon.” Again, a decade ago, this could have seemed a dream. But, as lithium-ion batteries have got more efficient, and electric vehicles have got cheaper, it’s now clearly the only way forward. And it has to happen fast: as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out two years ago, if we don’t make “fundamental transformations” in our energy systems by 2030—which the group defined as cutting emissions by nearly half—we have no chance of meeting even the modest targets set by the world’s nations in Paris five years ago. There is no time to waste.

And yet wasting time is exactly what we’re doing, because the renewable electricity that could stave off climate change is a huge threat to oil and gas companies. Consider another campaign, which began development in 2017. As Mother Jones has reported, the American Public Gas Association, a collection of utilities that supply homes with natural gas, launched a campaign called “Natural Gas Genius,” which was developed by the consulting and communications firm Porter Novelli. (Jack Porter and Bill Novelli were sixties- and seventies-era ad men, too—they worked together to market the Peace Corps.) The message of what the A.P.G.A. called the “refreshing, sassy” campaign was “I choose natural gas to live better,” and the firm found a mid-tier Instagram influencer to help disseminate it. According to the A.P.G.A., The campaign’s “target audience is homeowners who are looking to buy or renovate a home in the next five years. We are confident in the ability of this new type of message that speaks to the emotional aspect of natural gas, to help us achieve our goal of increasing consumer consideration of natural gas direct use in their homes.”

That is, they were trying to do the opposite of what climate science suggests. If you’re buying a new home or renovating an old one, you can install an electric air-source heat pump instead of a gas boiler. It will heat (and also cool) your home effectively and cheaply, and produce far fewer greenhouse gases in the process. You can also install, instead of a gas stove, an induction cooktop—an appliance whose use is growing rapidly in Asia and Europe. Not only will it boil water considerably faster and help with the climate; it will remove from your kitchen a flame that pollutes the indoor air and can harm your kids. According to a Rocky Mountain Institute report released earlier this year, “children are more vulnerable to air pollution due to several factors including their developing lungs and smaller body size. Children in a home with a gas stove have a 24–42 percent increased risk of having asthma.” The report states that new modelling from researchers at U.C.L.A. found that “cooking on gas can spike emissions of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide to levels that would violate outdoor pollutant standards.” Indeed, “homes with gas stoves can have nitrogen dioxide concentrations that are 50–400 percent higher than homes with electric stoves,” the report notes, adding that even the Trump-era E.P.A. has acknowledged a causal link between short-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide and “respiratory symptoms.”

There’s not much question as to why the American Public Gas Association bankrolls the campaign—its members sell gas and it opposes natural-gas bans. (The A.P.G.A. president and C.E.O. David Schryver said, in a statement, “proposed gas bans are flawed, short-sighted and only serve to negatively impact homeowners by restricting consumers’ ability to choose a reliable, efficient and affordable energy source,” adding, “as publicly owned utilities deeply committed to their customers, APGA members see themselves as responsible stewards of the environment and of their communities.”) Nor is there much question about why Exxon is growing algae. As the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, put it, in a recent lawsuit filed against the company, alleging that it has misled consumers and investors, “ExxonMobil’s relentless ‘greenwashing’ marketing campaigns target consumers with messaging regarding ExxonMobil’s purported environmental stewardship, corporate leadership in the realm of environmental and climate protection, and innovative clean energy research, while failing to disclose that ExxonMobil is spending little on clean energy development, and instead is secretly opposing actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ramping up production of fossil fuels that cause climate change.” (Exxon said, in a statement, that “legal proceedings like this waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money and do nothing to advance meaningful actions that reduce the risks of climate change,” adding, “our corporate advertising efforts highlight proof-points to extensive our [sic] R&D portfolio. . . . We’re investing in new technologies that have the potential to provide affordable lower-carbon energy.”) The effect was certainly pretty clear to industry observers. Muse by Clio, an ad-industry daily newsletter, reported that, if the miniature-algae campaign “burnishes the brand as it stares down rough headlines, or just softens the company’s image in general—well, that’s not small potatoes either.”

The sociologist Robert Brulle, who is a visiting professor of environment and society at Brown, has studied such marketing extensively. The campaigns, he said, are “integrated efforts that combine lobbying with P.R. ad campaigns, editorial writing efforts, outreach to sympathetic media outlets, and grassroots mobilization. There is pretty much no real difference in the aims of lobbying and advertising, as they are all part of a large-scale coördinated effort to shift public policy in a specific direction.” And that direction is always the same: go slowly toward the energy future, if you go at all.

But there is some question as to why ad agencies and P.R. firms—and creative talent in general—go along. They can make millions of dollars if they do, but that money’s not an existential issue for them, in the way that it is for the oil and gas companies. Fossil fuels remain an important part of the economy, but a rapidly shrinking one; in 2008, the energy sector—mostly hydrocarbons—represented 15.96 per cent of the S. & P. 500. Now that’s dropped to 2.34 per cent, and it’s the smallest fraction of the index. So there are other things that you could be sassy and refreshing about, other products you could miniaturize and make fun Internet videos about. Miniaturize shampoo!

Did the people making the ads understand the real goal? The account executives I asked, in e-mails, didn’t respond. (B.B.D.O declined to comment for this story.) At Porter Novelli, my queries were answered by Maggie Graham, the company’s global chief of staff. “As more is learned about natural gas,” she wrote, “the industry is adapting and our role is to help consumers know about natural gas as it pertains to their priorities, including environmental issues. As a firm, we continually assess new research and findings relevant to our clients, so that we can integrate it into our work.” On Thursday, the company announced that it had finished that assessment, saying, in a statement, “Porter Novelli is committed to regularly assessing evolving issues, the science that guides them and their impact on diverse, global audiences. As such, we have determined our work with the American Public Gas Association is incongruous with our increased focus and priority on addressing climate justice—we will no longer support that work beyond 2020.” The A.P.G.A. declined to comment.

That decision is a big deal—and it makes sense. The statement of ethics of the American Marketing Association instructs, “Do no harm. This means consciously avoiding harmful actions or omissions by embodying high ethical standards.” According to the Public Relations Society of America’s code of ethics, “We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public.” The standards of practice of the American Association of Advertising Agencies states, “We will not knowingly create advertising that contains . . . false or misleading statements or exaggerations, visual or verbal.” At this point, it’s practically impossible to represent the fossil-fuel industry without violating these canons.

And other people in this class of creatives are starting to recognize that the situation places new demands on them. In June of last year, Extinction Rebellion activists, mostly from France and Sweden, were arrested outside the Cannes Lions annual advertising gathering. “We are coming back here next year with ten thousand people,” an organizer said. The coronavirus pandemic cancelled that plan, but, a few months later, more than twenty small agencies signed a pledge to disclose work with the fossil-fuel industry as a first step toward divesting from those clients. Solitaire Townsend, the founder of the Futerra agency, which organized the pledge, said, in an interview, that three hundred firms have now promised to produce “climate disclosure reports,” detailing how much of their business comes from oil and gas firms. “Most of the big agencies are pushing back, hard,” Townsend told me, this month. “But every copywriter, ideator, designer, and strategist will have to pick a side. Creativity isn’t neutral.”

Townsend added that she’s heard every possible justification. “The worst one is ‘We need to put our own house in order first,’ from multinational ad agencies raking in millions of dollars but with a sustainability strategy appropriate for a kindergarten. That leads to meetings held in renewably powered offices, with recycled coffee cups and organic snacks,” even as the agencies work on “briefs to extend the influence and producing capacity of the fossil-fuel industry.” She went on, “And don’t get me started on Davos events, with ad execs announcing new creative partnerships to ‘inspire young people to climate action.’ The irony is staggering when you think about it: agencies who won’t even disclose if they work for fossil-fuel clients purporting to motivate the young people already out on our streets striking for climate action.” (This same dynamic is playing out in the legal profession, where law students at top schools have come together to rank the nation’s top law firms, and more than six hundred of them have pledged not to work for firms that represent fossil-fuel companies. Last winter, students disrupted recruiting events for Paul, Weiss, which represents Exxon, at Harvard, Yale, and New York University.)

Before the pandemic began, the growing opposition to banks and asset managers funding fossil fuels led to civil disobedience and protests. (I was part of a group arrested at a Chase bank branch in Washington, D.C., in January.) If next year sees an adequately distributed vaccine, it may also see that kind of nonviolent action at ad agencies. A newly launched project, Clean Creatives, is designed to “target precisely the voices who rent themselves out to the industry,” Duncan Meisel, of the N.G.O. Fossil Free Media, said. (I have volunteered with Meisel in the past, opposing oil pipelines.) He added, “We know it won’t be an easy fight—they’ve literally made their careers spinning bad stuff into good stuff, so we’ll have to be on our toes. But every fire and every flood makes clearer precisely what they’re doing—physics simply can’t be spun.”

Even with that kind of aggressive campaigning, success may depend mostly on whether the talent itself decides that it wants to keep working for an industry that’s on the wrong side of the century’s most urgent issue. “I very much hope our great-grandkids look back with benign bemusement on how any creative person could have wasted their talent on an industry about to become irrelevant. That would be the best possible outcome, as it presupposes we overcome this monster,” Townsend said. “The appalling alternative would be the creatives of today being considered craven propagandists for the most destructive industry in human history.”

Links

• Bill McKibben: On Climate Change, We’re Entirely Out Of Margin
• Why Aren’t We Talking More About Trump’s Nihilism?
• The Trump Administration Knows The Planet Is Going To Boil. It Doesn't Care
• Climate Activist Bill McKibben Still Fighting 'The End Of Nature'
• Australia 'The Most Outstanding Rogue Nation' On Climate Change: Bill Mckibben
• Global Warming by the Numbers, Because This Week the Reality Is Too Much
• If There’s Something Valuable Under the Soil, Life Above Ground Can Be Hard The Most Important Global Forecast That You’ve Never Heard Of
• What Have We Learned in Thirty Years of Covering Climate Change?
• In a Historic Wildfire Season, It’s Time to Follow the Lead of Young Campaigners
• With a New Pipeline in East Africa, an Oil Company Flouts France’s Leadership on Climate
• How Fast Is the Climate Changing?: It’s a New World, Each and Every Day
• The World Has Reached Decision Time on the Climate Crisis

(AU) Survey Shows Australian Support For Paris Agreement And Net Zero Target

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

A new survey suggests Australians support the government in taking action to meet Paris Agreement climate targets and moves to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

A total of 71 per cent somewhat or strongly support action to meet Paris targets, while 69 per cent back a net zero target, according to a survey of 1000 people conducted by research firm Ipsos. Nine and 10 per cent oppose the two measures respectively.

Many Australians believe governments should be doing more to act on climate change. Credit: Bloomberg

But the research last month showed the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the relative importance of the environment in the minds of many.

Asked to name the top three issues facing the nation at the beginning of 2020 in the wake of the unprecedented bushfires, the environment was the main issue for the first time, with more than 40 per cent of respondents rating it in their top three.

However, in October, the economy (56 per cent) and unemployment (44 per cent) were the top two issues facing the nation by a comfortable margin. Concern about healthcare and cost of living was also ranked higher, leaving the environment fifth.

But unlike in the period following the global financial crisis, support for general action on climate change has continued to trend upwards through the pandemic, said Ipsos director, Stuart Clark.

“This highlights the degree to which Australians are taking onboard the idea of a green recovery led by government. It’s very different from the situation in 2010 and 2011. At that time, support for climate action dropped away as people prioritised the economic recovery,” he said.

Further data collected in January 2020 shows over half of Australians agree the nation will be better off in the long run if it meets the Paris Agreement targets, indicating many see long-term benefits to involvement in international efforts to reduce emissions.

In January, 60 per cent of respondents agreed Australia should be a global leader in emissions reduction with the aim of encouraging other countries to take similar actions.

The research also revealed the potential impacts of a transition to renewable energy concerned many, with 69 per cent rating reliability of supply as a top-three priority in transitioning. Ensuring energy prices remains low is a top-three priority at 58 per cent.

Ipsos found the institutions that Australians believed had the most power to act on climate change were governments and large multinational companies, and most believed governments, including Australia’s, had performed poorly on the issue.

Links

• Ipsos: Australians overwhelmingly support Government commitments to emissions reductions
• Ipsos: Climate Change Report 2020 (pdf)
• (AU) Climate Change Worrying More Australians Than Ever Before, Australia Institute Report Reveals
• Many Globally Are As Concerned About Climate Change As About The Spread Of Infectious Diseases
• World Risk Poll Reveals Global Threat From Climate Change
• (AU) Two Thirds Of Citizens Around The World Agree Climate Change Is As Serious A Crisis As Covid-19 – Ipsos Survey

(AU) Scott Morrison Tells G20 'Practical Pathways' Will Achieve Cuts In Emissions

 The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

Australian PM says government’s technology roadmap meets the commitment of Paris agreement signatories on long-term emissions

Scott Morrison speaks to the media during a virtual press conference from his coronavirus quarantine on Saturday. The PM told a side event at the G20 virtual summit Australia had ‘great form’ on achieving emissions reduction goals. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

Scott Morrison has told participants at the virtual G20 summit that safeguarding the planet is an “ongoing, long-term and collective responsibility” and nations “must pursue economic models that support growth and sustainability”.

With the G20 communique released after the weekend talks noting signatories to the Paris agreement had agreed to communicate their long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies by 2020, Morrison set up the government’s technology roadmap as fulfilling that criterion.

Speaking at a side event at the G20 forum badged Safeguarding the Planet: Circular Carbon Economy Approach, Morrison said: “Australia is committed to practical pathways to reduce our emissions and meet our emissions reduction targets.”

“We’ve got great form on achieving our goals – what we’ve set, we’ve met and we’ve exceeded it,” the prime minister said.

Morrison said “this includes for the future unlocking promising low emissions technologies, technologies like hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, green steel and aluminium” – approaches identified in the government’s technology roadmap.

“These can make massive inroads into reducing emissions not just here in Australia, taking care of our commitments, but globally as well. Australia remains firmly committed to the Paris agreement and the commitments we have made.”

Morrison said he welcomed the G20’s acceptance that there were “many approaches” to achieving a sustainable recovery, and he said Australia had “a great story to tell” on oceans, including “ramping up our actions” to stop marine plastic pollution. He noted the government’s initiatives to protect the Great Barrier Reef had been “praised by the OECD”.

“As G20 members we all have important responsibilities to the present but also to the future, and we must all take action to safeguard our planet for our peoples and for the generations to come,” Morrison said.

While Morrison was underscoring the importance of safeguarding the planet, his energy minister, Angus Taylor, criticised the $32bn renewables roadmap outlined recently by the New South Wales government, according to a weekend media report.

The Daily Telegraph reported that Taylor was concerned the roadmap legislation before state parliament did not include a cap on costs that can be passed on to consumers, and could lead to the premature closure of ageing coal assets.

The communique released after the G20 meeting reiterated the Paris commitments for signatories, including the request to communicate or update their nationally determined contributions “reflecting their highest possible ambition”, in accordance with their obligations under the Paris agreement.

“In addition, these signatories reiterate the invitation to communicate by 2020 long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies,” the G20 communique said. It also reminded signatories that developed countries made a commitment to jointly mobilise US$100bn a year by 2020 “to address the needs of developing countries”.

Australia has faced sustained international pressure about its use of carryover credits to meet emissions reduction targets. That strategy was strongly opposed by dozens of countries at last year’s climate conference in Madrid, and experts said there was no legal basis for their use under the Paris agreement, given it had no relationship to the Kyoto protocol.

Last week, Morrison said the government might not use them, in a speech to the Business Council of Australia – one of many organisations that has championed Australia adopting a net zero emissions reduction target by 2050, and which has argued Australia, if possible, should meet its 2030 targets without relying on carryover credits.

Morrison told the BCA: “My ambition is that we will not need them and we are working to this as our goal, consistent with our record of over-delivering.”

Before Joe Biden was projected as the winner of the US presidential election – a development expected to increase diplomatic pressure on Australia to lift its emissions reduction ambitions – the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, also raised net zero in a private conversation with Morrison.

Morrison later declared the British government understood that Australia’s mid-century emissions reduction targets would not be set by London or by Europe, because Johnson embarked on his own act of “sovereignty” by withdrawing the UK from the European Union.

Morrison has faced pressure from business for months to adopt a net zero target by mid-century – pressure he has been resisting without ever ruling out adopting the commitment.

Links

• Australia's climate record labelled 'simply embarrassing' and among worst of G20 nations
• 'We'll be left behind': Australia's electric car inertia is getting it nowhere
• Scott Morrison signals retreat on using carryover credits to meet emissions targets
• Scott Morrison says the government is acting on emissions. Is it true?
• Coalition quietly appoints expert panel to salvage emissions policy
• Scott Morrison points finger at UN for pursuing 'negative globalism'
• How does Scott Morrison's climate declaration at the United Nations stack up?
• Scott Morrison says Australia's record on climate change misrepresented by media
• Scott Morrison ducks questions on Australia's emissions strategy for 2050
• Scott Morrison won't attend UN climate summit despite being in the US

The Australian Government Is Surrounded By Leaders Taking Climate Action. Will It Step Up?

ABC News - Michael Slezak

When it comes to climate policy, Scott Morrison will be dealing with a very different global playfield in 2021. (ABC News)

Author Michael Slezak is the ABC's national science, technology and environment reporter. He has been the environment reporter for The Guardian in Australia, the Australian correspondent for New Scientist magazine, and he edited the anthology Best Australian Science Writing 2017.

The Morrison Government is surrounded by state governments, foreign trading partners, local businesses and big investors who are moving ahead to transition the world to net zero emissions by 2050.

The past few weeks have shown that Australia has only two choices when it comes to our climate-heating greenhouse gas emissions: sink good money after bad in polluting industries, or invest in the clean industries of the future.

As much as it might look like Australia is seeking one, there is no viable third option.

As the world strides ahead to try to stop global warming at 1.5C, Australia could risk being isolated and missing out on the opportunities the transition poses.

Five years after Australia signed up to the Paris Agreement, the Australian Government is now surrounded by leaders making progress towards its aims — a task most would say Scott Morrison is not enthusiastically embracing.

A new incumbent in the White House and a reversal of US policy is just the start: Morrison will be dealing with a very different playing field in 2021.

President-elect Joe Biden's plan for a 'clean energy revolution and environmental justice' includes rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change. (AP: Andrew Harnik)

A series of dramatic events over the past month have shown that a transition to net zero emissions will occur around 2050. A transition of that nature can either be done in a coordinated way — one that exploits the potential benefits — or in an uncoordinated way, which is likely to see few of the benefits but still be hit with downsides.

Just look at what our main trading partners are doing.

There's no doubt where our economy will go

China has committed to net zero emissions by 2060. China is our biggest overall trading partner, the biggest buyer of Australian thermal coal (taking about 20 per cent of all our exports), and the second biggest buyer of Australian gas (taking about 17 per cent of our LNG exports).

At about the same time, Japan and South Korea committed to net zero emissions even earlier — by 2050. Together, those two countries buy 33 per cent of our exported gas and 21 per cent of our exported thermal coal.

And looking at our top trading partners together, there's no doubt where our economy will go — by choice or otherwise. 

*Commitment made by president-elect Joe Biden. Sources: ABS and DFAT.

These massive transformations by Australia's trading partners mean changes will be imposed on our economy from the outside. Fossil fuel exports will dry up, tariffs could be placed on carbon-intensive products, and demand for clean energy will skyrocket.

Without guiding our economy towards those clean industries, and helping dirty industries transition, we're likely to be disproportionately affected by the downsides of this transformation.

Australia's biggest buyer of thermal coal — China — has committed to net zero emissions by 2060. (Wikimedia Commons)

In Australia, we don't have any robust federal policy to guide this transition in a meaningful way.

The Morrison Government's key policy is the so-called Technology Investment Roadmap. That policy doesn't have an emissions goal for Australia, and the bureaucrats that worked on it told Parliament last week they didn't have analysis showing how the policy would impact Australia's emissions by 2030.

In fact, in documents obtained by The Australia Institute, the Government admits the abatement expected under the roadmap is just a guess — it wasn't really modelled at all.

The modelling Australia has released shows no significant cuts to emissions to 2030.

And to meet our promise to cut emissions to 26 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, forecasts show we will only get there by claiming credits for beating targets from earlier climate agreements — the so-called "Kyoto carry-over credits", the validity of which is widely questioned.

The Federal Government is on its own


How climate change policies continues to divide parliament

It's not just Australia's trading partners leaving our Federal Government's position isolated. It's also our own state and territory governments.

Every single state and territory in Australia has declared they will aim to reach net zero emissions by 2050. So Australia does actually plan on doing that — the only thing we're lacking is federal coordination for how it will happen.

Among those states, the Liberal-National NSW government this month announced some of the strongest policies to reach that target. It plans to build a massive 12 gigawatts of renewable energy in the next decade, supported by two gigawatts of storage.

Also this month, the Liberal Tasmanian government passed a 200 per cent renewables target through the lower house.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government is also being left behind by Australian investors and big business. Most of Australia's five biggest super funds have committed to reducing the emissions of their investments to net zero by 2050.

Within the last month ANZ has committed to align its business to support a transition to a net zero economy and Woolworths (Australia's sixth-largest electricity user) committed to go 100 per cent renewable within five years. Even business groups like the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group support net zero by 2050 targets.

In the end, a federal net zero target for 2050 would carry little meaning on its own, since every jurisdiction within the federation already has that target. But if it was formally acknowledged by the Federal Government, it could help what really matters: guiding policies to help achieve the goal.

Politics, politics, politics

Emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor says the Federal Government does want Australia to reach net zero emissions "as soon as possible" and that it will happen before 2100.

In launching the Technology Investment Roadmap, Taylor argued that "long term targets without a plan" would "penalise energy-intensive industries and reduce economic activity".

He argued that other countries, "particularly our largest trading partners, are reluctant to commit to policies and targets with material economic costs".

That seems completely true. But what was not said was that those trading partners see great economic benefit in their much stronger targets and the policies that enact them.
    

When asked if he was worried about Australia's fossil fuel exports, Angus Taylor said he was confident those commodities will have a market "for years to come". (ABC: Marco Catalano)

It is no secret that climate policy has been a poison chalice for the federal Coalition and Labor alike, having claimed the heads of many leaders and prime ministers.

So it could be politically convenient to leave climate policy to the states, where governments of both political persuasions are getting on with the job.

Politically, that might let be win-win for the federal Coalition. But it leaves the federation without a coordinated approach — and a united front to show the world it's taking the global problem seriously.

States can do a lot of the work, albeit less efficiently. But there are some things they can't do. They can't themselves do what the UK and other countries are doing and plan a transition towards electric vehicles, for example.

They can't introduce fuel efficiency standards, helping Australia catch up to the rest of the world, while simultaneously reducing emissions and costs to consumers.

And they can't easily drive a shift away from a reliance on fossil fuel exports towards commodities that will still have a significant market in a decade or two.

When asked if he was worried about our fossil fuel exports, Taylor seemed relaxed, telling Sky News this week he was confident those commodities will have a market "for years to come" and that the mix of commodities "will change" but that "was natural".

But one can't help wondering if addressing that transition — and planning for it to happen — might be a better strategy than letting it happen to us.

Links

• (AU) Prime Minister Facing ‘Difficult Territory’ As Australia Becomes ‘Globally Isolated’ On Climate Change
• (AU) Australia Suddenly Isolated In The New Global Climate
• Australia Warned It Could Be Isolated Over Climate Inaction After Joe Biden Victory
• (AU) We Should Stop Backing Losers In The Climate Change Cup
• (AU) Climate Change Action Stymied By Australian Business Lobby, UK Think Tank Finds
• (AU) Cowardice: What Morrison And Albanese Have In Common On Climate
• (AU) Morrison Says You're Either For Gas Or Against It. Of Course It's Not As Simple As That
• San Francisco just banned gas in all new buildings. Could it ever happen in Australia?
• The US just voted out a climate denier — and that means Australia should prepare for change
• International momentum towards net-zero carbon emissions is growing and Australia can't ignore it

Sentinel-6: 'Dog Kennel' Satellite Blasts Off On Ocean Mission

 BBC - Jonathan Amos

Artwork: The unusual shape, with fixed solar panels, keeps the satellite very stable.

A satellite that will be critical to the understanding of climate change has blasted skyward from California.

Sentinel-6 "Michael Freilich" is set to become the primary means of measuring the shape of the world's oceans.

Its data will track not only sea-level rise but reveal how the great mass of waters is moving around the globe.

Looking somewhat like a dog kennel, the sophisticated 1.3-tonne satellite was taken aloft from the Vandenberg base on a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket.

The Sentinel is a joint endeavour between Europe and the US, and will continue the measurements that have been made by a succession of spacecraft, called the Jason-Topex/Poseidon series, going back to 1992.

These earlier missions have shown unequivocally that sea levels globally are rising, at a rate in excess of 3mm per year over the 28-year period. And their most recent data even suggests there is an acceleration under way, with levels recorded as going up at over 4mm per year.

The Falcon rocket, with its Sentinel-6 payload, heads out over the Pacific Ocean. ESA/Stéphane Corvaja

About one-third of the measured global sea-level rise on Earth is from the expansion of warming water, a key driver of which is climate change. The rest is largely from melting ice.

Sentinel-6, like all the satellites before it, will use a radar altimeter to assess the height of the oceans.

This instrument sends down a microwave pulse to the surface and then counts the time it takes to receive the return signal, converting this into an elevation.

Sentinel-6 will, however, fly with a much improved capability, which will allow it to see more clearly what seas are doing right up against coastlines; and also how inland water features - rivers and lakes - are behaving.

The record has been built by four previous satellites. The baton now passes to Sentinel-6. 

Why is ocean height so important?

Elevation is a key parameter for oceanographers. Just as surface air pressure reveals what the atmosphere is doing above, so ocean height will betray details about the behaviour of water down below.

The data gives clues to temperature and salinity. When combined with gravity information, it will also indicate current direction and speed.

The oceans store vast amounts of heat from the Sun; and how they move that energy around the globe and interact with the atmosphere are what drive our climate system.

But having the longest possible record of change is essential.

"The longer that time series, the better able we are to separate out the natural climate signals from the forced ones, from the human signal," explained European Space Agency mission scientist Craig Donlon.

"It means we can run climate models backwards and then, through a validation process, have confidence that when we run them forwards we have some predictive skill."

The rise in sea level is not uniform. Some regions of the globe have been rising very fast. 

Why is the 3mm figure a little misleading?

The oceans are not rising at the same rate everywhere. There are parts of the world where the elevation exceeds 1cm per year.

This is due to a multitude of factors, including changes in ocean circulation, changes in heat content, and the uneven dispersal of meltwater from ice sheets.

It's a little recognised fact that the discharge from mighty glaciers, such as Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, has the greatest effect on ocean height at far distances.

"Sea-level rise is not uniform; it's really important to recognise this," Christine Gommenginger, from the UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, told BBC News.

"It's the regional sea-level budgets that we're now targeting. Global sea-level rise - fine, we know about this. But it's the local picture we want, and the altimetry can give us this."

Meltwater from the huge Thwaites glacier affects sea level a long way away from Antarctica.

Who uses sea-surface height data?

Oceanographers and climatologists, obviously. But the data is of supreme importance to the weather forecasters as well.

In the return signal is information about the state of the ocean - about how rough it is, which speaks also to the strength of the winds.

The ocean and its connection to the atmosphere is perhaps best illustrated in hurricanes. These storms get their energy from warm tropical water which an altimeter can sense by the way the sea surface bulges.

And it's satellites like Sentinel-6 that give forewarning of an El Niño event, which sees warm waters in the western Pacific shift eastwards. This sets off a global perturbation in weather systems, redistributing rainfall and bumping up temperatures.

"Other users include ship routers - they don't want their vessels to go through storms; they want to avoid big waves," said Remko Scharroo, from the intergovernmental weather agency Eumetsat. "With the Sentinel-6 altimeter, we will also see the eddies in the ocean, and if you're a ship router this information will tell you how to go with the current, not against it."

It goes without saying that coastal and flood defence planning depends on the elevation data. No new nuclear power station can be built without understanding where high tide and storm surges might reach decades into the future.

The information is used to plan coastal and flood defences decades into the future.

What's in the special name?

The "Sentinel" moniker is the name given to all the satellites in the European Union's Copernicus Earth-observation programme, of which this mission is a part.

Its number shows that it is the sixth in the series of different sensor types planned for the network.

The name Michael Freilich commemorates the former director of the US space agency Nasa's Earth sciences division who died earlier this year. He was an oceanographer by background and was instrumental in putting together the international partnership behind the mission.

"Mike Freilich exemplified the commitment to excellence, generosity of spirit and the unmatched ability to inspire trust that made so many people across the world want to work with Nasa, to advance big goals on behalf of the planet and its people," commented Thomas Zurbuchen, who heads Nasa's science directorate.

"Earth system science is bigger than any particular agency, bigger than any single nation, bigger than any single continent. And I surely hope, because humanity requires it, that we make some significant progress in understanding it."

-Dr. Michael Freilich pic.twitter.com/wW7dGz4nf8 — Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) November 20, 2020

What's the UK angle in this mission?

British engineers built the propulsion module on Sentinel-6. It has eight 5-newton thrusters that will help maintain the 1.3-tonne satellite in the very precise orbit required to make its measurements.

The module is a kind of plug and play unit that can easily be incorporated into other spacecraft.

"As we have recurring equipment, it means we can do bulk procurement which is cost-saving," said Natasha Pushkin from Airbus UK. "And as we have reusable building blocks, this means that designs and processes can be established in advance, which is time saving."

Further modules are to go in the successor to Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, and in Europe's next-generation polar-orbiting weather satellites.

But beyond the industrial contribution, UK scientists and agencies will be heavy users of the data - at NOC to understand the broader behaviour of the oceans, and at the UK Met Office which will feed its data into the numerical models that produce the next day, medium and long-range weather forecasts.

Sentinel-6's propulsion system is a design that could go in other spacecraft. AIRBUS UK

Links

• Wikipedia: Michael Freilich (oceanographer)
• US-European Mission Launches to Monitor the World's Oceans 
• SpaceX to Launch Satellite Tracking Rising Sea Levels
• NASA’s new satellite, Sentinel-6, will collect measurements of sea-level changes
• Why Scientists Are So Worried About Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier
• How Many People Will Migrate Due To Rising Sea Levels? Our Best Guesses Aren’t Good Enough
• Melting Antarctic Ice Will Raise Sea Level By 2.5 Metres – Even If Paris Climate Goals Are Met, Study Finds
• NASA-Led Ice Melt Study Makes A Terrifying Prediction About Rising Sea Levels
• Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Is Starting To Crack
• Antarctica: 60% Of Ice Shelves At Risk Of Fracture, Research Suggests
• Greenland's Ice Sheet Melted Away At Record Levels In 2019, Scientists Fear It Will Continue
• More Than Half Of World's Oceans Already Being Affected By Climate Change
• (AU) Flooding Could Occur Daily In Sydney By The End Of This Century Because Of Climate Change
• (AU) Unwelcome Sea Change: New Research Finds Coastal Flooding May Cost Up To 20% Of Global Economy By 2100

(AU) Kevin Rudd Says Climate Change Is the Reason He's Taking On Rupert Murdoch

NIKKEI Asia -  Kevin Rudd

Fox News owner a cancer on democracy

Rupert Murdoch's position is all about accumulating and exercising political power. © AP

Author Kevin Rudd was the 26th Prime Minister of Australia, serving from December 2007 to June 2010 and again from June to September 2013.

Recent landmark moves by Japan, South Korea and China to embrace a pathway to net-zero emissions beg the question as to why other major economies such as Australia -- and until now the United States -- have been dragging their feet in the fight against climate change. Part of the answer, quite simply, is Rupert Murdoch.

The Murdoch family's media empire may be virtually nonexistent in Asia, but its political influence across the English-speaking West should not be underestimated. Their crown jewels in the American media include the most-watched cable outlet in Fox News, the biggest-selling metropolitan newspaper in the New York Post, and premier business title The Wall Street Journal -- properties that Murdoch surrendered his Australian passport to acquire. These outlets collectively feed American voters a steady diet of climate change denial while running a protection racket for politicians who toe this company line.

In my own country, Australia, Murdoch has ruthlessly deployed his monopoly control of daily newspaper circulation to sow doubt about climate science and destroy politicians who take the problem seriously. Even as our nation was besieged by megafires that burned out almost as much land as the United Kingdom, these newspapers heaped doubt on climate change and spouted trumped up claims of mass-arson.

The lies became so transparent that Rupert Murdoch's own son, James Murdoch, quit the News Corporation board in disgust at these newspapers' relentless denial and disinformation on climate change.

James Murdoch and his wife, pictured in March 2016: he quit the News Corporation board. © Reuters

At its heart, Murdoch's position is all about accumulating and exercising political power. In 2006, when conservative governments in both the United States and Australia were inching toward accepting the need for climate action, Murdoch smoothed the way by declaring in Tokyo that "the planet deserved the benefit of the doubt." But years later, when the world was edging closer toward securing a new landmark deal, he did everything in his power to bring down the progressive governments such as my own that had been working toward it. It was the same modus operandi that Murdoch would use against my conservative successor, Malcolm Turnbull, when he also acted in the national interest to advance climate action.

All along, Murdoch's strategy has been to use his media mastheads and networks to narrowly frame the debate as one simply between outright climate change denialism at one end, and skepticism as to the humankind's contribution at the other. This means trotting out his most ardent mouthpieces to proclaim among a long and distinguished rap sheet of disinformation such as that "there is no carbon emissions" and "if there were, we could not see because most carbon is black." This is, as James Murdoch put it, a campaign to "sow doubt, to obscure fact."

This tactic of trotting out pseudoscience at every opportunity should not be unfamiliar. It is exactly the same tactic that big tobacco used during the 1950s and 1960s to try and dispel the connection between smoking and cancer. Just as it did then, and is now, this kind of reckless commentary costs lives.

This is part of why I have called Murdoch a cancer on Australia's democracy, and recently launched a national petition calling for an independent inquiry -- known as a royal commission -- into media diversity in our country.

In just a few short weeks, the petition garnered 501,876 signatures -- the most of any online petition the history of the Australian parliament. It was introduced into the national parliament by Andrew Leigh from the Labor Party. There will now be a parliamentary inquiry to examine the matters raised in the petition. This will only be the beginning.

Our petition not only struck a chord with the Australian people, it struck a chord with the international community that has watched in horror at Australia and the United States' climate inaction over recent years, and drawn a direct link to Murdoch's not so invisible hand. This includes some of the most conservative voices in the United States, such as former Republican congressman Bob Inglis.

Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that Murdoch himself is likely to now be just as much of an impediment to President-elect Biden implementing his ambitious climate agenda as a Republican-controlled Senate. Just as he will continue to stand in the way of climate action in Australia, no matter who is in power. This is precisely why it is time the rest of us also declare that enough is enough. 

Links

• How ‘Murdochracy’ controls the climate debate in Australia
• Protesters 'call bullsh*t' on News Corp climate denial by dumping dung outside office
• Rupert Murdoch's British Papers Delayed As Climate Protesters Stop The Presses
• (AU) Media Watch: News Corp's Fire Fight
• The Murdoch Media: Polluting Australia's Airwaves? (video)
• James Murdoch Criticises Father's News Outlets For Climate Crisis Denial
• (AU) How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia’s Bushfire Debate
• (AU) News Corp Employee Lashes Climate 'Misinformation' In Bushfire Coverage With Blistering Email
• (AU) Rupert Murdoch Says 'No Climate Change Deniers Around' – But His Writers Prove Him Wrong

A Lesson For Humanity From 17 Million Doomed Creatures

New York Times - Margaret Renkl

If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped.

Credit...Ole Jensen/Getty Images

Author Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

It was the photo of the mink in Denmark, soon to be slaughtered, that hit me the hardest. In it, the animals peer from their cages with open curiosity, ears pricked forward, clever fingers grasping the wire of the cage doors as they study their surroundings. They are clearly trying to figure out what is happening. 

What’s happening, it turns out, is that mink can catch Covid-19 from human beings and from each other. Several other species — dogs, cats, hamsters, tigers, monkeys and ferrets — have contracted the virus from people, but only mink, so far, have passed the virus back to us.

Mink are native to North America, but they are farmed by the millions around the world, including here in the United States. (Let’s be clear: “Farmed,” in this context, means the animals are kept in cages until they are killed and skinned for the fur industry.) Few people come into contact with mink, so the news about Covid-19 on mink farms hasn’t elicited the kind of public terror that would no doubt ensue if dog parks became potential superspreaders.

What makes the news from Europe so alarming is that Covid-19 can mutate as it jumps between humans and mink and back again. So far these mutations have not made the virus more easily transmissible or more likely to cause severe infection. But because one set of mutations in one variant of the virus has the potential, at least theoretically, to limit the effectiveness of a Covid-19 vaccine, Danish officials made the extraordinary decision to kill every mink in the country — some 17 million animals.

It’s a heart-wrenching story of mass slaughter and mass graves. The outcry in Denmark, the world’s largest producer of mink pelts, has focused largely on the shaky legal framework for the government’s order, and on its financial devastation to fur farmers. The real question is why such farms exist in the first place.

It’s not news that life on earth is out of balance. We already know that human behavior — not just in burning fossil fuels but also in food production, wilderness fragmentation, habitat degradation and overpopulation, among other planetary depredations — has imperiled everything from global biodiversity to the actual weather. In the general public, however, warnings from scientists and environmental activists have fallen mostly on deaf ears, even when those depredations come with a cost to us.

We have known for decades what happens when we put pressure on wild animals by degrading their habitats, interrupting their ecosystems, keeping them in cages or otherwise failing them. H.I.V., Lyme, bubonic plague, anthrax, Ebola — all are among the many animal pathogens that now infect human beings. The coronavirus pandemic is just the most recent example of what nature has been telling us all along.

“When diseases move from animals to humans, and vice versa, it is usually because we have reconfigured our shared ecosystems in ways that make the transition much more likely,” Ferris Jabr wrote in The New York Times Magazine back in June. “Deforestation, mining, intensive agriculture and urban sprawl destroy natural habitats, forcing wild creatures to venture into human communities. Excessive hunting, trade and consumption of wildlife significantly increase the probability of cross-species infection.”

The conversation around conservation traditionally pits people who care about the natural world against people who say that nature is great so long as it doesn’t interfere with their plans to build a new subdivision or buy a cheap hamburger or drive a giant SUV or eat raspberries year round. So long as it doesn’t inconvenience them in any way.

The earth is paying the price for our convenience. Headlines of the last few weeks have included reports of the United States officially leaving the Paris climate agreement (followed by a record high temperature of 83 degrees Monday here in Nashville); the continuing decline of coral reefs; a devastating hurricane season; coastal plastic pollution caused by Americans; and the Trump administration’s decision to remove gray wolves from the protected species list.

Our mistake was only partly in believing that the natural world was ours for the taking. Our mistake was also in failing to understand that we ourselves are part of the natural world. If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped. We must begin right now to make preserving biodiversity a priority, to make protecting wildlife habitats a priority, to make living in closer harmony with our wild neighbors a priority. Keeping ourselves safe from a future of ever-renewing pandemics will mean completely reframing the way we think about the natural world.

“Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves,” the British naturalist Helen Macdonald writes in her transcendent new essay collection, “Vesper Flights.” For far too long, human beings believed they’d been given dominion over all the Earth. Now the slaughtered minks in Denmark — and all the creatures who are dying in this human-wrought and rapidly accelerating extinction — are teaching us what we need to do to save them and ourselves, too: We must change our lives.

Links

• How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases
• Species and Climate Change
• Climate Impacts on Ecosystems
• Animals Affected by Climate Change
• Conservation in a Changing Climate: Impacts to Species and Habitats
• Nature Climate Change: Shifting habitats
• How climate change is hurting ecosystems across the globe
• Ecosystems across Australia are collapsing under climate change