[TheClimate.Vote] May 30, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat May 30 10:34:49 EDT 2020
/*May 30, 2020*/
[follow the IMF money]
*Equity Investors Must Pay More Attention to Climate Change Physical Risk*
By Felix Suntheim and Jerome Vandenbussche - May 29, 2020
The damage from the 2011 floods in Thailand amounted to around 10
percent of Thailand's GDP, not even considering all the indirect costs
through a loss in economic activity in the country and abroad. By some
estimates, the total costs of the 2018 wildfires in California were up
to $350 billion, or 1.7 percent of U.S. GDP. Every year, climatic
disasters cause human suffering as well as large economic and ecological
damage. Over the past decade, direct damages of such disasters are
estimated to add up to around US$ 1.3 trillion (or around 0.2% of world
GDP) on average, per year.
Direct damage from floods, heatwaves and droughts adds up to $1.3
trillion a year, on average.
As scientists warn that global warming will increase the frequency and
severity of such extreme weather events, the IMF's latest Global
Financial Stability Report examines the impact of climate change
physical risk (loss of life and property as well as disruptions to
economic activity) on financial stability, and finds that equity
investors might not be pricing these risks adequately. The COVID-19
pandemic has shown how fast and extensive disruption of economic
activity can be (even for well-known types of risks), underscoring the
importance of preparedness and adequate risk assessment...
graph -
https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/eng-may-26-gfsr-chap-5-blog-chart1-764x1024.png
...
- -
*What policymakers can do*
The current COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder that crisis preparedness and
resilience are essential to manage risks from highly uncertain events
that can have extreme economic and human costs.
As mentioned above, expanding the availability of insurance and
strengthening the sovereign's overall financial strength can lessen the
impact of climatic disasters and hence reduce financial stability risks.
Developing global mandatory climate change physical risk disclosure
standards could be an important step to preserve financial stability
too. Granular, firm-specific information on current and future exposures
and vulnerabilities to climate shocks would help lenders, insurers, and
investors to better grasp this risk.
Climate-change stress testing can provide financial firms and their
supervisors with a better understanding of the size of their exposures
and the associated physical risk. Over the past decade, one in five of
the IMF's own Financial Sector Assessment Programs considered physical
risks related to climatic disasters. A recent example is the assessment
published last year for the Bahamas.
Without a doubt, the most effective remedy will be strong global policy
action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, addressing the cause of
global warming in a sustainable way, and conferring benefits that extend
well beyond the realm of financial stability.
https://blogs.imf.org/2020/05/29/equity-investors-must-pay-more-attention-to-climate-change-physical-risk/
- -
[IMF sources]
*GLOBAL FINANCIAL STABILITY REPORT*
*Chapter 5: Climate Change: Physical Risk and Equity Prices*
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/GFSR/Issues/2020/04/14/global-financial-stability-report-april-2020#Chapter5
[Biden and global warming]
*Joe Biden has a chance to make history on climate change*
All he has to do is embrace the consensus that's waiting for him.
By David Roberts - May 28, 2020
- - -
*Biden needs the left and climate is the best way to get it*
Biden won the primary because of strong support from African Americans
and older voters, and he has a good chance of peeling some older voters
off of the Trump coalition. But he needs turnout and enthusiasm from
younger voters and the party's base, too.
There's no better way to get it than with bold climate policy. "There
continues to be a consensus that young people are necessary to winning
this election," said Maggie Thomas, political director at Evergreen
Action, "and this is among the issues that they care most about."..
- -
When the League of Conservation Voters became the first big green group
to endorse Biden last month, he released a statement saying, "I want to
campaign on climate change and win on climate change so that I can
govern with climate change as a top priority for legislative and
executive action in the White House."
In service of that goal, Biden asked his campaign "to commence a process
to meaningfully engage with more voices from the climate movement,
including environmental justice leaders and worker organizations, and
collaborate on additional policies in areas ranging from environmental
justice to new, concrete goals we can achieve within a decade, to more
investments in a clean energy economy."...
- -
The Democratic Party goes into the 2020 elections unified on climate
change. They win and, taking advantage of the momentum, immediately
begin an aggressive program of executive and legislative efforts.
To say the very least, this utopian scenario could go wrong at every
juncture.
Biden might not move far enough to make an impression, either
rhetorically or on policy.
Even if he does embrace sweeping policy changes, it's possible that many
people on the left simply can't be won over -- they have defined their
political identities in opposition to the party establishment and are
too invested in those identities to support Biden no matter what he says
about climate change. No one is quite sure how much of the youth climate
movement fits that description. Even the leaders of those groups don't
know for sure. They can promise the Biden campaign enthusiasm, but no
one will know until the time comes whether they can deliver it...
- - -
If the climate coalition can overcome its longstanding internal
suspicions and rivalries and keep its momentum going, there is a core of
ambitious climate policy around which it can unite. And several people I
talked to confessed that they had begun to feel a strange sort of hope
that Biden just might be the guy who can sell it, in a
Nixon-goes-to-China kind of way.
"Joe Biden isn't the climate champion that the movement wanted, but he
may be the champion they need," said Jason Walsh, executive director of
the environmental and labor group BlueGreen Alliance. "The next
president has to make a case for climate action that resonates with
Steelworkers in Pennsylvania just as much as it does with urban, coastal
lefties."
After a great deal of patient work and trust-building, the left has
built that case for him, an ambitious, aspirational climate platform
that foregrounds jobs, investment, and rejuvenation. It fits with
Biden's natural strengths and addresses some of his greatest political
liabilities. All he has to do is pick it up.
"If the brother wants to go down with a legacy," said Roberts, "he'd be
a damn fool not to embrace what we're doing."
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/28/21265416/joe-biden-climate-change-democrats-young-voters
[Now is rehearsal for tomorrow]
*Economic Giants Are Restarting. Here's What It Means for Climate Change.*
Want to know whether the world can avert catastrophe? Watch the recovery
plans coming out now in Europe, China and the United States.
By Somini Sengupta
May 29, 2020...
- -
Europe this week laid out a vision of a green future, with a proposed
recovery package worth more than $800 billion that would transition away
from fossil fuels and put people to work making old buildings
energy-efficient.
In the United States, the White House is steadily slashing environmental
protections and Republicans are using the Green New Deal as a political
cudgel against their opponents.
China has given a green light to build new coal plants but it also
declined to set specific economic growth targets for this year, a move
that came as a relief to environmentalists because it reduces the
pressure to turn up the country's industrial machine quickly.
What course these giant economies set is crucial if the world is to have
a fighting chance to head off the blistering heat, droughts and
wildfires that are the hallmarks of a fast-warming planet.
Just as their recovery plans are taking shape, though, the political
pressure on world leaders switched off: On Thursday, the United Nations
announced that the next round of global climate talks, which had been
slated for Glasgow in November, would be delayed.
That meeting is now scheduled for November 2021, more than a year and a
half away. The delay comes at a time when the scientific consensus says
the world has very little time left to avert climate catastrophes.
The Glasgow talks are the most important climate meeting since the Paris
Agreement was adopted in 2015, after 20 years of negotiations. Under the
Paris pact, which was largely designed to work through peer pressure
among nations at annual meetings, world leaders were expected to
announce revised targets this year for reducing emissions.
That peer pressure is now suspended for a year. Advocates for climate
action urged national leaders to not squander the time.
"If the necessary climate action can be embedded in recovery efforts
then this year will have been a year when we pivoted for good," said
Rachel Kyte, a former United Nations climate official and now the dean
of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. "If we are distracted from
climate action and fumble in the recovery, then we will have pivoted to
an even darker road."
Not only has the Glasgow meeting been postponed, global protests
demanding climate action have come to an abrupt halt and the pandemic
has reinforced the impulse of nationalist leaders to reject
international cooperation...
- -
Governments are under considerable pressure to aim for what is called a
green recovery. A survey of central bankers and finance ministers found
broad support around the idea that the most effective economic recovery
measures would also reduce emissions, including clean energy infrastructure.
"The recovery packages can either kill these two birds with one stone --
setting the global economy on a pathway toward net-zero emissions -- or
lock us into a fossil system from which it will be nearly impossible to
escape," the authors wrote...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/climate/coronavirus-economic-stimulus-climate.html
[Canadian Paul Beckwith rants about the deluge]
*Ranting in the Rain on Climate, Coronavirus, Trump, Murders by Police,
and Other Worsening Mayhem*
May 29, 2020
Paul Beckwith
I needed to rant tonight while walking through a torrential downpour in
Ottawa tonight. Lots of utter crap and craziness is occurring around
this week. The Coronavirus has not gone away despite actions of many,
and we can expect many more severe waves. Far northern Arctic heatwaves
are unbelievable; major Siberian cities slashed a previous record high
of 12C (53.6F) reaching 25.4C (77.7F). Zombie fires that smouldered
under snow all winter reignited. Parts of the US experienced incredible
deluges knocking out dams, draining lakes inundating towns. Trump is
totally bonkers, and US cops are murdering black folk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypAhlL23HZI
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - May 30, 2014 *
The Washington Post reports:
"The methane that leaks from 40,000 gas wells near this desert
trading post may be colorless and odorless, but it's not invisible.
It can be seen from space.
"Satellites that sweep over energy-rich northern New Mexico can spot
the gas as it escapes from drilling rigs, compressors and miles of
pipeline snaking across the badlands. In the air it forms a giant
plume: a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud, so vast that
scientists questioned their own data when they first studied it
three years ago. 'We couldn't be sure that the signal was real,'
said NASA researcher Christian Frankenberg.
"The country's biggest methane "hot spot," verified by NASA and
University of Michigan scientists in October, is only the most
dramatic example of what scientists describe as a $2 billion leak
problem: the loss of methane from energy production sites across the
country. When oil, gas or coal are taken from the ground, a little
methane -- the main ingredient in natural gas -- often escapes along
with it, drifting into the atmosphere, where it contributes to the
warming of the Earth.
"Methane accounts for about 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions, and the biggest single source of it -- nearly 30 percent
-- is the oil and gas industry, government figures show. All told,
oil and gas producers lose 8 million metric tons of methane a year,
enough to provide power to every household in the District of
Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.
"As early as next month, the Obama administration will announce new
measures to shrink New Mexico's methane cloud while cracking down
nationally on a phenomenon that officials say erodes tax revenue and
contributes to climate change. The details are not publicly known,
but already a fight is shaping up between the White House and
industry supporters in Congress over how intrusive the restrictions
will be.
"Republican leaders who will take control of the Senate next month
have vowed to block measures that they say could throttle domestic
energy production at a time when plummeting oil prices are cutting
deeply into company profits. Industry officials say they have a
strong financial incentive to curb leaks, and companies are moving
rapidly to upgrade their equipment.
"But environmentalists say relatively modest government restrictions
on gas leaks could reap substantial rewards for taxpayers and the
planet. Because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas -- with up
to 80 times as much heat-trapping potency per pound as carbon
dioxide over the short term -- the leaks must be controlled if the
United States is to have any chance of meeting its goals for cutting
the emissions responsible for climate change, said David Doniger,
who heads the climate policy program at the Natural Resources
Defense Council, an environmental group.
"'This is the most significant, most cost-effective thing the
administration can do to tackle climate change pollution that it
hasn't already committed to do,' Doniger said."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/delaware-sized-gas-plume-over-west-illustrates-the-cost-of-leaking-methane/2014/12/29/d34c3e6e-8d1f-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html
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