[TheClimate.Vote] April 9, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/April 9, 2019/


[CBS News]
*Blockbuster blizzard could impact states hit by "bomb cyclone" weeks ago*
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/extreme-weather-blizzard-bomb-cyclone-plains-midwest-latest-forecast-path-track-today-2019-04-08/


[Chilling]
*Researchers Warn Arctic Has Entered 'Unprecedented State' That 
Threatens Global Climate Stability*
"Never have so many Arctic indicators been brought together in a single 
paper." And the findings spell trouble for the entire planet.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/08/researchers-warn-arctic-has-entered-unprecedented-state-threatens-global-climate


[Necessity Defense allowed]
*Washington Court of Appeals Upholds Right to Present Necessity Defense 
in Climate Case*
April 8, 2019
Today the Washington Court of Appeals reversed and remanded the 
conviction of climate activist Ken Ward and sent his case back to the 
lower court for a third trial because Ward was denied his Sixth 
Amendment right to present the necessity defense to a jury of his peers.

The case arose from a series of non-violent actions that occurred in 
several states on October 11, 2016 in which five climate activists, 
known as the "valve-turners," temporarily shut down all pipelines 
carrying tar sands oil from Canada into the U.S.

Judge Mann ruled: "Kenneth Ward appeals his conviction for burglary in 
the second degree after he broke into a Kinder Morgan pipeline facility 
and turned off a valve, which stopped the flow of Canadian tar sands oil 
to refineries in Skagit and Whatcom Counties. Ward intended to protest 
the continued use of tar sands oil, which he contends significantly 
contributes to climate change, and the inaction by governments to 
meaningfully address the crisis of climate change."

Ward was tried twice for the action. In the first trial, he was charged 
with burglary in the second degree, criminal sabotage, and criminal 
trespass in the second degree. The first trial ended in a mistrial after 
jurors could not reach an agreement to convict. During his second trial, 
the state recharged Ward with burglary and criminal sabotage. He was 
then convicted of burglary but not criminal sabotage.

Prior to trial, Ward argued that, while he committed these actions, his 
actions were protected under the long-standing common law doctrine of 
necessity, now recognized by statute in Washington. As the appellate 
Court notes, the "[necessity] defense may be raised when a defendant 
demonstrates that they reasonably believed the commission of the crime 
was necessary to avoid or minimize a harm, the harm sought to be avoided 
was greater than the harm resulting from a violation of the law, the 
threatened harm was not brought about by the defendant, and no 
reasonable legal alternative existed."...
- - -
After hearing news of the Court's decision, Mr. Ward stated: "I am very 
heartened that the Appeals Court recognized the validity of a necessity 
defense, in light of abundant evidence that the climate crisis is at a 
tipping point, and that our government is utterly ineffectual. I look 
forward to putting the true facts of my case before a jury."
https://cldc.org/washington-court-of-appeals-upholds-right-to-present-necessity-defense-in-climate-case/
- - -
[Court opinion]
*Download the Court of Appeals Opinion (PDF)*
** https://cldc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/COA-Opinion.pdf


[millions of years ago]
*Last time CO2 levels were this high, sea levels were 60 feet higher and 
Antarctica had trees*
Study finds the Earth's climate is highly sensitive to "relatively small 
variations in atmospheric CO2."
https://thinkprogress.org/carbon-dioxide-levels-sea-antarctica-b435497e1266/


[FEWS NET =  Famine Early Warning Systems Network]
*Droughts persist in southern Africa as rainfall deficits increase over 
dry areas of the Greater Horn *
FEWS NET analysts, working in more than 35 countries, continuously 
gather evidence of the current food security situation in areas of concern.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network is a leading provider of early 
warning and analysis on food insecurity.
http://fews.net/global/global-weather-hazards/april-5-2019


[Small miracles]
*Heatwave helps Britain's rarest butterflies boom to record numbers*
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/07/heatwave-helps-britains-rarest-butterflies-boom-record-numbers/


[Book reviews by Bill McKibben]
*A Future Without Fossil Fuels?*
Bill McKibben APRIL 4, 2019 ISSUE
_2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming_
a report by Kingsmill Bond
41 pp., September 2018, available at carbontracker.org
_A New World: The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation_
a report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy 
Transformation
88 pp., January 2019, available at irena.org
"Kingsmill Bond" certainly sounds like a proper name for a City of 
London financial analyst. He looks the part, too: gray hair expertly 
trimmed, well-cut suit. He's lived in Moscow and Hong Kong and worked 
for Deutsche Bank, the Russian financial firm Troika Dialog, and 
Citibank. He's currently "new energy strategist" for a small British 
think tank called Carbon Tracker, and last fall he published a short 
paper called "2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak 
Coming." It asks an interesting question: At what point does a new 
technology cause an existing industry to start losing significant value?

This may turn out to be the most important economic and political 
question of the first half of this century, and the answer might tell us 
much about our chances of getting through the climate crisis without 
completely destroying the planet. Based on earlier technological 
transitions--horses to cars, sails to steam, land lines to cell 
phones--it seems possible that the fossil fuel industry may begin to 
weaken much sooner than you'd think. The British-Venezuelan scholar 
Carlota Perez has observed that over a period of twenty years, trains 
made redundant a four-thousand-mile network of canals and dredged rivers 
across the UK: "The canal builders…fought hard and even finished a 
couple of major canals in the 1830s, but defeat was inevitable," as it 
later was for American railroads (and horses) when they were replaced by 
trucks and cars.

Major technological transitions often take a while. The Czech-Canadian 
academic Vaclav Smil has pointed out that although James Watt developed 
the coal-powered steam engine in 1776, coal supplied less than 5 percent 
of the planet's energy until 1840, and it didn't reach 50 percent until 
1900. But the economic effect of those transitions can happen much 
earlier, Bond writes, as soon as it becomes clear to investors that a 
new technology is accounting for all the growth in a particular sector.

Over the last decade, there has been a staggering fall in the price of 
solar and wind power, and of the lithium-ion batteries used to store 
energy. This has led to rapid expansion of these technologies, even 
though they are still used much less than fossil fuels: in 2017, for 
instance, sun and wind produced just 6 percent of the world's electric 
supply, but they made up 45 percent of the growth in supply, and the 
cost of sun and wind power continues to fall by about 20 percent with 
each doubling of capacity. Bond's analysis suggests that in the next few 
years, they will represent all the growth. We will then reach peak use 
of fossil fuels, not because we're running out of them but because 
renewables will have become so cheap that anyone needing a new energy 
supply will likely turn to solar or wind power.

Bond writes that in the 2020s--probably the early 2020s--the demand for 
fossil fuels will stop growing. The turning point in such transitions 
"is typically the moment when the impact is felt in financial 
markets"--when stock prices tumble and never recover. Who is going to 
invest in an industry that is clearly destined to shrink? Though we'll 
still be using lots of oil, its price should fall if it has to compete 
with the price of sunshine. Hence the huge investments in pipelines and 
tankers and undersea exploration will be increasingly unrecoverable. 
Precisely how long it will take is impossible to predict, but the 
outcome seems clear.

This transition is already obvious in the coal markets. To understand, 
for example, why Peabody, the world's largest private-sector coal-mining 
company, went from being on Fortune's list of most admired companies in 
2008 to bankrupt in 2016, consider its difficulties in expanding its 
market. India, until very recently, was expected to provide much of the 
growth for coal. As late as 2015, its coal use was expected to triple by 
2030; the country was resisting global efforts like the Paris Accords to 
rein in its carbon emissions. But the price of renewable energy began to 
fall precipitously, and because India suffered from dire air pollution 
but has inexhaustible supplies of sunlight, its use of solar power 
started to increase dramatically.

"In 2017, the price in India of wind and solar power dropped 50 percent 
to $35–40 a megawatt hour," said Tim Buckley, who analyzes 
Australasia/South Asia for the Institute for Energy Economics and 
Financial Analysis. "Fifty percent in one year. And a zero inflation 
indexation for the next twenty-five years. Just amazing." This price 
drop occurred not because India subsidizes renewable energy (it 
doesn't), but because engineers did such a good job of making solar 
panels more efficient. The cost of power from a newly built coal plant 
using Indian coal is, by comparison, about $60 a megawatt hour. If you 
have to import the coal, the price of power is $70/megawatt hour. And 
solar's $40/megawatt hour price is guaranteed not to rise over the 
thirty-year life of the contract the suppliers sign--their bids are 
based on building and then running a facility for the life of the 
contract. No wonder that over the first nine months of 2018, India 
installed forty times more capacity for renewable than for coal-fired power.

Much the same is happening around the world. President Trump has spared 
no effort to help the coal industry, but more coal-fired power plants 
shut down during the first two years of his presidency than during 
President Obama's entire first term. American coal consumption fell 4 
percent in 2018. In 2017 Kentucky's coal-mining museum installed solar 
panels on its roof in order to save $10,000 a year on electric costs.

And it's not just coal that's on the way out. Natural gas was supposed 
to be the planet's next big fuel source, since it produces less carbon 
than coal (although its production releases great clouds of methane, 
another potent greenhouse gas). While fracking has produced high volumes 
of natural gas--especially in the US, where it was pioneered--wells tend 
to dry out quickly, and despite enormous investment, the International 
Energy Agency estimates that between 2010 and 2014 the shale industry 
operated with negative cash flows of more than $200 billion.

Even "cheap" natural gas is now starting to look expensive compared to 
the combination of sun, wind, and batteries. In an essay for Vox, the 
energy reporter David Roberts listed all the natural gas plants--many of 
them designed to provide quick bursts of "peaking power" on heavy demand 
days--whose planned construction has been canceled in recent months, as 
utilities and banks began to figure out that over the projected 
forty-year life of a new plant, there was a good chance it would become 
an uncompetitive "stranded asset" producing pointlessly expensive 
electricity. The chief executive of one US solar company said in 
January, "I can beat a gas peaker anywhere in the country today with a 
solar-plus-storage power plant. Who in their right mind today would 
build a new gas peaker? We are a factor of two cheaper."

You get some sense of the future from the stunning fall of General 
Electric. "They were the world leader, the thought leader, the finance 
leader, the IT leader," said Buckley. "And their share price is down 70 
percent in the last two and a half years, in a market that's up 50 
percent. It's a thermal power–reliant basket case." That's in large 
measure because manufacturing turbines for coal- and gas-fired power 
plants was a significant part of the company's business; in 2015, it 
hugely expanded that capacity by buying its largest European competitor, 
Alstom. But then the bottom dropped out of the industry as proposed new 
generating plants couldn't find financing. GE makes wind turbines, too, 
but that's a lower-margin business with many more competitors. The fall 
in GE's stock has meant "hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder 
value reduction," according to Buckley. Last June, after more than a 
century, General Electric was dropped from the Dow Industrial Index, 
replaced by a drugstore chain.

Oil was believed to be better protected than coal and gas from 
competition because cars have long needed liquid fuel to run. But 
electric cars are becoming affordable for more and more consumers. In 
2017 only three million out of a worldwide total of 800 million cars 
were electric, but they accounted for 22 percent of the growth in global 
car sales. The world's leading car companies have become convinced that 
electric vehicles will account for all the growth in demand by the early 
2020s. That's why, by January 2018, they had committed $90 billion to 
developing electric vehicles--and why, by 2017, Tesla was worth more 
than GM or Ford. And for every Tesla that rolls off the assembly line, 
Chinese manufacturers are producing five electric cars. Auto analysts 
are already warning consumers to think twice before buying a gas-powered 
car, since its resale value may fall dramatically over just the next 
three years.

The oil companies tell investors not to worry. In mid-February Exxon 
announced that it had found huge new deepwater oil deposits off the 
coast of Guyana, and that overall it planned to pump 25 percent more oil 
and gas in 2025 than it had in 2017, which, it claimed, would triple its 
profits. In September, OPEC released a report predicting higher oil 
demand due to increases in jet travel and the production of plastics, 
which are made from petrochemicals. Analysts like Bond are skeptical of 
such claims. Although oil has been the planet's most important industry 
for over a century, over the last five years it's been the 
slowest-growing sector of the stock market. Petrochemicals and jet fuel 
are indeed harder to replace with renewable energy, but they make up a 
relatively small part of the market for oil--even if demand for them 
grows, it can't offset the losses in core uses like pumping gas for cars.

The recent history of European utilities may provide a more realistic 
preview of what will happen in the rest of the world. In the early years 
of this century the German government increased the pace of 
decarbonization, subsidizing solar and wind energy. As more and cheaper 
renewable supplies became available, the existing utilities were slow to 
react. They had built new gas plants to account for what they assumed 
would be rising demand, but solar and wind cut into that demand, and the 
price of electricity began to fall. So far, European utilities have 
written down about $150 billion in stranded assets: fossil fuel 
installations that are no longer needed. "In the Netherlands, by the 
time the last three coal plants were turned on, their owners had already 
written them down by 70 percent," said Buckley. And they're scheduled to 
close by 2030.

One obvious question is why the fossil fuel companies don't simply 
transform themselves into renewable energy companies and use the huge 
cash flows they still have to gain control of future markets. "They're 
putting under ten percent of capital expenditures into renewables," says 
Bond, which translates into about one percent of their balance sheets. 
As Exxon's CEO recently told The Economist, "we have much higher 
expectations for the returns on the capital we invest" than sun and wind 
can provide. From their point of view, there's some money to be made 
from putting up solar panels, but once they're on the roof the sunshine 
is free. For corporations that made vast profits by selling their 
customers fuel every day for a century, that's not an attractive 
business model.

Another important question is whether this transition will crash the 
world economy. Investors have money at risk, and not just in fossil fuel 
shares: a shift of this size will affect car companies, machinery 
companies, and many others. But as the climate activist and billionaire 
investor Tom Steyer has pointed out, most technological transitions 
damage existing industries without wrecking the economy because they 
create value even as they destroy it. "Look at the communications 
industry over the last two decades, as the Internet came of age," Steyer 
said. "Some of the most valuable businesses on the planet that had been 
around for more than a century got decimated. I mean, Newsweek sold for 
a dollar. But a lot of new businesses got created that were worth more."

And banks have had at least some warning to prepare for this enormous 
shift. In 2015 Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, began 
issuing strident warnings about stranded fossil fuel assets, urging the 
banks he regulated to begin taking close account of their exposure. He 
gave a memorable speech on the trading floor of Lloyds of London, 
pointing out that if countries made serious efforts to meet climate 
targets, vast amounts of money spent on oil wells, pipelines, coal 
mines, and tankers would be written off. He had to issue the warnings, 
he said, because the normal time horizon for financiers was too short. 
"Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, 
it may already be too late," he said, noting that "the exposure of UK 
investors, including insurance companies, to these shifts is potentially 
huge." He urged them to start preparing for a lower-carbon world. 
Companies, he said, should "disclose not only what they are emitting 
today, but how they plan their transition to the net-zero world of the 
future."

Carney's warning--which reverberated out from the financial center of 
London--seems to have spurred a reevaluation of fossil fuel exposure by 
many big financial institutions. "The major banks are now addressing 
this risk, whereas three years ago they were asleep to it," Buckley 
said. "Now in Australia all our banks have climate policy, where they 
didn't three years ago. We didn't even have data." A report in late 
February from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis 
showed that since 2013 a hundred major banks had restricted coal lending 
or gotten out of the business altogether.

A far more important question, of course, is whether the changes now 
underway will happen fast enough to alter our grim climatic future. 
Here, the answers are less positive. Scientists, conservative by nature, 
have routinely underestimated the pace of planetary disruption: the 
enormous melt now observed at the poles was not supposed to happen until 
late in the century, for instance, and the galloping pace of ocean 
acidification wasn't even recognized as a threat two decades ago. That 
means that we have very little time to act--not enough, certainly, for 
business cycles to do the job alone. The latest report of the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last autumn, laid 
out a strict timeline: we need to effectively halve our use of fossil 
fuels within a dozen years to prevent the worst damage, which is why 
activists and politicians have called for dramatic government 
interventions like the Green New Deal recently proposed by 
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Democratic colleagues.2

Government action is required because, for one thing, there's vast 
inertia in the energy system. Plants are built to last decades, and even 
if plants that use fossil fuels aren't built today, banks will insist 
that existing ones operate long enough to pay back their investments. 
And in some parts of the world, fossil fuel expansion continues: China, 
for instance, is trying to close down its own coal-fired power plants 
because its cities are choked in smog, but Chinese companies are using 
their expertise to build coal-powered plants abroad. Buckley noted that 
the opportunities for bribes on colossal projects mean, among other 
things, that a number of developing countries may indeed continue down 
the fossil fuel path.

In countries like the US or Canada, the political power of the fossil 
fuel industry is still considerable. Barack Obama boasted to a Texas 
audience last year that during his administration the US had passed 
Russia and Saudi Arabia as the biggest producer of hydrocarbons; even 
the progressive Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau recently spent 
billions in tax dollars to finance a pipeline designed to increase 
exports from the country's environmentally ruinous tar sands.

That's why the most important aspect of the decline of fossil fuel 
companies might be a corresponding decline in their political influence. 
The coal, oil, and gas industries have been the architects of the 
disinformation campaigns that kept us from responding earlier to 
scientists' warnings about climate change, and they are using every 
trick they know to keep us from making a quick transition. History 
indicates that "the oil majors--and those who invest in them--will…bribe 
and fund Trump-type candidates and use their money in any other way" to 
slow down change, Carlota Perez said.

But change is here. While engineers are doing their part by making 
renewable energy cheaper, activists are mounting efforts to weaken the 
companies directly, and there are some signs that the pressure is 
working. An effort that I helped launch beginning in 2012 to persuade 
universities and churches to divest their fossil fuel shares has spread 
rapidly and become the largest divestment campaign in history. Over the 
last five years, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds have 
joined in, raising the total value of endowments and portfolios involved 
to over $8 trillion, and prompting Shell to declare the campaign a 
material risk to its future business. (Early last year, the governments 
of New York City and London pledged to divest their pension funds, and 
the entire nation of Ireland joined in midsummer.) Campaigns have also 
targeted banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase to force them to 
stop supporting particular pipelines.

The bottom line is clear: to the degree that the fossil fuel industry is 
weakened by some combination of technological change and furious 
activism, the chances for serious change increase. If energy barons like 
the Koch Brothers and Exxon remain flush with cash, they can probably 
delay or undermine initiatives like the Green New Deal. But if their 
businesses are under strong pressure from a rapidly changing energy 
economy, polities around the world would be freer to take the steps that 
scientists insist are necessary with the speed required to prevent 
global catastrophe. Should these changes happen quickly, they could do 
more than save us from planetary peril.

"A New World," the January report on the geopolitics of energy 
transformation from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), 
is one of the most hopeful documents I've read in a long time: it points 
out that for the 80 percent of the world's population that lives in 
countries that are net importers of fossil fuels, the transition to 
renewable energy means the end of a crushing import burden. "The 
long-term consequences of a switch to renewables are very positive," 
said Bond, who helped write the report. "Fossil fuels are produced by a 
small number of companies and countries and the benefits flow to a small 
number of people. With solar and wind you get a lot more local jobs, a 
lot more local investment. You get a whole new geopolitics."

Take India, the poorest large nation on earth. It imports 80 percent of 
its oil and 40 percent of its gas, along with much of its coal. 
Currently that costs the country $240 billion a year; if, as its leaders 
hope, its economy grows 7 percent annually, that figure would double in 
a decade--which is economically unsustainable. "Renewables also offer 
developing economies an opportunity to leapfrog, not only fossil fuels, 
but, to some extent, the need for a centralized electricity grid," the 
IRENA report concludes.

Countries in Africa and South Asia have a golden opportunity to avoid 
expensive fixed investments in fossil fuels and centralized grids by 
adopting mini-grids and decentralized solar and wind energy deployed 
off-grid--just as they jumped straight to mobile phones and obviated the 
need to lay expensive copper-wired telephone networks.

The changeover, of course, would be rocky. Beyond the effects on the 
global economy or on particular companies and their investors, countries 
like Russia or Saudi Arabia (and increasingly parts of the US) are 
essentially oil companies themselves. As these petro-states face a fall 
in the value of their only real asset, there is a risk of 
destabilization on a vast scale; in fact, it's possible that we're in 
the early stages of this process, with mischief and cruelty increasingly 
on display as countries with no other source of economic power struggle 
to maintain profits while they can. The worst damage will, as usual, be 
inflicted on the poorest oil producers: Kuwait might be able to manage 
the transition, but could Angola?

Yet overall the benefits would be immeasurable. Imagine a world in which 
the tortured politics of the Middle East weren't magnified in importance 
by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands. And imagine a world 
in which the greatest driver of climate change--the unrelenting 
political power of the fossil-fuel industry--had begun to shrink. The 
question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/04/04/future-without-fossil-fuels/




[last year McKIbben essay]
*A Very Grim Forecast*
Bill McKibben NOVEMBER 22, 2018 ISSUE
Global Warming of 1.5C: An IPCC Special Report
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Though it was published at the beginning of October, Global Warming of 
1.5C, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 
is a document with its origins in another era, one not so distant from 
ours but politically an age apart. To read it makes you weep not just 
for our future but for our present.

The report was prepared at the request of the United Nations Framework 
Convention on Climate Change at the end of the Paris climate talks in 
December 2015. The agreement reached in Paris pledged the signatories to

holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C 
above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the 
temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing 
that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate 
change.
- -
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/11/22/global-warming-very-grim-forecast/



[Vice news video report on HBO]
*Russia Is Profiting Off Global Warming | VICE on HBO*
Published on Mar 8, 2018
While many parts of the world are struggling from catastrophic effects 
of climate change, Russia is looking to capitalize on it, with the 
Kremlin driving a narrative that touts the economic benefits.

Like more and faster access to petroleum and mineral reserves that were 
previously unreachable. The Northern Sea Passage, a legendary shipping 
lane along Russia's Arctic coastline, has been largely inaccessible for 
part of the year because of dense sea ice. But now, that ice is melting, 
opening up a new trade route for Russia's cargo ships. Russian oil 
companies are already betting big on the new reserves they hope to find 
in the Russian Arctic, and other industries -- like mining -- are 
ramping up production since they now have faster shipping routes to many 
ports.

"The problem of climate change is actually the problem of adaptation to 
climate change. This is not a tragedy," said Nobel Prize-winning 
climatologist Oleg Anisimov. "Certainly some places will become 
unlivable, but other areas are places that will become more livable."

But the Russian people seem unaware, or unconcerned, about the 
environmental impacts of these climate change-related activities, like 
pollution from the booming factories, and wildfires in the North that 
destroyed million of acres of forest in a major tourism area.

VICE's Gianna Toboni visited Russia's Arctic to see just how big the 
country is betting on climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbtZaqWVUgA


[#VICEonHBO]
*The Battle Raging In Nigeria Over Control Of Oil | VICE on HBO*
VICE News
Published on Mar 22, 2018

Nigeria may sit atop one of the largest oil reserves in the world, but 
the majority of the Nigerian people have seen little benefit from the 
multibillion-dollar industry. The government and global energy companies 
have been exploiting the resource for years, bringing poverty, 
pollution, and violence to the Niger Delta. And now the local militias 
fighting for oil control have made conditions even worse.

Caught in the conflict are Nigerian citizens involved in the illegal oil 
market simply for survival. Oil theft is rampant, and the booming black 
market has transnational oil and gas consultants concerned about the 
effects on global oil markets. The government isn't too happy about it 
either.

"All the oil that is sold around here, the government calls illegally 
refined products," local oil businessman Don Wizaro told VICE News. And 
when the Nigerian military raids illegal oil operations, they slash 
containers, releasing oil into waterways, contaminating what the main 
source of fishing, agriculture, and drinking water.

As the government continues its assault on illegal refineries and barges 
carrying stolen oil, local militias are retaliating. And one of the most 
notorious militias is the Niger Delta Avengers. They attack pipelines 
and infrastructure, significantly affecting both the environment and the 
economy.

VICE correspondent Gianna Toboni heads to the heart of Nigeria's oil 
production to witness firsthand the fight over the control of oil in the 
Niger Delta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAgw_Zyznx0


[Existential Risk - first posted at Code Red]
*How UN science reports and policymaking understate the threats of 
climate change*
by David Spratt
International climate policymaking has failed to avoid a path of 
catastrophic global warming. Two often-overlooked causes of this failure 
are how climate-science knowledge has been produced and utilised by the 
United Nation's twin climate bodies--the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 
(UNFCCC)--and how those organisations function.

It is now widely understood that human-induced climate change this 
century is an existential risk to human civilisation. Unless carbon 
emissions are rapidly reduced to zero, it is likely that global warming 
will either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically 
curtail its potential.

While policymakers talk about holding warming to 1.5C to 2C above the 
pre-industrial level--a very unsafe goal given that dangerous 
climate-system tipping points are being activated now at just 1C of 
warming--by their lack of action they are in fact setting Earth on a 
much higher warming path that will destroy many cities, nations and 
peoples, and many, if not most, species.

This cognitive dissonance was on full display at the UNFCCC's 
twenty-fourth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP24) in 
Katowice, Poland, last December. Speaking at COP24 to great fanfare and 
a standing ovation, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year old Swedish climate 
activist who has inspired a global movement for 'climate strikes' by 
school students, called out the leadership failure of the COP adults who 
'are not mature enough to tell it like is':

We have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. You 
only speak of green eternal economic growth (and) about moving forward 
with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only 
sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature 
enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children.1

And then the adults got down to business, which was to write a rulebook 
for the Paris Agreement. The result does little to push nations to 
improve on the low ambition of the 2015 COP, and instead simply restates 
a request for nations to update their commitments by 2020.

The Paris deal established 'bottom up', voluntary, unenforceable, 
national emission-reduction commitments that would result in a warming 
path of 3.5C, and closer to 5C when the full range of climate-system 
feedbacks is taken into account. Such an outcome, say scientists, is 
inconsistent with the maintenance of human civilisation, and may reduce 
the human population to one billion people. Even the World Bank says it 
may be beyond adaptation.

In a foreword to the recent report What Lies Beneath: The 
Underestimation of Existential Climate Risk, eminent scientist and 
emeritus director of the Potsdam Institute John Schellnhuber warned that 
'climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity 
must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it 
has been left too late and bear the consequences'.2

In a recent interview, Schellnhuber said that if we continue down the 
present path 'there is a very big risk that we will just end our 
civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy 
almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years'.3

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Since the UNFCCC was established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, annual 
human carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions have increased more than 50 per 
cent, and there is no sign of their growth slowing. Since 1992, warming 
has risen from 0.6C to 1.1C, and the rate of warming is now 
accelerating, with Earth likely to hit the lower range of the Paris goal 
of 1.5C within a decade or so. Evidence from Earth's climate history 
suggests that the present CO2 level would raise sea levels by many tens 
of metres and the temperature by around a civilisation-ending 3.5C in 
the longer term.

The UNFCCC strives 'to enable economic development to proceed in a 
sustainable manner', but every year humanity's ecological footprint 
becomes larger and less sustainable. Humanity now requires the 
biophysical capacity of 1.7 Earths annually as it rapidly chews up 
natural capital.

A fast, emergency-scale transition to a post–fossil fuel world is 
absolutely necessary to address climate change. But policymakers exclude 
emergency action from consideration because it is seen as too 
economically disruptive.

Two good examples of this mindset are found in the initial reports to 
their governments by Nicholas Stern (UK in 2006) and Ross Garnaut 
(Australia in 2008), in which they canvassed the 450 parts per million 
(ppm) and the 550 ppm CO2 targets. The figure of 550 ppm represents 
around 3C of warming before carbon-cycle feedbacks are considered, and 
would be truly devastating for people and nature. While both Stern and 
Garnaut concluded that 450 ppm--around 2C of warming without longer-term 
system feedbacks--would inflict significantly less damage, they 
nevertheless advocated that government start with the 550 ppm figure 
because they considered that the lower goal would be too economically 
disruptive. They have since acknowledged that evidence of accelerating 
climate impacts has rendered this approach dangerously complacent.

The UNFCCC orthodoxy is that there is time for an orderly economic 
transition within the current neoliberal paradigm, and so emphasis is 
placed on cost-optimal paths, which are narrowly defined. Policymakers 
increasingly rely on integrated assessment models (IAMs) that claim to 
provide economically efficient policy options, but their modelling of 
the physical science excludes materially relevant processes such as 
permafrost melting, and they systematically underestimate the cost and 
scope of future climate impacts.

Policymakers also favour commodifying carbon pollution and creating a 
vast market for the capture and underground storage of CO2, an unproven 
technology at scale but one that would create a boom for oil and gas 
producers. Unrealistic assumptions about untested solutions become an 
excuse for delaying strong action.

Policymakers, in their magical thinking, imagine a mitigation path of 
gradual change to be constructed over many decades in a growing, 
prosperous world. The world not imagined is the one that now exists: of 
looming financial instability; of a global crisis of political 
legitimacy; of climate-system non-linearities; and of a sustainability 
crisis that extends far beyond climate change to include all the 
fundamentals of human existence and most significant planetary 
boundaries (soils, potable water, oceans, the atmosphere, biodiversity, 
and so on).

The Paris Agreement is almost devoid of substantive language on the 
cause of human-induced climate change and contains no reference to 
'coal', 'oil', 'fracking', 'shale oil', 'fossil fuel' or 'carbon 
dioxide', nor to the words 'zero', 'ban', 'prohibit' or 'stop'. By way 
of comparison, the term 'adaptation' occurs more than eighty times in 
thirty-one pages, though responsibility for forcing others to adapt is 
not mentioned, and both liability and compensation are explicitly 
excluded. The agreement has a goal but no firm action plan, and 
bureaucratic jargon abounds; the terms 'enhance' and 'capacity' appear 
more than fifty times each.

In a way, none of this should be surprising given the UNFCCC's 
structure. The COPs are political fora, populated by professional 
diplomatic representatives of national governments, and subject to the 
diplomatic processes of negotiation, trade-offs and deals. The 
decision-making is inclusive (by consensus), making outcomes hostage to 
national interests and lowest-common-denominator politics.  This was 
again evident in Poland, where, in a deadly diplomatic strike, four big 
oil and gas producers--Saudi Arabia, the United States, Kuwait and 
Russia--blocked wording to welcome a scientific report on the 1.5C 
target, which the COP had commissioned three years earlier in Paris. 
Such behaviour is a hallmark of COP meetings.

Discussion of what would be safe––less warming than we presently 
experience––is non-existent. If climate change is already dangerous, 
then by setting the 1.5C to 2C target, the UNFCCC process has abandoned 
its key goal of preventing 'dangerous anthropogenic influence with the 
climate system'.

Moral hazard permeates official thinking, in that there is an incentive 
to ignore risk in the interests of political expediency. And so we have 
a policy failure of epic proportions.

Scientific reticence

The failure to appreciate and act to avoid the existential risk is in 
part due to the way climate-science knowledge is produced. The bulk of 
climate research has tended to underplay the existential risks, and has 
exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly 
reticence, although increasing numbers of scientists--including Kevin 
Anderson, James Hansen, Michael E. Mann, Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi 
Oreskes, Stefan Rahmstorf, Eric Rignot and Will Steffen--have spoken out 
in recent years on the dangers of such an approach.

One study examined a number of past predictions made by climate 
scientists and found them to have been 'conservative in their 
projections of the impacts of climate change' and that 'at least some of 
the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric 
greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in IPCC 
assessments of the physical science'. The authors concluded that climate 
scientists are not biased toward alarmism but rather the reverse of 
'erring on the side of least drama, whose causes may include adherence 
to the scientific norms of restraint, objectivity, skepticism, 
rationality, dispassion, and moderation'. This may cause scientists 'to 
underpredict or downplay future climate changes'.4

This tallies with Garnaut's reflections on his experience in presenting 
two climate reports to the Australian government. Garnaut questioned 
whether climate research had a conservative 'systematic bias' due to 
'scholarly reticence', and observed that in the climate field this has 
been associated with 'understatement of the risks'.5

When dealing with existential climate risks, Schellnhuber has pointed to 
the limitations of methods that focus on risk and probability analyses 
that often exclude the outlier (lower-probability, high-impact) events 
and possibilities:

Experts tend to establish a peer world-view which becomes ever more 
rigid and focussed. Yet the crucial insights regarding the issue in 
question may lurk at the fringes. This is particularly true when the 
issue is the very survival of our civilisation, where conventional means 
of analysis may become useless.6

He has pointed to a 'probability obsession' in which scientists have 
tried to capture the complex, stochastic behaviour of an object by 
repeating the same experiment on that object many, many times:

We must never forget that we are in a unique situation with no precise 
historic analogue. The level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is 
now greater, and the Earth warmer, than human beings have ever 
experienced. And there are almost eight billion of us now living on this 
planet. So calculating probabilities makes little sense in the most 
critical instances, such as the methane-release dynamics in thawing 
permafrost areas or the potential failing of entire states in the 
climate crisis. Rather, we should identify possibilities, that is, 
potential developments in the planetary make-up that are consistent with 
the…conditions, the processes and the drivers we know.7

Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester says there is 'an endemic 
bias prevalent amongst many of those building emission scenarios to 
underplay the scale of the 2C challenge. In several respects, the 
modelling community is actually self-censoring its research to conform 
to the dominant political and economic paradigm'.8

A good example is the 1.5C goal agreed to at the Paris December 2015 
climate-policy conference. IPCC assessment reports until that time (and 
in conformity with the dominant policy paradigm) had not devoted any 
significant attention to 1.5C emission-reduction scenarios or 1.5C 
impacts, and the Paris delegates had to request the IPCC to do so as a 
matter of urgency. This is a clear case of the policy tail wagging the 
science-research dog.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The IPCC produces science synthesis reports for the primary purpose of 
informing policymaking, specifically that of the UNFCCC. This may be 
termed 'regulatory science' (as opposed to 'research science'), which 
Sheila Jasanoff describes as one that 'straddles the dividing line 
between science and policy'9 as scientists and regulators try to provide 
answers to policy-relevant questions. In this engagement between science 
and politics, say Kate Dooley and co-authors, 'science is seen neither 
as an objective truth, nor as only driven by social interests, but as 
being co-produced through the interaction of natural and social orders'.10

This coproduction has resulted in a number of characteristic features in 
the work of the IPCC, and is exhibited in the way the organisation was 
formed in 1988. There was tension between the desire of UN member states 
for political control of the panel's outcomes, and the need to have 
credible scientists in charge of an expert process of synthesising and 
reporting on climate science. Some countries, including the United 
States, were concerned that 'the ozone negotiations had allowed experts 
to get too far ahead of political realities; they wanted to retain 
closer control over the production of scientific knowledge by appointing 
the Panel's members'.11

The compromise was that scientists would write the long synthesis 
reports, but that the shorter Summary for Policymakers would be subject 
to line-by-line veto by diplomats at plenary sessions. Historically, 
this method has worked to substantially water down the scientific 
findings. As well, government representatives have final authority over 
all actions, including the publication of all reports, and the 
appointment of the lead scientific authors for all reports. The latter 
has contributed to the reticent nature of much of the IPCC's key work.

As early as the IPCC's first report, in 1990, the US, Saudi and Russian 
delegations acted in 'watering down the sense of the alarm in the 
wording, beefing up the aura of uncertainty', according to Jeremy 
Leggett.12 Martin Parry of the UK Met Office, co-chair of an IPCC 
working group at the time, exposed the arguments between scientists and 
political officials over the 2007 Summary for Policymakers: 'Governments 
don't like numbers, so some numbers were brushed out of it'.13

Like the UNFCCC, the IPCC process suffers from all the dangers of 
consensus building in a complex arena. IPCC reports, of necessity, do 
not always contain the latest available information, and consensus 
building can lead to 'least drama', lowest-common-denominator outcomes, 
which overlook critical issues. This is particularly the case with the 
'fat-tails' of probability distributions--that is, the high-impact but 
lower-probability events for which scientific knowledge is more limited.

Climate-model limitations

 From the beginning the IPCC derived its understanding of climate from 
general climate models (GCMs) to the exclusion of other sources of 
knowledge. This had far-reaching consequences, including the IPCC's 
reticence on key issues and incapacity to handle risk issues. Dooley has 
noted that for more than two decades researchers:

questioned the policy-usefulness of GCMs because of their limitations in 
dealing with uncertainty. They argued that the dominance of 
models--widely perceived as the 'best science' available for climate 
policy input--leads to a technocratic policy orientation, which tends to 
obscure political choices that deserve wider debate. There is now an 
established body of literature critiquing the implications of this 
expert-led modelling approach to climate policy.14

Dooley and co-authors say that research has now unmasked how this 
expert-led modelling approach to climate-policy politics gets built into 
science, enabling a technocratic and global framing of climate change, 
devoid of people and impacts.

There is a consistent pattern in the IPCC of presenting detailed, 
quantified (numerical) complex-modelling results, but then briefly 
noting more severe possibilities--such as feedbacks that the models do 
not account for--in a descriptive, non-quantified form. Sea levels, 
polar ice sheets and some carbon-cycle feedbacks are three examples. 
Because policymakers and the media are often drawn to headline numbers, 
this approach results in less attention being given to the most 
devastating, high-end, non-linear and difficult-to-quantify outcomes.

Twelve years ago, Oppenheimer and co-authors pointed out that consensus 
around numerical results can result in an understatement of the risks:

The emphasis on consensus in IPCC reports has put the spotlight on 
expected outcomes, which then become anchored via numerical estimates in 
the minds of policymakers…it is now equally important that policymakers 
understand the more extreme possibilities that consensus may exclude or 
downplay…given the anchoring that inevitably occurs around numerical 
values, the basis for quantitative uncertainty estimates provided must 
be broadened.15

Oppenheimer and co-authors said that comparable weight should be given 
to evidence from Earth's climate history, to more observationally based, 
less complex semi-empirical models and theoretical evidence of poorly 
understood phenomena. And they urged the IPCC to fully include 
'judgments from expert elicitations'--that is, what leading scientific 
figures think is going on when there is not yet sufficient, or 
sufficiently consistent, evidence to pass the peer-review process. This 
has not been done.

Getting risk wrong

We have already seen the consequences of scientific reticence and 
consensus policy-making in the underestimation of risk. IPCC reports 
have underplayed high-end possibilities and failed to assess risks in a 
balanced manner. Stern said of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report: 
'Essentially it reported on a body of literature that had systematically 
and grossly underestimated the risks [and costs] of unmanaged climate 
change'.16

This is a particular concern with climate-system tipping points--passing 
critical thresholds that result in step changes in the climate 
system--such as the polar ice sheets (and hence sea levels), and 
permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming 
are non-linear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge.

Integral to this approach is the issue of the lower-probability, 
high-impact fat-tail risks, in which the likelihood of very large 
impacts is actually greater than would be expected under typical 
statistical assumptions. The fat-tail risks to humanity, which the 
tipping points represent, justify strong precautionary management. If 
climate policymaking is to be soundly based, a reframing of scientific 
research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently 
required.

But this is not even on the radar of the UN's climate bodies, which have 
given no attention to fat-tail risk analysis, and whose method of 
synthesising a wide range of research with divergent results emphasises 
the more frequent findings that tend to be towards the middle of the 
range of results.

A prudent risk-management approach means a tough and objective look at 
the real risks to which we are exposed, especially those high-end events 
whose consequences may be damaging beyond quantification, and which 
human civilisation as we know it would be lucky to survive. It is 
important to understand the potential of, and to plan for, the worst 
that can happen (and, hopefully, be pleasantly surprised if it doesn't). 
Focusing on the most likely outcomes, and ignoring the more extreme 
possibilities, may result in an unexpected catastrophic event that we 
could, and should, have seen coming.

An upside to non-linearity?

The problem with non-linear changes in the climate system is that, 
almost by definition and given the current state of development of 
climate models, they are difficult to forecast. While Earth's climate 
history can give valuable insights into our near future, the IPCC has 
downplayed, often to the point of ignoring, these important research 
findings on the range of possible climate futures.

This field of paleoclimatology has revealed that in the longer run each 
1C of warming will result in 10 to 20 metres of sea-level rise and that 
the current level of greenhouse gases is sufficient to produce warming 
that would likely end human civilisation as we know it by the 
destruction of coastal cities and settlements, the inundation of the 
world's food-growing river deltas, warming sufficient to make most of 
the world's tropical zone uninhabitable (including most of South, 
Southeast and East Asia), and the breakdown of order within and between 
nations.

We have physical, non-linear climate-system disruptions coming very 
soon. But there are also social, economic and psychological tipping 
points that could trigger a much more rapid response to climate change. 
The rapid rise in popular support in the United States for the Green New 
Deal championed by the newly elected congresswoman from the Bronx, 
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, may be one such moment.

Big changes, says Schellnhuber, will require us to 'identify a portfolio 
of options…disruptive innovations, self-amplifying innovations'. He says 
that these cannot be predicted precisely, so we need to look into 
whether there are high nonlinear potentials in a whole range of emerging 
technologies.17

Such innovation is an important element for any whole-of-society, 
government-driven approach, such as the Green New Deal and its proposal 
for a wartime-level effort to build a zero-emissions economy, with an 
emphasis on jobs and justice.

Schellnhuber says the problem is the conventional economist who 'will 
want to be efficient, but efficiency is the enemy of innovation'. Rapid 
innovation at a time of crisis, when time is short, means parallel 
innovation as you look for many answers at the same time, and some will 
fail, and capital will be wasted, but the successes are the 'change we 
need'.18

He says we must now muster climate-change venture capital at a global 
scale because 'we cannot efficiently get ourselves out of this 
predicament'. This means:

We have to save the world but we have to save it in a muddled way, in a 
chaotic way, and also in a costly way. That is the bottom line, if you 
want to do it in an [economically] optimal way, you will fail.19

Such thinking would require a revolution in the neoliberal norms of the 
UNFCCC. Perhaps that is not possible and the body can no longer serve a 
useful role. Developing mechanisms that are more fit for purpose is now 
an urgent task.
https://arena.org.au/existential-risk-by-david-spratt/
http://www.climatecodered.org/2019/04/existential-risk-neoliberalism-and-un_8.html


*This Day in Climate History - April 9, 2014 - from D.R. Tucker*
April 9, 2014: In Politico Magazine, Bill McKibben discusses the "Cowboy 
Indian Alliance" standing up against the Keystone XL pipeline.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/cowboys-and-indians-against-keystone-105550.html#.U0evC6KwWU4
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