03/12/2018

'New Weapon': Courts Offer Hope For Driving Serious Climate Action

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

In the not so far-off future, if your home is flooded by extreme rain or razed by an unseasonable bushfire, the first people to turn up on your property after the emergency crews could be bearing legal documents.
In Australia and around the world, crack teams of lawyers and eminent law schools are systematically exploring available legal options to sue for climate justice - or seeking to create new ones where they don't exist.
Chasing firefighters: How long before legal action takes the lead on climate action?Credit:QFES Media
"The truth is there's a huge number of people about to litigate," said Martijn Wilder, a partner at Baker McKenzie and an author featured in a special issue of The Australian Law Journal devoted to climate change and the law. "What we see all of a sudden is that people are realising litigation is a new weapon."
Describing the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions as "an existential battle", Wilder predicts people will be able to sue for the impacts of climate change and have a good chance of winning. "No doubt it's going to happen - it's inevitable," he says. "Governments have a duty of care, they have a responsibility."

Climate summit starts
Evidence of that care will be on display over the next couple of weeks from Sunday as delegates from the almost 200 nations that signed the 2015 Paris climate accord gather for a UN summit in the Polish city of Katowice.
Australia will be led by Environment Minister Melissa Price, who on Friday released the latest emissions figures showing carbon pollution continues to climb, reaching seven-year highs for the end of the financial year.
Australian emissions by quarter, 2008 to 2018
Source: Department of the Environment and Energy
The meeting also comes days after the World Meteorological Organisation released its state of the global climate report warning the planet was on an emissions trajectory that would lift temperatures as much as five degrees by 2100 versus pre-industrial times.
The year 2018 is likely to be the fourth warmest on record - trailing only the previous trio of years.
Among the key topics of the talks will be settling on the agreed rules for the greenhouse gas cuts promised at Paris ahead of the agreement coming into force in 2020.
"I'm not expecting a train wreck at all but a lot has to be done in little time," Bill Hare, director of tracking group Climate Analytics, tells Fairfax Media from Katowice.
Also of interest will be whether countries that can claim credits for exceeding their pledges during the previous accord, the Kyoto Protocol, can use them to count for the Paris pact that runs to 2030. Australia is one of them.
But besides the bickering over national pledges, businesses, academics and activists will be
busy examining the fast developing field of climate law.
"It'll feature in the backrooms and the siderooms, for sure," Hare says. "We certainly see more and more companies engaging with this issue."

One thousand cases
And no wonder.
A flurry of legal action is under way in a host of nations, particularly the litigious United States. The UK's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics estimates as many as 1000 climate court cases have been tried or are under way.
The Paris Agreement itself has spawned 139 framework laws addressing mitigation (cutting emissions) and adaptation - dealing with the consequences of the climate disruptions experienced and expected in a warmer world.
But perhaps wary of nations keeping their promises - the Paris targets were deliberately non-binding legally to ensure almost all nations signed up - leading legal minds have been busy formulating an alternative use of law.
“In some ways, climate litigation is born out of a certain despair with the current political process," says Matthew Rimmer, professor of  intellectual property and innovation at Queensland University of Technology, adding there has been a "great explosion of different forms".
Rimmer reels off a list of legal avenues from tort, such as public nuisance and negligence, to public trust and consumer and corporations law. He likens the process of probing to the advance of Native Title Law in Australia, where the Mabo decision "was one of many pieces of litigation going on" when it broke though and "was quite transformative”.
Sydney's 'one-in-a-100 year' rain event this week left a damage bill of at least $10 million. Credit: Nick Moir
Going Dutch
Brian Preston, the chief judge of the NSW Land and Environment Court, has helped lead global efforts to develop legal principles that could  lower the barriers to successful climate litigation with or without a Paris accord.
He highlights perhaps the most famous climate lawsuit to date - the  2015 Urgenda Climate Case in which 886 Dutch citizens sued their government to roughly double emissions cuts - as revealing the pitfalls and the promise of such cases.
For one thing, governments will keep appealing, as Dutch authorities have done again in November.  The fact most environmental law is based in statute now, such as protecting clean air and clean water, also limits the roll-out of similar Urgenda cases in places such as Australia, Preston says.
"That makes it more difficult, like the Lord of the Rings - to get one ring that solves it all - because it’s all going to be statute specific," he says. Australia's lack of bill of rights also curbs Urgenda's applicability here.
Preston has seen firsthand a pushback from US lawyers in the past year,  in part inspired by the Trump presidency's backing of the fossil fuel industry, against development of a "model statute" for the International Bar Association.
That statute was designed to “find what the barriers are to successful litigation in various jurisdictions and then lower those barriers, but that hasn’t yet to come to light” because American lawyers blocked it, he says.
”They saw a wave of litigation, and said, 'we don’t want to encourage it',” he says, adding he was "annoyed" at the intervention after working on the model for almost three years.

Cautionary tales
Preston says the examples of tobacco and asbestos - where legal operations were later found to be harmful and subject to damage claims - offer what should be cautionary tales for fossil fuel firms.  “They keep looking at what is the liability risk today but that’s not what it should be - it should be the risk in the future."
With asbestos, the court never proceeded with 100 per cent certainty but rather probability. Likewise, the fast-developing science of climate change attribution, which can ascertain the odds of an extreme weather event happening without human-induced carbon emissions.
"Attribution science is making more probable that we will have this event,” such as severe flooding or heatwaves, Preston says. “Therefore, you can get the link from greenhouse gas emissions to harm here by probabilistic reasoning."
Emma Herd, chief executive officer of the Investor Group on Climate Change, says international pressures are already nudging corporate behaviour, as the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures.

'Obligations'
Lawsuits at home, such as against industry super fund REST, are also similarly raising the accountability stakes.
REST is facing claims it breached its trustee duties by failing to properly factor climate change-related risks into its investment decisions.
Herd recalls arguing with one director "with an engineer background" who defiantly argued that "the climate had always changed" said he "didn't believe the science".
Despite personal reservations, however, this director "nevertheless recognised the company had obligations" to identify its exposure to fossil fuel and climate risks, and to disclose them, she says.
"There's a clear market demand for increased disclosure," Herd says. "It's happening faster than people anticipated."
Tania Constable, chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia, said her organisation "expects member companies to comply with all disclosure requirements under Australian law and international law where applicable".
"Our member companies are not only aware of this issue, but are taking action to mitigate risks," she says.

'Chill factor'
Jacqueline Peel, a professor of environmental law at Melbourne University, says "eventually governments will realise the policies they have in place are anachronistic compared to where companies are".
Barriers to Australian climate action include the fact that, unlike in the US, plaintiffs can be up for the government's legal costs as well as their own if they lose. “It’s a real chill factor on litigation,” Peel says.
Kelly O’Shanassy, chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation, knows that issue well, with her organisation slapped with overall costs of $230,000 for its 2015 failed challenge and appeal against the Adani coal mine in Queensland. (The mine said this week it would proceed by self-funding after banks baulked.)
“Even big not-for-profit organisations like ACF struggle to mount public interest cases as they often push the boundaries of the financial risk a responsible board can tolerate," O'Shanassy says. 

ACT takes advice
Among Australian jurisdictions,  Victoria has the most detailed climate change legislation after passing an act last year that locks in a goal of net zero emissions by 2050 and requires five-yearly reviews of progress.
The ACT, meanwhile, wants to examine ways it can lower barriers to climate litigation that could involving the territory undertaking lawsuits of its own for damages and other remedies. (See more detail here.)
"I've asked my department about what options are available," Shane Rattenbury, climate minister in the Labor-Greens government, says.
He's particularly angered by the way fossil fuel companies, such as Exxon in the US, have been revealed to have behaved. "They knew about climate change all along, they buried the science, they fought hard to prevent it being released, and they kept selling their health-damaging products," he says.
Exxon has been involved in a number of legal actions, including a case brought by New York’s attorney-general in October, which claims the company defrauded shareholders by downplaying the risks of climate change to its business, the New York Times has reported.
Melbourne University's Peel, meanwhile, says it's notable that a significant proportion of recent cases has been brought by young people, whether by children in the US or a law student in New Zealand.
In echoes of the mass protests of students this week demanding governments lift their climate game, the actions suggest "they can see pretty clearly that it’s their future" on the line, she says.
“Litigation has the appeal of action and fighting for their rights," Peel says. "These ideas motivate them a lot.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,

The Climate Apocalypse Is Now, And It’s Happening To You

Wired - 

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
What people say they know about climate change is a roller coaster of human ignorance—wait, everyone knows that but no one knows that? It’s striking to learn (according to Yale’s climate survey program) that 74 percent of women and 70 percent of men believe climate change will harm future generations of humans, but just 48 and 42 percent, respectively, think it’s harming them personally.
It is, of course, in lots of ways. Yet fewer than half of Americans think climate change is a right-here, right-now problem. So it’s critical that a new report on the impact of climate change is about the present as much as the future. The topline results: 157 million more people experienced a heat wave in 2016 than in 2000—12.3 million Americans. That heat and the injuries that can come from it cost the world 153 billion hours of labor—1.1 billion in the US. The geographic range of the mosquitoes that carry dengue fever, Zika, malaria, and chikungunya is spreading. So is the range of the bacterium that causes cholera. Global crop yield is going down.
You’re like, old news! But you might be thinking of last week’s apocalyptic climate-is-broken report. That was volume 2 of the fourth National Climate Assessment. Today’s red alert is the 2018 Lancet Countdown, a British medical journal’s annual accounting of how climate change affects public health.
Some confusion here would be understandable. What both reports have in common (along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s October report on a 1.5-degree planetary temperature increase) is immediacy. These reports are designed to show climate change happening now, today—and to actually spur people to do something about it. How? Show them how climate change affects them personally, and describe those effects in ways that transcend their politics. Global warming is causing “present-day changes,” the Lancet report says. On a telephone briefing for reporters, Renee Salas, director of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and the lead author of the report’s US chapter, described seeing more patients with asthma attacks and heat stress. “Viewing climate change as a public health emergency is literally second nature,” Salas said.
Still, these reports tackle immediacy with different strategies. The Lancet Countdown focuses on health. For NCA4, the approach was a little more subtle. Its hundreds of authors started by considering their audience. The 1990 Global Change Research Act says these quadrennial reports are specifically for the president and congress. Climate change affects the American southwest very differently than the northeast, so breaking regional effects into chapters makes that data more useful for people in congress, who can see specific effects on their districts. (NCA isn’t the only research that does this; you can drill down as far as county-by-county economic effects, if you’re into it.)
Breaking out climate impacts by region and by sector gives the report a potentially wider impact. “The idea is that risks are most salient if they apply to you,” says Robert Lempert, a principal researcher at RAND and an author of the report. “We very much intended it to speak to, call them decision-makers, on many levels—not just the federal government.” Lempert says they were thinking of water management agencies, land managers: the people who write the guidances.
Over the 20 years of the NCA’s life, science has gotten better. So has the thinking about how to tell people about that science in ways they can understand it. Talking about tens of thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars can help with that. “Over the last 20 years of doing this, we’ve gotten better at thinking about the economic costs,” says John Furlow, a development and aid expert at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society and an author of NCA4. “And we have more examples.”
Pretty much everyone (even oil companies, but not the president) now understands that burning fossil fuels sends gases into the atmosphere and increases global temperatures. In recent years, climate science has gotten better at attribution, at figuring out more precisely how much of a hurricane, wildfire, or drought was caused by that warming and those gases. “We can see impacts on things that people care about, and that’s leading us to shorter timescales and more concrete examples,” Furlow says. “The science enables us to attribute some things more or less to climate than just to ongoing trends, and to parse the way those things interact.”
The Lancet report attempts much the same kind of grounding in individual experience. Carbon dioxide counts in parts-per-million and error margins on global circulation models aren’t the most intuitive ways to talk about the end of the world. Abstract numbers and distant-future scenarios don’t cut it. “Today’s babies, by adulthood, will live on a planet without an Arctic. Prevalence of heatstroke and extreme weather will have redefined global labour and production beyond recognition,” as an editorial accompanying the report puts it. “Multiple cities will be uninhabitable and migration patterns will be far beyond those levels already creating pressure worldwide.” Cats and dogs living together; mass hysteria. Your planet’s on fire, kids.
But how all this immediacy and personalization will actually work might depend on how immediate the issue is, and who the person is. “Most of the mitigation decisions are taken at the federal and state level. Or in principle they are; maybe not at the moment at the federal level,” says Robert Kopp, director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Scientists at Rutgers University and another author of the National Climate Assessment. “But the adaptation decisions are taken at all levels, perhaps more at the local level than anywhere else.”
The Lancet report is full of straightforward policy recommendations, like “cut carbon emissions, dummies.” By law, the NCA can’t do that. “We were perhaps a little more conscientious about that this time, because we didn’t want there to be anything in there that would cause the administration to try to kill the report,” Furlow says. “Given the administration’s history on climate—calling it a hoax and everything—I think there was concern we might have trouble getting it out the way it was written.” (That doesn’t seem to have been the case; all the authors I’ve talked to say that the executive branch didn’t interfere with its contents.)
But the NCA can (and does) tailor its analyses to the people who might best put them into effect. Lempert’s chapter on adaptation, for example, leverages the basic assumptions of a civil engineer. “In some sense the structure of the chapter is to try and get them to do things,” he says. Past climate no longer predicts the present or the future—that idea is what scientists call stationarity, and it’s pretty much dead. The planet’s past performance is no longer a predictor of future results. So if engineers have been making infrastructure assumptions (sea wall height, 100-year flood levels, days of the year above a certain temperature), well, they should probably not do that. How they feel about climate change as a political issue doesn’t matter. “Even in the red parts of Florida, people will vote for bond issues to raise the water treatment plants, and let’s not talk about why,” Lempert says.
Engineers won’t be these reports’ only users. Consider lawyers. The NCA is, after all, a government report acknowledging the damage caused by climate change. So it might be evidence in lawsuits against climate emitters. “We used the last assessment for that purpose and this is even stronger,” says Steve Berman, managing partner at Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a firm involved in a few of those lawsuits. “It also takes away a lot of the oil industry argument that this science is still nascent, and that no one is really certain there will be all of these impacts.”
Those lawsuits happened because cities, states, and environmental groups didn’t feel like they were getting results from the executive or legislative branches. So far, the executive seems to be disregarding NCA4. But in January the Democrats take over the House of Representatives, and some of them have been agitating for climate action. “This is a powerful piece of artillery for any legislator who is interested in advocating for action,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. The report might also make it harder for the Trump Administration to weaken EPA rules on carbon dioxide. The EPA under President Obama determined that carbon dioxide was a harmful pollutant that should be regulated under the Clean Air Act, and the NCA reaffirms that conclusion.
None of those things necessarily change any minds. They might not move the needles on the Yale climate survey. But maybe they don’t have to. As the New Yorker writer Osita Nwanevu argued recently on Twitter, denialism isn’t a commonly held position. The real problem is an absence of climate policy. Ideally, the constructions of the IPCC reports, the National Climate Assessment, and the Lancet Countdown won’t just make a policy more obvious, but help clear a path to a policy going into effect. The clock’s ticking.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,

It Should Not Be Up To Australia's Schoolchildren To Stop Adani

Fairfax - Ebony Bennett*

The Coalition government under Scott Morrison appears to have forgotten the first rule of holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. It’s far too early to describe the Morrison government as terminal; the six months or so till a mooted May federal election is a long time in politics. But the government seems content to write off the message from Liberal voters in Wentworth and Victoria, particularly on climate change, because they do not represent its ‘base’. God only knows where the Liberal base is if it isn’t located in blue ribbon Liberal seats, but who are we to argue?
Coalition government policies under John Howard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and now Scott Morrison have failed to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Australia’s emissions are rising when they should be falling. Worse, the Morrison government appears determined to back policies and projects that will increase emissions and fuel global warming.
There were 114 fires burning across Queensland on Friday. Credit: QFES Media



It was sickening to watch the Minister for Resources and Northern Australia Matt Canavan welcome Adani’s announcement that it was ready to start construction of its mega coal mine before Christmas, at the same time as bushfires raged across Queensland during an unprecedented heatwave.
Mining and burning coal is a major cause of the greenhouse gas pollution that is heating the atmosphere, cooking the Great Barrier Reef and intensifying the extreme weather conditions Queensland is currently experiencing.
For the first time in Queensland’s history, the state’s fire danger warning was raised to ‘catastrophic’, the new category of fire danger that had to be invented following the Black Saturday fires of 2009. It is only five years since the Bureau of Meteorology had to add new colours – deep purple and pink – to indicate temperatures beyond its 50-degree cap. Australia’s extreme heat and fire danger is now literally off the charts.
As far as divine signs to stop burning fossil fuels go, more than a hundred bushfires in Queensland’s tropical north rainforest country during the wet season could not be more obvious. Thousands of residents were given ‘Leave Now’ warnings, with authorities bluntly warning residents who refused to flee that they could "burn to death" and that the firestorm could create "dead man zones" which would be impossible to survive, even in a car. Even on the beach.
“I'm sure that some people have probably got very good and elaborate systems of pumps and dams and systems and they believe that I'll be OK and I know what I'm doing and I've done this before," said Fire and Emergency Services Minister Craig Crawford, who experienced Victoria’s Ash Wednesday fires firsthand as a firefighter. "Today is not one of those days. Today is different. We are expecting a firestorm."
"Australia’s extreme heat and fire danger is now literally off the charts."
Queensland residents described 20-metre-high flames fanned by "tornado-like" winds. The heatwave is set to continue. There is no rain forecast. Watching a senior minister tweet photos of bushfire devastation in Queensland while applauding Adani’s coal mine is like watching someone hand out cigarettes to cancer patients.
Is it any wonder thousands and thousands of students turned out in force across Australia on Friday for the School Strike 4 Climate? Australia’s kids are willing to sacrifice their education to stop Adani because they know it is their future at stake, it is their generation who will be forced to clean up the policy mess that ministers like Matt Canavan have left them.
But of course, it should not be up to Australia’s schoolchildren to stop Adani. The Labor party, Australia’s likely future government, should give voters a real choice at the next election and commit to stop Adani’s mine by any means available to it.
Adani’s mine is a dud project for any one of a dozen reasons. No bank would touch it, Adani has had to finance the mine itself. There won’t be many jobs in it, Adani boasts "When we ramp up the mine, everything will be autonomous from mine to port". Traditional owners do not consent to the mine on their land and are challenging Adani before a full federal court bench next year. Adani is still under investigation for potential environmental breaches in Australia and it has an appalling record of environmental destruction and prosecutions overseas, including allegations of corruption, fraud and money laundering.
The federal Environment Department found Adani probably broke the law in its environmental application by giving false evidence. Federal and Queensland governments are yet to sign off on key water plans which water scientists say are grossly inadequate to protect precious water. As Queensland burns and suffers through drought, it seems grossly unfair that Adani has been granted a license to extract 12.5 billion litres of water every year for 60 years, nearly as much as all local farmers combined, without a full environmental impact assessment, as documents obtained by Lock The Gate Alliance under Queensland's Right To Information laws showed. And the Queensland government is still offering Adani a secret royalty subsidy.
Frankly Australia’s next government should not only stop Adani, it should put a moratorium on all new coal mines. Even with a ban on new mines, Australia Institute research shows Australia's coal production would decline only gradually as existing mines reached the end of their economic lives. If Adani’s coal mine goes ahead, with flat world demand for coal, every new coal mine opened in new coal regions like the Galilee simply reduces production in existing coal regions like the Hunter Valley, Bowen Basin and Surat Basin. This will lead to the closure of some mines and layoffs in others. A moratorium on new coal mines would protect existing coal jobs. It is impossible to limit global warming while building new coal mines.
The Morrison government’s determination to use taxpayers’ money to underwrite new coal-fired power is also concerning. Just as you can’t dig yourself out of a hole, you can’t reduce electricity prices by building coal-fired power stations - the most expensive form of new energy to build. Renewable energy and battery storage are cheap and getting cheaper and renewables have been putting downwards pressure on electricity prices for years now.
But Minister for Energy Angus Taylor appears determined to invest in coal - like investing billions of taxpayers’ dollars in Video Ezy while blaming the world for streaming Netflix. Coal-fired fired power stations aren’t even that reliable and our ageing fleet increasingly fails in the heat when we need them most. The Australia Institute’s Gas and Coal Watch has tracked 109 separate breakdowns at coal-fired power stations this year: 67 at black coal plants and 42 at brown coal plants, hardly  'reliable’.
Taxpayers should be concerned the Government is gearing up to sign risky contracts for billions of dollars, possibly without the authority to do so. It is policy on the run from a government in panic mode, only it is Australian taxpayers, not the Liberal and National parties, who will be left on the hook for any liability arising from the Minister’s rushed process.
The Liberal party is perfectly entitled to keep its ‘homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers’ branding - as Kelly O’Dwyer so succinctly put it - if it thinks it’s onto a winner. The only danger now is that the Coalition will mire Australia in its climate policy bog as it doubles down on coal and digs itself further away from the political mainstream.

*Ebony Bennett is deputy director at The Australia Institute

 Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , ,

02/12/2018

World Must Triple Efforts Or Face Catastrophic Climate Change, Says UN

The Guardian - 

Rapid emissions turnaround needed to keep global warming at less than 2C, report suggests
The drought-stricken La Sorrueda reservoir in Gran Canaria, Spain. Rising emissions could trigger extreme weather events around the world, the UN says. Photograph: Reuters
Countries are failing to take the action needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change, a UN report has found, and the commitments made in the 2015 Paris agreement will not be met unless governments introduce additional measures as a matter of urgency.
New taxes on fossil fuels, investment in clean technology and much stronger government policies to bring down emissions are likely to be necessary. Governments must also stop subsidising fossil fuels, directly and indirectly, the UN said.
Gunnar Luderer, one of the authors of the UN report and senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said: “There is still a tremendous gap between words and deeds, between the targets agreed by governments and the measures to achieve these goals.
“Only a rapid turnaround here can help. Emissions must be reduced by a quarter by 2030 [to keep warming to no more than 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial levels] and for 1.5C emissions would have to be halved.”
In all, a tripling of effort may be needed to keep warming to less than 2C, meeting scientific advice on avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change.
Greenhouse gas emissions continued their long-term rise last year, according to the UN, but they could be brought under control. There are promising signs, such as investment from the private sector in renewable energy and other technologies to cut carbon, but these are currently insufficient to meet scientific advice.
Joyce Msuya, deputy executive director of UN Environment, said: “The science is clear: for all the ambitious climate action we’ve seen, governments need to move faster and with greater urgency. We’re feeding this fire, while the means to extinguish it are within reach.”
Global emissions have reached what the UN has called “historic levels” of 53.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and are showing no signs of peaking, despite a levelling off in the past decade.
The report came a day after Donald Trump said he did not believe his own administration’s latest report warning about the dire risk of inaction on climate change.
Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of the dire effects of allowing global warming to reach 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The world has a little over a decade to bring down greenhouse gas emissions before such dangerous levels of warming become inevitable.
Only 57 countries, representing 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions, are on track to cause their emissions to peak before 2030. If emissions are allowed to rise beyond that, the IPCC has said countries are likely to breach the 1.5C limit, which will trigger sea-level rises, droughts, floods and other extreme weather events.
On Monday, the biggest review of climate change in the UK for a decade found that flooding was likely to become more severe and summers could become more than 5C hotter within 50 years.
The UN’s warning comes before key talks in Poland next month, when governments will meet to discuss how to implement the commitments made in Paris in 2015. According to the Paris agreement, the first global pact to bind both developed and developing countries to a specific temperature goal, governments must do all they can to stop warming reaching 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspiration to limit warming to no more than 1.5C.
Jian Liu, the chief scientist at UN Environment, said some of the necessary policies were clear and available, if there was political will to implement them. “When governments embrace fiscal policy measures to subsidise low-carbon alternatives and tax fossil fuels, they can stimulate the right investments in the energy sector and significantly reduce carbon emissions. If all fossil fuel subsidies were phased out, global carbon emissions could be reduced by up to 10% by 2030.”
Carbon pricing is one way of achieving this, but has run into difficulties as taxes are often unpopular and schemes to reduce carbon through emissions trading are often contested by businesses and other interests.
Greenhouse gas emissions stalled soon after the global financial crisis of a decade ago, then quickly resumed their rise, to the consternation of climate experts. For three years before 2017 they fell once again, but last year there was an increase. Emissions are expected to rise further this year, pointing to an emissions gap between what countries promised in Paris and what their policies are delivering.
Another problem is that infrastructure such as buildings, transport networks and energy generation that is built now to rely on fossil fuels will in effect lock in future emissions for the lifetime in which that infrastructure operates, usually up to 50 years.
Changing the way we construct infrastructure is therefore essential, but many companies and governments still rely on old measures of economic performance and old ways of generating energy and constructing buildings.
Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “The window of opportunity is starting to close and if we fail to act now the opportunity will be gone. Failure to act will lock in catastrophic global warming that will change the planet irrevocably and condemn millions to suffering. What are governments waiting for?”
Stephanie Pfeifer, the chief executive of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, said some businesses were taking action. “Investors understand the opportunity presented by the move to a low-carbon economy. The right signals from government will help to unlock low-carbon investment from the private sector.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,

Climate Change Already A Health Emergency, Say Experts

The Guardian - 

Deadly heatwaves and spread of diseases affect people’s health today – report
Farmers on the outskirts of Guwahati, India. The country lost the equivalent of 7% of its total working hours due to extreme heat in 2017. Photograph: EPA 
People’s health is being damaged today by climate change through effects ranging from deadly heatwaves in Europe to rising dengue fever in the tropics, according to a report.
Billions of hours of farmwork has been lost during high temperatures and global warming has damaged the ability to grow crops, it said.
The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was produced by 150 experts from 27 universities and institutions including the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
“The findings are clear and the stakes could not be higher,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general. “We cannot delay action on climate change. We cannot sleepwalk through this health emergency any longer.”
The report sets out the impacts of global warming on health in stark terms. ”A rapidly changing climate has dire implications for every aspect of human life, exposing vulnerable populations to extremes of weather, altering patterns of infectious disease, and compromising food security, safe drinking water and clean air,” it said.
Nick Watt, the executive director of the Lancet Countdown, said: “These are not things happening in 2050 but are things we are already seeing today. We think of these as the canary in, ironically, the coalmine.”
On Tuesday the UN said action to cut carbon emissions must be tripled to avoid catastrophic warming. International climate change negotiations were due to resume on Monday in Poland.
The Lancet report said the lack of progress “threatens both human lives and the viability of the national health systems they depend on, with the potential to overwhelm health services”.
A survey in the report of leaders of almost 500 global cities found half expected their public health infrastructure to be seriously compromised by climate change, meaning systemic failures such as the shutdown of hospitals.
A heatwave in Europe this summer was linked to hundreds of premature deaths in the UK alone. MPs said in July that the UK was “woefully unprepared” for heatwaves.
The Lancet report says populations in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean are at higher risk than those in Africa and south-east Asia because of the high proportion of vulnerable and elderly people living in cities.
As temperatures rise across the world, the report says 157 million more vulnerable people were subjected to a heatwave in 2017 than in 2000. Hot conditions directly damage health via heatstroke, but dehydration and exacerbation of conditions such as heart disease are also very dangerous. Heat also worsens air pollution and mental health problems.
Prof Kristie Ebi, of the University of Washington, said: “Increased mortality in extreme heatwaves is happening now [but] there is abundant evidence that communities are not prepared for the ongoing increases in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves.”
The Lancet report said 153bn hours of work were lost in 2017 due to extreme heat, 80% of it in agriculture. Almost half the losses were in India, equivalent to 7% of its total working population, while China lost the equivalent of 1.4% of its workers. “This has led to vast losses for national economies and household budgets,” said Prof Joacim Rocklöv of UmeÃ¥ University in Sweden.
Relatively small changes in temperatures and rainfall could cause large changes in the transmission of infectious diseases spread via water and mosquitoes. The ability of the dengue fever virus to be transmitted – its “vectorial capacity” – reached a record high in 2016, according to the report, 10% above a 1950s baseline. The danger from cholera risk was also rising in regions such as the Baltic states where the sea has been warming rapidly.
Doctors not involved in the report said it presented convincing evidence. “It is clear that climate change is directly impacting our health,” said Howard Frumkin, head of the Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet, Our Health programme. “All sectors must prioritise action on climate change if we are to significantly reduce the potentially devastating impact on our planet and our health, affecting generations to come.”
Prof Paul Ekins, of University College London, said the health benefits of tackling climate change had long been undervalued, with just 5% of funding for adaptation to global warming being spent on health.
“These benefits are enormous, near-term and affect our health immediately,” Ekins said. “If you factor in these benefits, cutting emissions to [keep the temperature rise below] 1.5C is going to be a net benefit to humanity in monetary terms.”
The Lancet report noted some promising trends, such as the phase-out of coal and the growth of electric cars.
Prof Hilary Graham, of the University of York and part of the Lancet Countdown team, said linking health and climate change could help spur further action. “Health is what people feel. It makes a direct connection with their lives and the lives of people they care about like their children and grandchildren.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Five Myths About Climate Change

Washington Post - Katharine Hayhoe

Smoke rises from chimneys of the gas boiler houses as the temperature dropped to minus 14 degrees Celsius in Moscow, Russia, 29 November 2018. According to a report by the UN, CO2 emissions have gone up for the first time in four years. (Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Katharine Hayhoe
Katharine Hayhoe is a professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is a lead author on volumes one and two of the Fourth National Climate Assessment.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment — the work of 13 federal agencies and more than 350 scientists, including me — is clear: The Earth is warming faster than at any time in human history, and we’re the ones causing it. Climate change is already affecting people, and the more carbon we produce, the more dangerous the effects over the coming century. Nevertheless, many people continue to believe and propagate some misleading myths. Here are the five I hear most frequently.

Myth No. 1: Climate scientists are in it for the money.
When the second volume of the National Climate Assessment was released on Nov. 23, Rick Santorum, a Republican former senator from Pennsylvania, took to CNN to proclaim that climate scientists “are driven by the money that they receive.” Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) appeared on the network the next day declaring the report to be “made by scientists that get paid to further the politics of global warming.”
I was one of the report’s authors. How much did I earn for the hundreds of hours I spent on it? Nothing. Nearly every day, climate scientists are accused of venality. Our other purported sins include fabricating data, selling out to “big green” — which supposedly tethers our grant money to doom-and-gloom findings — and fanning the flames of hysteria to further our nefarious agenda.
The reality is that nearly every climate scientist could make at least the same amount of money — and often much more — in a different field, including the oil industry. And the money we do receive in grants doesn’t go into our pockets. A $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation provided me with a mere $37,000 a year, all of which went to paying for the proposed work, including a graduate researcher, a computer and publication fees. (In summer, I do some climate-focused consulting with cities and water districts to cover my salary when I’m not teaching.) Santorum, meanwhile, receives a substantial income from serving as a consultant to Consol Energy, a coal company; and according to OpenSecrets.org, DeLay has received nearly $740,000 from the oil and gas industry.

Myth No. 2: The climate has changed before. It's just a natural cycle.
Last fall, when the first volume of the National Climate Assessment was released, White House spokesman Raj Shah responded that “the climate has changed and is always changing.” President Trump himself has embraced this position, claiming that the climate “will change back again.” This line is a popular one with people who dismiss climate change by maintaining that we’ve had ice ages before, as well as warm periods, and so the warming we’re seeing now is just what the Earth has always done.
But we can look at the natural factors that affect the climate. First, over the past few decades, energy from the sun has been going down , not up, so if changes in the sun’s energy drove our temperature, we should be getting cooler, not warmer.
Others argue that we’re getting warmer because we’re recovering from the last ice age. But ice ages — and the warm periods in between — are caused by the Earth’s orbital cycles, and according to those cycles, the next event on our geologic calendar is another ice age, not more warming.
We can also rule out volcanoes, which do produce heat-trapping gases, but less than 1 percent of the CO2 that humans produce. And big eruptions, when they happen, cool the Earth instead of warming it. In other words, the climate change we’re experiencing now definitely isn’t natural.

Myth No. 3: Climate scientists are split on whether it's real.
We often hear that climate scientists are split 50-50 when it comes to whether global warming is occurring. “Each side has their scientists,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told Politico in 2014. Trump echoed that rhetoric on “60 Minutes” this October, telling Lesley Stahl, “We have scientists that disagree” with human-caused global warming.In reality, more than 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is happening and that humans are causing it. At least 18 scientific societies in the United States, from the American Geophysical Union to the American Medical Association, have issued official statements on climate change. And it’s been more than 50 years since U.S. scientists first raised the alarm about the dangers of climate change with the president — at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson. The public confusion has been manufactured by industry interests and ideologues to muddy the waters.

Myth No. 4: Climate change won't affect me.
We often think the most widespread myth is that the science isn’t real. But according to public opinion polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication , the most prevalent misconception — one that the majority of us have bought into — is that climate change just doesn’t matter to us. While 70 percent of American adults agree that climate change is happening, only 40 percent of those surveyed believe it will harm them personally. Sure, it’ll hurt polar bears, and maybe people who live on low-lying islands in the South Pacific. But the world has warmed by just 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. What’s the big deal?
Climate change is a threat multiplier that touches everything, from our health to our economy to our coasts to our infrastructure. It makes heat waves stronger, heavy precipitation events more frequent and hurricanes more intense, and it nearly doubles the area burned by wildfires . It supercharges natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey and the Camp Fire, as those suffering the effects of these events know firsthand. Climate change is no longer a distant issue in space or time: It’s affecting us, today, in the places where we live.

Myth No. 5: It's cold outside — global warming can't be real.
Whenever a cold snap brings out our winter parkas, there’s a politician or pundit saying, Global warming? Global cooling, more like! Trump has done so repeatedly, tweeting just before Thanksgiving, “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS — Whatever happened to Global Warming?” In 2015, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) brought a snowball to the Senate floor in an attempt to reject the reality of climate change.
But cold weather doesn’t rebut the data that shows the planet is warming over climate time scales. Think of it this way: Weather is like your mood, and climate is like your personality. Weather is what occurs in a certain place at a certain time. Climate is the long-term average of weather over decades. The fact it was cold and snowy one day last week? That’s weather. Global warming or not, cold days still occur, particularly in winter. But since 2000, we’re seeing far more new hot-temperature records than cold ones. In fact, in 2017, we saw more than 10,000 cold-temperature records broken at weather stations across the United States. And more than 36,000 high-temperature records were broken the same year.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: ,

30/11/2018

Australian Students Stage School Strikes Over Climate Change Inaction

New York Times - Livia Albeck-Ripka

Frustrated by their government’s failure to act on climate change, thousands of Australian students quit school for a day to protest instead.
Milou Albrecht, 14, center, speaking to students attending a rally for climate change action at the Old Treasury Building in Melbourne, Australia, on Friday. Credit Christina Simons for The New York Times
 MELBOURNE, Australia — As wildfires raged across the country, a heat wave again threatened the Great Barrier Reef and a mining giant announced it would push ahead with a huge coal project, thousands of students across Australia quit school for the day on Friday to protest government inaction on climate change.
The students — ranging in age from 5 to 18 — came from more than 200 schools to demand that the federal government block construction of the Adani Carmichael coal mine, block any new coal or gas projects and require 100 percent renewable energy use by 2030.
“I am here because I am terrified,” Harriet O’Shea Carre, 14, told a crowd of thousands of student marchers outside the Old Treasury Building in Melbourne. Protesters spilled out onto the road with signs saying “civil disobedience requires no permission slip” and “don’t be a fossil fool.”
Ms. O’Shea Carre, an organizer of the march and a student from Castlemaine Steiner School in Muckleford, about 70 miles northwest of Melbourne, predicted dire consequences if the government failed to act on climate change.
“I cannot bear the thought of losing the people that I love, when it could have been stopped,” she said of climate change. “And it can be stopped, but not for much longer.”
Another organizer, Milou Albrecht, said she had been inspired by the actions of Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old girl in Sweden who since September has spent every Friday sitting in protest outside Parliament in Stockholm.
“I realized that I could do the same,” said Ms. Albrecht, 14, a schoolmate of Ms. O’Shea Carre.
Ms. Thunberg tweeted her support of the students.

Greta Thunberg Twitter
With the help of their parents, climate activists and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Ms. Albrecht, Ms. O’Shea Carre and two other students from the same town, Callum Neilson-Bridgefoot, 11, and Tully Boyle, 15, created a campaign video and set up a website and Facebook groups to publicize the strike.
Student protesters in Melbourne on Friday. Organizers estimated that about 8,000 students participated in Melbourne and Sydney alone. Credit Christina Simons for The New York Times
 Ms. Albrecht said she was astonished by the number of students who took part.
In Melbourne and Sydney, organizers estimated that about 8,000 students participated, and hundreds more joined the effort in other cities and towns. And earlier this week, an estimated 1,700 students protested in other parts of the country, including more than 200 who showed up at Parliament House in Canberra, the capital, to demand answers from Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Still waiting to go in to Parliament House...@ScottMorrisonMP @billshortenmp will you save us the wait and come ?
On Monday, Mr. Morrison told senators that he did not condone the strike, because students should focus on “more learning” and “less activism.” He said he did not support “schools being turned into parliaments.”
The resources minister, Matt Canavan, was more pointed, saying students “don’t learn anything” by marching.
“I want kids to be at school to learn about how you build a mine, how you do geology, how you drill for oil and gas,” he told the local news media.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said this week that he did not condone the protests, and that students should be focused on “more learning” and “less activism.” Credit Christina Simons for The New York Times
While the students did not manage to meet with Mr. Morrison, they were able to discuss their climate demands with members of the Green and Labor parties.
“We have seen parties listening to us, so we do have hope,” said Maiysha Moin, 17, an organizer from Fintona Girls’ School in Melbourne. “We’re part of a democracy; you can’t just ignore us because we’re younger,” she added.
Organizers said the students were joined by teenagers in Sweden, France, Norway and Finland who also skipped school in support.
In Melbourne, the students left the Treasury building’s steps to march through the busy city center. Some passers-by looked on, bewildered, as the strikers chanted, “The youth are rising, we’re not compromising.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative