Heat causes climate change and climate change causes humans to produce reports: reports documenting the worsening problem and its causes; reports about the actions needed but not being taken; and reports about actions that should be avoided but are taken any way. And through it all, we keep burning coal.  

You can always count on the Breakthrough Group to provide an evidence-driven, honest, easy-to-read analysis of the pickle we’re in with climate change. And its ‘Climate Reality Check 2020 is no exception. The Reality Check’s ‘20 critical understandings, observations and insights’ include:

• Warming of 1.5oC, likely in the next decade, is far from ‘safe’ and threatens the survival of vital ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef, Antarctic ice sheets and Arctic sea ice, and the Amazon forest;
• If all greenhouse gas emissions stopped today, the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will lead to warming of 2.4oC …
• … but the world is actually on a path to 3-5oC warming by 2100. This will be beyond the adaptation capacity of most ecosystems, will be catastrophic for human food production and civilisation as we know it, and may lead to runaway global warming (Hothouse Earth);
• The urgency is such that the time it will take humanity to solve the problem may be longer than the time we have left before it’s too late. This presents an existential threat to civilisation (and some would say humanity but the authors don’t go that far);
• An appropriate response would include zero emissions by 2030 (‘long term targets are an excuse for procrastination’), large scale drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere to reduce the concentration from the current 410ppm to 350ppm, and investigation of the social and environmental benefits and risks of solar radiation management.
  I personally regard the risks associated with solar radiation management as far too great to countenance but if massive ecosystem collapse and human deaths in the billions became imminent and inevitable I suppose I’d look back and think ‘why didn’t we at least investigate solar radiation management in case we ever needed a desperate last throw of the dice?’.

The World Meteorological Association has produced a very snappy, less than tw0-minute video of current climate conditions and their effects.

CONSTRAIN is a consortium of 14 European partners that brings together world-leading climate scientists to develop a better understanding of climate projections over the next 20-50 years. Their most recent report ‘zeroes in’ on a new generation of climate models with some interesting conclusions:

• The average global temperature is about 1.2oC above the pre-industrial level, and increasing at 0.22oC per decade;
• Although the average global temperature increase for one or more years may exceed 1.5oC in the near future, it’s unlikely that the ‘long term’ (30 years) average will exceed 1.5oC before around 2040. We will know only in retrospect;
• The current best estimate is that doubling the atmospheric concentration of CO2 compared with the pre-industrial level of 280ppm will increase the average global temperature in the range 2.3-4.5o. The largest cause of uncertainty is an incomplete understanding of cloud behaviour. The current CO2 concentration is about 412ppm;
• A strong green global economic recovery from Covid – investing 1.2% of GDP in green technologies and refusing to bail out fossil fuel companies – could get us on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, halve the rate of warming experienced over the past 20 years and help us stay below 1.5oC of warming. However …
• … ‘it is also clear that present policies and commitments for climate action and emission reductions by 2030 are collectively grossly inadequate for staying below the Paris Agreement’s 1.5° limit’;
• If the world continues pumping out CO2 at the current rate (about 40 Gigatons per year) for another nine to 10 years, we will have exhausted our carbon budget for even a one in two chance of keeping warming under 1.5o.

There is a short FAQ version of the CONSTRAIN report for the time-challenged.

The nations of the G20 are responsible for more than 90% of cumulative CO2 emissions and about 80% of current emissions. The goal of Climate Transparency, a consortium of research organisations and NGOs, is to ‘encourage ambitious climate action in the G20 countries’ by providing information and stimulating debate. Its most recent ‘transparency report’ compares climate action and responses to Covid-19 across the G20. It doesn’t provide much encouragement.

Despite the need for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, fossil fuels still provided 82% of the G20’s primary energy in 2019, many G20 nations are lacking effective targets and policies for emissions reductions, and the majority are spending most of their Covid recovery stimulus on emissions-intensive and environmentally damaging industries.

In summary, ‘the G20’s climate ambition and action is behind what would be needed to achieve the Paris Agreement goals’ – these are the richest, best-educated, most technologically advanced nations in the world, remember. As well as the overview report, in which Australia mostly features as a poor performer, there is a special report for each country. I cannot begin to tell you how depressing it is to read of Australia’s complete abrogation of responsibility.

Recommended policies for the G20 include to:

• phase out coal use,
• eliminate fossil fuel subsidies by 2025,
• set renewable energy targets,
• implement carbon pricing,
• decarbonise the transport and industrial sectors,
• establish zero deforestation targets, and
• invest in education, research and development.

Benefits would be widespread:

• improved health and wellbeing,
• more jobs,
• a stronger economy,
• increased biodiversity and environmental resilience, and
• enhanced energy access and security.

The World Resources Institute recently produced a State of Climate Action report that provides an overview of how we are collectively doing in tackling the climate crisis across several dimensions.

The report rates global and country-level progress towards emissions reduction targets for 2030 and 2050 that would limit global warming to 1.5oC.

The assessment includes 21 indicators covering six sectors: agriculture, buildings, forests, industry, power and transport. There are two indicators in which the direction and pace of change are sufficient to meet the goal (ruminant meat consumption, but this is complicated by gross regional differences, and increasing crop yields); 13 indicators in which change is in the right direction but far too slow; and two are heading in the wrong direction (increasing deforestation and increasing agricultural emissions).

There was insufficient data to assess the progress of four indicators. The Institute’s graphic below provides estimates of how much faster change must occur in six crucial indicators for the world to stay below 1.5oC of warming.

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/environmental-round-up-31-january-2021/

Sometimes a warning comes along that is so unequivocal and so unimpeachable, from an objective and authoritative source, that it sets a test for a government where they can either act or they can own the consequences that occur when they fail to act. The report by Prof Graeme Samuel AC into Australia’s environmental laws (the cumbersomely named Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act or EPBC Act) is one of those warnings.

It’s not the first time an Australian government has received advice, information or recommendations that unless our laws and policies change, then our iconic species or our most special places are condemned. Every State of the Environment report, released every four years, has shown that the health of our environment has worsened and the trajectory of decline is accelerating. And there’s not a day that passes where a new study or report is released on the fate of our marsupials or fish, forests or oceans, highlighting everything going in the wrong direction.

Furthermore, every month or so, the environment minister, for the last 20 or more years, has had to put their signature on an updated list of endangered species after scientists have reviewed their status. Each update tracks a species as they move from being vulnerable to being endangered, and then from endangered to critically endangered and finally from being critically endangered to being extinct. If we did this in the human world it would be like having newspaper notices saying “Jane Smith has a cold”, “Jane Smith is in hospital”, “Jane Smith is in palliative care”, “Jane Smith has passed and her funeral is on next Friday, please attend or send flowers if you can”. But in the human world, for each notice saying “Jane Smith has a cold”, more often than not the following notice would record Jane’s return to rude health. Unlike with all of us, this almost never happens with our endangered species. There is much more decline than recovery. No environment minister, whatever their political perspective or intellect or ability, could possibly fail to see this.

The difference between these continuous warnings and what Graeme Samuel has delivered to the government is that it has been delivered into a political context where the issue is politically live, the public is attuned to the problem and the message has come from someone that this government has previously used major reform tasks (in this case, oversight of the banking system) and actually implemented the recommendations. And Samuel himself has set up the test. In the foreword of his 268 page report, just above his signature he writes: “To shy away from the fundamental reforms recommended by this review is to accept the continued decline of our iconic places and the extinction of our most threatened plants, animals and ecosystems. This is unacceptable.”

What Samuel has recommended doesn’t go far enough in all the areas needed to really put a brake on extinction. It’s a compromise position where major industry groups have as much say as scientists and the community on what level of destruction nature is able to take. But putting that aside, his proposed reforms are a major step forward to genuine environmental protections and put us on a path to having a system that will self-correct as it becomes clear the decline is not stopping.

We’d really like to believe that this government is willing to implement these reforms and change the fate of Australia’s flora and fauna. We’ve been looking for signs that they will.

But as we’ve looked for signs that the government is willing to move beyond commissioning an independent review of this Act (as is required by law), to actually be seeking to implement the recommendations, we haven’t seen a lot that has engendered trust that they can or will do this.

In this term alone, the Morrison government has, without consultation subsumed the environment department into the agriculture department; reintroduced a Tony Abbott-era bill that would unwind federal protections and hand environmental protection decisions to the states; failed to make any environmental policy changes in the wake of the Black Summer bushfires; and, in a way that it’s hard not to read as a cynical pattern of avoidance, held on to this review for three months, only to release it during a press conference where the opposition leader was announcing a reshuffle and yet still fail to provide any formal government response to it.

In an era of faltering government accountability, of Trumpian neo-populism, of sports rorts and of “I don’t hold a hose, mate”, the lack of environmental accountability is perhaps the least-explored and will provide the most enduring costs of those failures.

The Samuel report can help to start to change this. Not just in the specific reforms it recommends, but in whether or not this government can be held to account or actually own the consequences of their actions.

• Tim Beshara is manager of policy and strategy and Suzanne Milthorpe is national laws campaign manager at the Wilderness Society.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/01/the-morrison-government-must-change-our-environment-laws-or-be-guilty-of-condemning-our-greatest-treasures

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Federal officials warned against transferring environmental approval powers to state governments before a major review of conservation laws was complete, saying it could undermine hopes of substantial reform.

Despite the warning, the Morrison and Western Australian governments pushed ahead with plans to give the states greater authority in approving developments before the formal review by former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel was finished.

Samuel ultimately recommended the change should only happen alongside the introduction of strong national environmental standards and the establishment of independent bodies to ensure they were enforced – two initiatives the government is yet to move on.

Documents obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws detail meetings between senior federal environment department officials and the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia in late 2019 and early 2020.

The documents show the chamber lobbied for a handover of federal decision-making powers to Western Australia before the once-in-a-decade review of national environmental laws was complete.

Legislation to give states more responsibility for decision-making under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity (EPBC) Act has been before the parliament since August and is due to be debated by the Senate in February or March.

As Guardian Australia has reported, the government began drafting its bill before receiving the interim findings of the Samuel review. The final report, released last week, called for an overhaul of the laws and the establishment of several independent bodies to oversee them.

The government has not responded to Samuel’s 38 recommendations, but is pushing ahead with its bid to transfer approval powers.

The new documents include talking points that department officials prepared for a meeting between its secretary, Andrew Metcalfe and the state minerals chamber on 12 February 2020, during the early stages of the review.

The talking points state the chamber and companies including Rio Tintowanted a bilateral approval agreement that would give the McGowan government responsibility for decisions under national laws.

They said the department was opposed “because of its potential to undermine the outcomes of the EPBC Act review, its limited scope of coverage and legal risk unless legislative amendments to the EPBC Act can be secured”.

Early pursuit of an agreement could derail the chance for substantial reform of environmental laws, the document states. “The department is not supportive at this time,” it concluded.

Officials said the department did not believe a transfer of approval powers was the best way to make the environmental assessment process more efficient.

They instead recommended making improvements to streamlined assessment processes – known as bilateral assessment agreements, under which

the commonwealth retains its decision-making powers.

In a briefing to Metcalfe, officials said a renewed bilateral assessment agreement with WA would benefit about half of the projects proposed in the state.

As previous documents have shown, the Morrison government was under pressure from both the McGowan government and Rio Tinto to transfer approval powers to WA. It ultimately pushed ahead and the department drew up a timeline for reaching such an agreement shortly after the government received the interim Samuel review in June.

James Trezise, a policy analyst at the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the new documents confirmed that rushing a transfer of approval powers through the parliament would “fundamentally undermine” Samuel’s independent review.

He said the department’s warnings had not been heeded.

“It is deeply concerning that a select group of industry players, including Rio Tinto, have been actively undermining the capacity for any win-win reforms put forward by the review,” he said.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/06/foi-documents-show-scott-morrison-has-bungled-environment-law-reform-labor-says

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Scomo is a worse bullshit artist than Abbott... and he also is more deceitful...