[TheClimate.Vote] January 26, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 26, 2020*/

[CNBC]
*Amid climate crisis, investors are starting to put their money towards 
a sustainable future*
SAT, JAN 25 2020
KEY POINTS
- The risks of climate change are already impacting investors, with 
increasingly frequent climate disasters like wildfires, drought, 
flooding and heatwaves threatening business operations and properties 
worldwide.
- Many investors are now choosing to funnel their money into investments 
that address climate change risk.
- Asset managers are rushing to meet the demand, but sustainable 
investing isn't as simple as it sounds.
- "We're not saying to not to invest in an oil or gas company. But if 
you are, you want to invest in one that has a historically strong track 
record in dealing with environmental issues," Nuveen managing director 
Steve Liberatore said...
- - -
Investors last year put $20.6 billion into funds focused on 
*environmental, social and governance* -- or ESG -- issues, according to 
Morningstar data, almost quadruple the record the year prior. In the 
U.S., money managed with sustainable investing strategies now comprises 
over a quarter of total investment assets under management, according to 
the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance...
- - -
"Across different benchmarks of ESG, companies that take it seriously 
are financially stronger and get higher financial returns in 
marketplace," Sarda said. "If anyone argues that this is a drain on 
financial performance, the data says otherwise."

As momentum builds behind ESG investing and analysis of climate change 
risks on returns, so do concerns over how to define funds that have an 
ESG mandate. Securities and Exchange Commission regulators have 
investigated some funds to see whether the claims align with reality, 
and the extent to which companies adhere to ESG principles.

Peirce said that ESG factors are amorphous and subjective, and therefore 
the process of determining which companies count as socially or 
environmentally conscious is "pointless."

"If you want to judge companies by the ESG metric, that's fine, but you 
have to tell people that you're running a fund for that, you're only 
going to invest in companies that meet ESG, and hold to that 
definition," Peirce said.

"The idea we need a central decider of what qualifies as good in the ESG 
world is ridiculous," she added.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/24/climate-crisis-investors-putting-money-towards-sustainable-future.html



[Greta the Great - video at Davos]
*Greta Thunberg Davos speech - Climate change action 'completely 
insufficient' and 'world is on fire'*
Jan 21, 2020
The Sun
GRETA Thunberg addressed world leaders and CEOs on the first day of the 
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
https://youtu.be/wLW4Tk8Pwdg



[Washington Post has posted a very important article]
*We can't recall the planet if we mess up: Climate change is risky business*
By Rob Motta and Jim White - January 25
If we handled climate risk the way that businesses manage risk every 
day, we would have tackled climate change a long, long time ago. But 
that's not how we as a society are responding -- even though the 
potential consequences are a lot worse than most business risks.

Consider how climate change risk is expressed in key reports like those 
from the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) and the U.N. 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The NCA says there is at least a two-thirds chance that your asthma or 
hay fever will get worse because of climate change. There's a more than 
90 percent probability that extreme precipitation (think flooding) will 
increase in frequency and intensity. What about heat waves increasing? 
There's a 99 percent probability. In fact, heat waves kill more people 
than any other weather-related event in the United States.

What about rising sea level? Under our current emissions trajectory, the 
NCA says there is a 2 in 3 chance that between $66 billion and $106 
billion of real estate will be underwater by 2050. And we mean literally 
underwater.

How do we handle these risks from climate change? Not very well. We want 
more data, more proof that the risks are real before acting.

Let's contrast that with how businesses handle risks. Companies would 
not be content with a 66 percent chance that a fire will start in their 
building, or a 66 percent chance that the wheels will fall off a new car 
they release to production. That's an untenable level of risk.

How do we know this? Because we know of the tools companies use and the 
level of risk they are willing to tolerate. One tool used extensively is 
a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). An FMEA is used to assess 
the risk of failure of every component in a product (like every bolt), 
and the consequences of that failure to the overall product (like the car).

The FMEA scale goes from 1 to 10, with 10 being worst case and one being 
what the engineers and designers shoot for. A 10 rating corresponds to a 
10 percent or greater probability, a nine to a 5 percent probability and 
a two rating corresponds to a 0.0001 percent probability or lower. A one 
rating corresponds to zero probability. So the automotive designers 
strive for a 0.0001 percent probability of failure, or better. Wow! 
Meanwhile, we are talking 66 percent, 90 percent and 99 percent 
probabilities with climate change, and we have done little so far to 
mitigate these risks.

In contrast to the automotive world, it seems like we want climate 
scientists to strive for 100 percent certainty. It's like saying, "I 
want you to be 100 percent certain the wheel is going to fall off my car 
before you take any action."

Risk is generally expressed as the probability multiplied by the impact. 
It is the combination of these two variables that determines the level 
of risk. So a high probability risk with a small impact might not be a 
significant concern. But a high probability risk with big impact is a 
real problem.

The wheel falling off your car has a big impact. So is your house being 
underwater. In both cases, we want to drive the probability as low as 
possible. And there is one big difference between the wheel falling off 
your car and climate risk. When the auto company makes a mistake and a 
risk occurs, they can recall the vehicles and fix the problem. You 
cannot recall the sea lapping at your front door or the air that your 
asthmatic child is breathing.

It's like we are speaking two different languages. I guess the risk of 
destroying the climate, and a good part of Earth, is not as worrisome to 
us as the risk to an individual car.

One of the most worrisome risks of all with climate change is that the 
Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will start to collapse this century, 
triggering up to eight feet of rising sea level by 2100 and putting the 
fate of our low-lying coastal cities in peril. Can you imagine trying to 
relocate millions of people inland? How many people will suffer? Who 
will pay the cost?

What's that probability? Nobody really knows for sure, but a recent 
survey of climate scientists who specialize in rising sea level put it 
at 5 percent. Multiply that by the cost of all the infrastructure in 
harm's way. The same study indicated almost 200 million people would be 
displaced. Nothing to worry about, right? No need to take action.

Let us make it clear: We are not criticizing scientists for the way they 
express risks. We certainly want scientists to have high confidence 
before we accept a new wing design on a plane or that new prescription 
drug. But climate change is different. We have already gone way beyond 
what the business industry would react to. We can't recall the planet if 
we mess up. So let's get on with it and stop asking the scientists for 
ever higher certainty in their predictions. That's a recipe for beyond 
disaster.
Rob Motta is a climate change communication specialist at the University 
of Colorado at Boulder.
Jim White is a professor of geological sciences at the University of 
Colorado at Boulder.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/01/25/we-cant-recall-planet-if-we-mess-up-climate-change-is-risky-business/


[James Hansen essay about despair]
*No Time for Despair*
24 January 2020 - James Hansen
We have no time for despair.  Nor is there good reason to despair. Yes, 
as I noted recently the Wheels of Justice turn slowly.  But they can be 
turned, and we will achieve justice soonest if we are smart and have a 
realistic view of the world.

"Shell's Crude Awakening" in the 27 January issue of Time provides 
reasons for optimism, as well as need for continued resolve and hard 
work.  Shell is beginning to bend under the pressure of the Dutch 
public, but additional pressure is needed before it will be transformed 
into an energy company that will be part of the solution, rather than 
part of the problem.

As Dan Galpern, my legal adviser, and I argued at the recent COP25 
meeting in Madrid, it is important to use lawsuits to ratchet up the 
pressure on the fossil fuel industry.

Roger Cox, pictured on the right above, deserves accolades for his 
success in the Urgenda (Urgent Agenda) case in the Netherlands and 
continued pressure on Shell.  Upon returning from a trip to the 
Netherlands in 2012 to help launch that case, I was irritated (Galileo 
and the Fireflies) by Roger's decision to base Urgenda's challenge to 
federal policy on the 2°C IPCC 'guardrail' target for limiting global 
warming.  It turns out he was right: the international target assured 
that even conservative Dutch scientists supported him.  Seven years 
later, Urgenda won their historic case, requiring the Dutch government 
to phase down emissions faster.  As wheels of justice go, that was 
pretty fast.

The other historic case, by Our Children's Trust against the U.S. 
federal government, suffered a setback last week when a federal appeals 
court voted 2-1 to dismiss the case.  That is not the end of the story, 
though.  As Joe Robertson points out, the opinion of the two majority 
judges is logically incoherent: the Court exists to redress grievances 
protected by the Constitution, yet they conclude they are not empowered 
to do so.  The more reasoned opinion of dissenting Judge Staton includes 
"…plaintiffs' claims adhere to a judicially administrable standard.  And 
considering plaintiffs seek no less than to forestall the Nation's 
demise, even a partial and temporary reprieve would constitute 
meaningful redress."

Our requested redress no doubt flummoxed the majority judges. However, 
as both a Plaintiff and Expert Witness in the case, I note that our 
"ask" is based on science that the Defendants will not be able to 
refute: a plan is needed to reduce atmospheric CO2 to some value south 
of 350 ppm, if we are to avoid unacceptable consequences such as 
eventual loss of coastal cities.

Thanks to the slow pace of the wheels of justice, we can no longer 
achieve that CO2 target in an acceptable period solely by reducing the 
rate of fossil fuel emissions.  But that is no reason to despair.  And 
we should not be frightening vulnerable young people with gloom and doom 
pronouncements.  The problem can still be solved.  Our planet has a 
bright future.

The ridiculous climate statement – even from politicians – goes 
something like: "we have 10 years, 7 months, x days until the carbon 
budget is used up and we are doomed!"  IPCC should be censured for 
initiating that nonsense, and wrongly frightening young people.  We are 
already in carbon overshoot, but that does not mean that the problem is 
unsolvable.

Instead of despair, we should celebrate how far we have come.

I was stunned to hear U.S. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg 
precisely describe Carbon Fee & Dividend as the central pillar of his 
plan to address climate change.  Underlying economic forces unleashed by 
a rising carbon fee will do more to move us to a clean energy future 
than all the laws and regulations that can be imagined.  The public 
would accept a rising carbon fee/tax, if and only if 100% of the money 
is distributed to the public so as also to address wealth disparity.

That is not enough, however.  The fossil fuel industry, if we allow them 
to get away with it, will build an infrastructure that locks young 
people into a future of gas + renewables – and increasing climate 
change.  The fossil fuel industry is spending large amounts of money 
campaigning against nuclear power, for the purpose of locking in gas + 
renewables.

Massive amounts of power will be needed for drawing down atmospheric 
CO2, for producing liquid fuels, and for desalinization, as well as for 
an electricity-dominant energy system.  Young people will get fracked 
and gassed, if there is no viable alternative for baseload electric power.

Andrew Yang is the one candidate in Iowa who seems to have the most 
complete understanding of the energy and climate story.  Yang, of all 
the candidates, gave the shortest, best answer to the Des Moines 
Register question about their climate policy: Carbon Fee & Dividend.

In addition, with Cory Booker's withdrawal, Yang is the one remaining 
candidate with an understanding of the crucial role of United States 
leadership in nuclear technology.  That technologic leadership, and our 
young people's future, depend upon investment and support from the 
government comparable to the support that brought down the cost of solar 
energy.

Yang's party, unfortunately, has a history of hostility toward nuclear 
power, our largest source of carbon-free energy, with smallest 
environmental footprint, as discussed in Fire on Planet Earth.  Some 
candidates espouse a 'Green New Deal,' characterized by limited 
understanding of the energy/climate problem, but by an $XX trillion 
price tag.  One thing is assured: if they get the nomination, they will 
lose the election.

Yes, I know, young people are afraid of hurting their Boomer hippie 
grandparents' feelings.  Of course, they meant well when they paraded 
against nuclear power.  It was identified as the next villain, after the 
Viet Nam war ended.  But what is more important: their feelings or your 
future?

As with Obama, it is said that Yang has no chance.  But a message can be 
sent to the other 49 states: we all had best take a closer look at this 
guy, for the sake of the future of young people.
more at - http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200124_NoTimeForDespair.pdf



[NYTimes opinion]
*How Does a Nation Adapt to Its Own Murder?*
Australia is going up in flames, and its government calls for resilience 
while planning for more coal mines.
By Richard Flanagan - Mr. Flanagan is a novelist.
Jan. 25, 2020

BRUNY ISLAND, Australia -- The name of the future is Australia.

These words come from it, and they may be your tomorrow: P2 masks, 
evacuation orders, climate refugees, ocher skies, warning sirens, ember 
storms, blood suns, fear, air purifiers and communities reduced to 
third-world camps.

Billions of dead animals and birds bloating and rotting. Hundreds of 
Indigenous cultural and spiritual sites damaged or destroyed by bush 
fires, so many black Notre Dames -- the physical expression of 
Indigenous Australians' spiritual connection to the land severed, a 
final violence after centuries of dispossession.

Everywhere there is a brittle grief, and it may be as much for what is 
coming as for what is gone.

The dairy farmer Farran Terlich, whose properties in the South Coast 
were razed in a firestorm that killed two of his friends, described the 
blaze as "a raging ocean." "These communities are destroyed across the 
board," he said, "and most people are running dead."

Dead, too, is a way of life.

Many homes will not be allowed to be rebuilt in threatened areas. Where 
they are allowed, they may not be affordable because of new building 
codes; if built, they may not be insurable. Local economies, like local 
ecosystems, may never recover.

A new survey estimates that more than half of all Australians have been 
directly affected by the fires, with millions suffering adverse health 
effects. The economic damage keeps growing, the total cost placed at 
about $100 billion Australian dollars (more than $68 billion), and 
rising. Gross domestic product is already impacted. Australia's central 
bank has announced that it may be forced to buy up coal mines and other 
fossil fuel assets to avoid an economic collapse.

"This is what you can expect to happen," said Richard Betts, a professor 
of geography at Exeter University in Britain, if the temperature 
increases by an average of three degrees Celsius above preindustrial 
levels. "It tells us what the future world might look like." To describe 
this terrifying new reality, a terrifying new idea: "omnicide." As used 
by Danielle Celermajer, a professor of sociology at the University of 
Sydney specializing in human rights, the term invokes a crime we have 
previously been unable to imagine because we had never before witnessed it.

Ms. Celermajer argues that "ecocide," the killing of ecosystems, is 
inadequate to describe the devastation of Australia's fires. "This is 
something more," she has written. "This is the killing of everything. 
Omnicide." *
*
*What does the future look like where omnicide is the norm?*
According to the American climatologist Michael Mann, "It is conceivable 
that much of Australia simply becomes too hot and dry for human habitation."

Australia's situation is now no different from that of low-lying Pacific 
islands confronting imminent destruction from rising seas. Yet when last 
August those states protested against the Australian government's 
refusal to act on climate change, Australia's deputy prime minister, 
Michael McCormack, said, "I also get a little bit annoyed when we have 
people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and 
say we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you 
know, they will continue to survive."

Today Australia has only one realistic chance to, you know, survive: 
Join other countries like those Pacific nations whose very future is now 
in question and seek to become an international leader in fighting for 
far stronger global action on climate change. But to do that it would 
first have to take decisive action domestically.

Anything less and Australia will be lost to its climate catastrophe as 
surely as Tuvalu will be to rising oceans.
And yet Prime Minister Scott Morrison argues that Australia is on track 
to "meet and beat" its pitifully low pledge, under the 2015 Paris 
climate accord, of cutting 2005-level greenhouse gas emissions by 26 
percent to 28 percent before 2030. Experts have overwhelmingly rejected 
Mr. Morrison's claim as false.

Emissions have been increasing on average since 2015. A recent study by 
Ndevr Environmental Consultants, a well-regarded environmental auditing 
company, calculated that the 2030 target will not be met until 2098.
"We say emissions are going down and they are going up. We say 
investment in renewables is higher than ever, but it's falling because 
of the policy mess we have created," an unnamed government member of 
Parliament told The Sydney Morning Herald. "It is little wonder we have 
no credibility on this issue."

According to a recent United Nations report, what is happening in 
Australia is "one of the world's largest fossil fuel expansions," with 
proposals for 53 new coal mines.

Australia's fossil fuel industry is already huge, thanks to massive 
taxpayer subsidies -- some $29 billion in 2015, according to a 2019 
paper by the International Monetary Fund. Every Australian man, woman 
and child is underwriting their own apocalypse to the tune of $1,198 a year.

And yet only 37,800 people are employed in coal mining.

According to John Hewson, a former leader of the conservative Liberal 
Party, Mr. Morrison "is almost totally beholden to the fossil fuel 
lobby. Several of his senior staff are ex-coal executives; a couple of 
his key ministers have coal industry links; fossil fuel companies are 
major donors."

Mr. Morrison now claims he accepts that climate change and the fires are 
linked, a connection he previously denied, and is talking up "resilience 
and adaptation" in response.

*But how does a nation adapt to its own murder?*
After some weeks of being widely criticized for his incompetent and 
emotionally stunted response to the fires, Mr. Morrison is now 
implausibly arguing that hazard-reduction burns are more important than 
emissions reductions in dealing with bush fires, even though eminent 
scientists and fire chiefs have repeatedly said this is untrue.

It's as if in the middle of the Blitz, Winston Churchill announced that 
rubble removal was more important than dealing with the Luftwaffe in 
fighting Hitler.

With no measure to even contain domestic emissions, the government's 
policies are predictably supported by the fossil fuel industry and its 
fellow travelers, like Siemens, which recently announced that it was 
pressing ahead with its work as a contractor on the controversial Adani 
coal mine. After notoriously profiteering from the genocide of Europe's 
Jews, the company is now is willing to profiteer from the omnicide of 
Australia.

If Mr. Morrison's government genuinely believed the science, it would 
immediately put a price on carbon, declare a moratorium on all new 
fossil fuel projects and transfer the fossil fuel subsidies to the 
renewables industries. It would go to the next round of global climate 
talks in Glasgow in November allied with other nations on the front line 
of this crisis and argue for quicker and deeper cuts to carbon emissions 
around the world. Anything less is to collaborate in the destruction of 
a country.

But the government is intent on doing nothing.

And to the names of those historic betrayers of their people -- Vidkun 
Quisling, Benedict Arnold, Mir Jafar -- perhaps one day will be added 
that of Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia who, when faced 
with the historic tragedy of his country's destruction, dissembled, 
enabled, subsidized and oversaw omnicide, until all was ash and even the 
future was no more.

Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize for "The Narrow Road to the 
Deep North" and is the author, most recently, of the novel "First Person."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/opinion/sunday/australia-fires-climate-change.html


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - January 26, 2011 *
Prof. Robert Brulle of Drexel University rips President Obama for 
avoiding any specific mention of climate change in his 2011 State of the 
Union Address, noting:

    "What I see going on here is that Obama is following the rhetorical
    advice of David Axelrod and groups like ecoAmerica, who argue that
    the American public is unwilling to deal with climate change.

    "So rather than make the case for climate change and the necessity
    of action, this approach focuses on 'clean' energy and research and
    development as a way to make a transition to a different energy mix.
    This is considered the popular, no pain, 'energy quest' approach
    that relies on a mystical belief in R&D to address climate change.
    The Obama administration appears to have bought this approach
    completely as the politically popular way to address this issue. In
    my opinion, this approach has several major drawbacks, and
    effectively locks in massive and potentially catastrophic global
    climate change."

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/01/26/207407/brulle-climate-change-obama-sotu-address/

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