"World Economic Forum outlines huge increase in all five eco risks since the US president assumed office
The World Economic Forum delivered a strong warning about Donald
Trump’s go-it-alone approach to tackling climate change as it
highlighted the growing threat of environmental collapse in its annual
assessment of the risks facing the international community."
............." the WEF avoided mentioning Trump by name but said “nation-state
unilateralism” would make it harder to tackle global warming and
ecological damage.
The WEF’s global risks perception survey
showed Trump’s arrival in the White House in 2017 had coincided with a
marked increase in concern about the environment among experts polled by
the Swiss-based organisation.
It said all five environmental risks covered by the survey – extreme
weather events, natural disasters, failure of climate-change mitigation
and adaptation, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and human-made
natural disasters – had become more prominent.
“This follows a year characterised by high-impact hurricanes, extreme
temperatures and the first rise in CO2 emissions for four years. We
have been pushing our planet to the brink and the damage is becoming
increasingly clear.
“Biodiversity is being lost at mass-extinction rates, agricultural
systems are under strain, and pollution of the air and sea has become an
increasingly pressing threat to human health.”
Trump has threatened to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris agreement
under which nations agreed to take steps to limit the increase in
global temperature. He has said the commitments made by his predecessor,
Barack Obama, would damage the American economy.
Other states have said they will keep to the pledges made in Paris, an approach supported by the WEF."
Trump suggests the climate may actually be 'fabulous' after an ominous UN report on looming disaster
Sinéad Baker
Trump digs coal
• President Donald Trump on Tuesday sought to cast doubt on a UN
report on climate change that had dire warnings about how little time we
have to stop a global catastrophe.
• Trump suggested that the world’s climate might actually be “fabulous” and that he’d seen reports expressing that position.
• The UN report outlines the effects of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
• Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax,” and last
year he announced he would pull the US out of the Paris climate accord.
"Rising consumption by the affluent has a far greater environmental impact than the birth rate in poorer nations
When a major study
was published last month, showing that the global population is likely
to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists had assumed, I
naively imagined that people in rich nations would at last stop blaming
all the world’s environmental problems on population growth. I was
wrong. If anything, it appears to have got worse. Next week the BirthStrike movement
– founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have
children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental
collapse – will dissolve itself,
because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by
population obsessives. The founders explain that they had
“underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of
climate breakdown denial”.
It
is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major
driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion
of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and
local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global impact is
much smaller than many people claim.
The formula for calculating people’s environmental footprint is
simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x
Technology (I = PAT). The global rate of consumption growth, before the
pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume
this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the
responsibility for increased consumption. But population growth is
overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T
to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas
emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the
impact of consumption growth."
The accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused
primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, had been worrying scientists
since the 1970s. The discovery of the “ozone hole” above Antarctica had
given atmospheric scientists enormous credibility and clout among the
public, and an international treaty banning chlorofluorocarbons, the
chemicals causing the problem, was swiftly signed.
Greenhouse gases
The Reagan White House worried
that a treaty on CO₂ might happen as quickly, and set about ensuring
the official scientific advice guiding leaders at the negotiations was
under at least partial control. So emerged the intergovernmental – rather than international – panel on climate change, in 1988.
Already before Sundsvall, in 1989, figures in the automotive and
fossil fuel industries of the US had set up the Global Climate Coalition
to argue against rapid action and to cast doubt on the evidence. Alongside thinktanks, such as the George Marshall Institute, and trade bodies, such as the Western Fuels Association, it kept up a steady stream of publishing in the media – including a movie – to discredit the science.
But their efforts to discourage political commitment were only
partially successful. The scientists held firm, and a climate treaty was
agreed in 1992. And so attention turned to the scientists themselves.
The Serengeti strategy
In 1996, there were sustained attacks on climate scientist Ben Santer, who had been responsible
for synthesising text in the IPCC’s second assessment report. He was
accused of having “tampered with” wording and somehow “twisting” the
intent of IPCC authors by Fred Seitz of the Global Climate Coalition.
Wildfire
In the late 1990s, Michael Mann, whose famous “hockey stick”
diagram of global temperatures was a key part of the third assessment
report, came under fire from right-wing thinktanks and even the Attorney General of Virginia. Mann called this attempt to pick on scientists perceived to be vulnerable to pressure “the Serengeti strategy”.
By singling out a sole scientist, it is possible for the forces of
“anti-science” to bring many more resources to bear on one individual,
exerting enormous pressure from multiple directions at once, making
defence difficult. It is similar to what happens when a group of lions
on the Serengeti seek out a vulnerable individual zebra at the edge of a
herd."
"Some Ages Have World Wars. Others Have Moonshots. Our Great Challenge is Preventing the Collapse of Civilization.
Let me explain what I mean by “accelerating pulsation of disaster.” Take the example of California’s wildfires. They’re the direct result
of climate change. Hotter temperatures, hotter oceans, bigger storms,
more lightning, drier vegetation — bang! A near certainty of historic
fires igniting."
Wildfire emergency
"So California’s burning…again. Just
like it was last year, and the year before that, and so on. In a few
months, it’ll be Australia’s turn to be hit by megafires, all over
again. They’ll be worse than last year, at least if we average it all
over a decade or so. That’s because, of course, fire is seasonal. And as
we head into the age of catastrophe, “megafire season” will become a
part of our lives. The world will develop Fire Belts, of which
California and Australia are becoming a part."
"Then there are Flood Belts. While the pandemic raged, much of Asia flooded. The West didn’t take much notice — even though China’s largest dam is now at it’s limits.
And yet the megafloods Asia just experienced are just like megafires —
natural phenomena that are getting worse on a seasonal, yearly cycle.
Within a decade or two, these floods will also threaten habitability.
Expect much greater sea level rise as land-ice melts
...................................
"Are
you beginning to get what I mean by “accelerating pulsation of
disaster” yet? As we head into the age of catastrophe, a new range of
calamities will become our dismal new normal. They’ll recur, in cycles.
Only each time the cycle spins, they’ll get worse and worse. Megafires,
megafloods, pandemics, extinctions."
Sea Rise will flood cities
................................................
The accelerating pulsation of disaster. Life
is going to feel scary, strange, dislocating, anxiety-inducing. As soon
as this disaster ebbs — phew, the megafire’s over! — here comes another
one. Now it’s megaflood season. Now it’s Covid season. Christ, now
there’s a new pandemic. What the? You and I were born live at the very
tail end of a golden age of human stability. That age is now over, and
the transition into the age of apocalypse is going to feel deeply
frightening. 2020 was just the beginning. It’s going to get much, much
worse, before — if — it ever gets better.
Melting Land ice on Greenland
As all
those cycles of catastrophe, operating at annual, semiannual, decadal
scales get worse and worse, ultimately, our systems will begin to
buckle, and then break. Faster and harder than we think.
Think of California right about now. A wildfire is bad. A respiratory pandemic is really bad. But megafires during a respiratory pandemic? What now? They have conflicting objectives: quarantine and stay at home, versus evacuate and firefight."
........................
Heatwaves kill
"They then face a stark dilemma. To
fight accelerating waves of natural calamity, fire, flood, drought,
famine, then saps resources that are needed to invest in tomorrow. We
fight that megafire, we try to build a barrier against tomorrow’s mega
flood. There go all those schools, hospitals, universities, libraries,
parks, roads, high-speed trains we wanted to build, expand, renew.
Simply fending off catastrophe will take a larger and large share of our resources. That
leaves less left over to invest in the things which really improve
people’s quality of life, whether healthcare, education, retirement, and
so on.
What happens as a result of that? Well, people’s qualities of life fall. Depression and frustration and unhappiness grow. And the predictable consequence of that is more extremism. Discontented masses tend to turn to demagogues, who blame all of a society’s problems on hated minorities. The age of catastrophe will be a boon to tomorrow’s Trumps.
And yet even all this just takes to about the mid 2030s or so. After that? That’s when the real fireworks begin."
"By about then, the limits of our civilization’s fundamental systems will have been breached.
Insurance and banking systems won’t be able to cover the losses of
burning states and flooded cities. They’ll go bankrupt, and probably
demand huge bailouts. Those bankruptcies will have a devastating
consequence. Not just the lack of credit, but a sharp rise in the cost
of it. Translation, you’re probably living in debt right now — whether
mortgage, credit card debt, car loans, student debt, medical debt, or
all of the above — and the interest rates on all that are going to
skyrocket. Somebody has to pay for the risk and costs of all this sudden
catastrophe. And it’s probably going to be you, in the hidden form of
paying massively more interest on all that debt you already can’t pay off."
Properties will become uninsurable
As
insurance and financial systems go broke, and the costs of accessing
money and credit spike, huge waves of businesses will close. Most small
businesses exist on razor-thin margins, from restaurants and bars to
nail salons and hobby shops. When their rents double and the interest on
their loans triples and they can’t get any more credit — at exactly the
same time as their customer base is falling apart? Bang! They go broke,
too. And all the millions of people they employ — small businesses are still the heart of the economy — are unemployed. The cycle of depression and poverty accelerates."
"This is not a drill, my friends. It’s
time to stop acting like it is, burying our pretty vacant little heads
in Netflix-and-chill and Instagram envy and the latest gender pronoun
and Fakebook friends. That’s all, history will rightly say, garbage for
the human mind and spirit. This is it. We’re not going to get another chance." "
"It
showed us bushfires through forested regions on a scale that we have
not seen in Australia in recorded history, and fire behaviour that took
even experienced firefighters by surprise."
The
main causes were a drought which had made the land extremely dry and
ready to burn, hot and windy weather, and climate change.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said on Tuesday: "The next fire season is already upon us."
An open-pit coal mine and power plant in Schophoven, Germany, this week.Credit...Federico Gambarini/DPA/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Germany announced on Thursday that it would spend $44.5 billion to quit coal — but not for another 18 years, by 2038.
The
move shows how expensive it is to stop burning the world’s dirtiest
fossil fuel, despite a broad consensus that keeping coal in the ground
is vital to averting a climate crisis, and how politically complicated it is.
Coal, when burned, produces huge amounts of the greenhouse gas emissions that are responsible for global warming.
Germany
doesn’t have shale gas, as the United States does, which
Resistance to the Adani Coal Mine in Australia
has led to the
rapid decline of coal use in America, despite President Trump’s support
for coal. Germany also faces intense opposition to nuclear power. After
the Fukushima disaster
in 2011, that opposition prompted the government to start shutting down
the country’s nuclear plants, a transition that should be complete by
2022.
The
money announced Thursday is to be spent on compensating workers,
companies and the four coal producing states — three in the country’s
east and one in the west. It followed months of negotiations between
regional officials and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.
Germany’s timetable, though, could present challenges to the European
Union’s efforts to swiftly cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as the
bloc’s new leadership has announced.
Countries around the world are watching how quickly the 28-country
union, which, taken together is currently the third-largest emitter of
planet-warming gases, can reduce its carbon footprint. Germany is the
largest economy in the European Union.
"Efforts to keep the Amazon rainforest
standing and reduce Brazil’s planet-warming emissions are being hampered
by budget cuts for the country’s environmental watchdog and its main
climate change programme, researchers have said.
Brazil has
seen a sharp spike in deforestation under the right-wing government of
President Jair Bolsonaro, with less than half the forest inspectors it
had a decade ago and the COVID-19 pandemic spreading rapidly across the
Amazon region.
Compared with 2019, the first five months of 2020
registered a
Amazon deforestration: Climate Change News com
substantial drop in government spending on forest
inspection activities carried out by the Brazilian Institute of
Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama).
For January
to May 2019, the amount allocated was R$17.4 million ($3.24 million),
against R$5.3 million so far in 2020, according to figures provided by
the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies (INESC), a non-profit
organisation that has analysed Brazil’s public budget for more than 30
years.
"If environmentalists proposed a comparable guarantee to windfarms or
industrial-scale solar or hydrogen they would be hounded for blatant
rent seeking."
The Morrison government’s post-Covid recovery commission has called for
an astonishing level of support for a declining carbon fuel.
"Gas in our own national electricity market has declined by 29% since 2014 and renewables sprung up by 70%, according to data from OpenNEM.
The official market operator believes by 2040 the role of gas is going
to be smaller. The gas glut on the world market will last the decade.
A decision by Canberra to rescue a declining carbon fuel by sinking
billions into gas would mean Australia having to say officially it was
abandoning its Paris targets. Given that our 2019-20 fire season is the
most recent image the world has of us, this would brand us an
international pariah.
Liveris admitted he “tingled with pride”
being recruited as an adviser by the US president, Donald Trump. But a
Biden-Harris presidency will elevate climate diplomacy and have little
regard for an Australia turning its back on climate action as
flamboyantly as Brazil’s president Jay Bolsonaro who allows fires to
denude the Amazon." Bob Carr
Former
Labor prime minister Julia Gillard has expressed optimism that
Australia will eventually embrace strong climate policy while defending
her government’s carbon price policy as one of the most effective
measures introduced in Australia to cut emissions.
Speaking during
a web forum organised by the Australia Institute, Gillard said that the
evidence was clear that the carbon price introduced by her government
successfully worked to cut Australia’s emissions without being a burden
on the Australian economy.
Talk of Australia’s climate policy
failures often focuses on Kevin Rudd’s CPRS, rejected by the Coalition
after Tony Abbott emerged as their leader. Somehow, the Greens are
blamed for this failure but it is often forgotten that the Greens worked
with Labor to deliver the carbon price, along with ARENA and the CEFC.
Marking
ten years since Gillard became prime minister, the former Labor leader
was asked to reflect on the performance of the carbon price, which
ultimately proved to be politically damaging, despite being effective
policy.
“Australia’s emissions were going up; our carbon price
came into effect, they went down. Then, it was repealed by the Abbott
government and there they go, back up. So we would be in a different and
better place on climate had that scheme endured,” Gillard said.
It was a record 125 degrees Fahrenheit in Baghdad in July, and 100
degrees above the Arctic Circle this June. Australia shattered its
summer heat records as wildfires, fueled by prolonged drought, turned
the sky fever red.
For 150 years of industrialization, the combustion of coal, oil and gas
has steadily released heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, driving
up average global temperatures and setting heat records. Nearly
everywhere around the world, heat waves are more frequent and longer lasting than they were 70 years ago.
But a hotter planet does not hurt equally. If you’re poor and
Heatwaves
marginalized, you’re likely to be much more vulnerable to extreme heat.
You might be unable to afford an air-conditioner, and you might not even
have electricity when you need it. You may have no choice but to work
outdoors under a sun so blistering that first your knees feel weak and
then delirium sets in. Or the heat might bring a drought so punishing
that, no matter how hard you work under the sun, your corn withers and
your children turn to you in hunger.
It’s not like you can just pack up and leave. So you plant your corn
higher up the mountain. You bathe several times a day if you can afford
the water. You powder your baby to prevent heat rash. You sleep outdoors
when the power goes out, slapping mosquitoes. You sit in front of a fan
by yourself, cursed by the twin dangers of isolation and heat.
Extreme heat is not a future risk. It’s now. It endangers human health, food production and the fate of entire economies.
And it’s worst for those at the bottom of the economic ladder in their
societies. See what it’s like to live with one of the most dangerous and
stealthiest hazards of the modern era.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change was the significant factor looming to ruin unprepared economies. Now that world economies are in deep depression it is 'green new deals' that can provide jobs in the future.
When investors start to take notice of 'climate change'.
"5. The severe costs of climate change outlined in this report are
not inevitable. To avoid the costs of climate change increasing
exponentially, greenhouse gas emissions must decline to net zero
emissions before 2050. Investments in resilience and adaptation will be
essential to reduce or prevent losses in the coming decades.
• Increasing resilience to extreme weather and climate change should
become a key component of urban planning, infrastructure design and
building standards.
• Buildings and infrastructure must be built to withstand future
climate hazards and to facilitate the transition to a net zero emissions
economy.
"3. The property market is expected to lose $571 billion in value by
2030 due to climate change and extreme weather, and will continue to
lose value in the coming decades if emissions remain high.
• One in every 19 property owners face the prospect of insurance
premiums that will be effectively unaffordable by 2030 (costing 1% or
more of the property value per year).
• Some Australians will be acutely and catastrophically affected.
Low-lying properties near rivers and coastlines are particularly at
risk, with flood risks increasing progressively and coastal inundation
risks emerging as a major threat around 2050.
• Certain events which are likely to become more common because of
climate change are not covered by commercial insurance, including
coastal inundation and erosion.
"Extreme events like droughts, heatwaves, cyclones and floods have
an impact on agriculture and food production; this is already affecting
Australia’s economy and will cost us much more in the future."
“We will pay for climate breakdown one way or another, so it makes
sense to spend the money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until
later to pay a lot more for the consequences… It’s a cliché, but it’s
true: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University
Rewiring America says: "This real–world experience (WW3) illustrates the employment potential of a rapid transition to a clean energy economy. Probably the only viable project of the scale necessary to reignite economic growth and return to full employment is decarbonizing America’s energy system.This is equally true in many other countries in the world." Rewiring America
"Increasing employment under the transition to a zero–carbon is driven by the requirement for more labor in manufacturing, installation, and maintenance of renewables than their counterpart fossil fuel technologies.
It takes more people to install and keep a wind farm running than it does to drill a well and keep it pumping for the same amount of energy overtime. Renewables get their fuels for free, whereas fossil fuels cost money. It takes more labor and maintenance to access those free renewable fuels. This is a very desirable trade off in an economy with massive unemployment." Rewiring America
Trump digs coal
