EcoRadio

Category: Climate chaos

The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity. 

  • WorldWatch report highlights need for stability

    From The WorldWatch Institute

    It’s New Year’s Day, 2101. Somehow, humanity survived the worst of global warming—the higher temperatures and sea levels and the more intense droughts and storms—and succeeded in stabilizing the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gas concentrations are peaking and are expected to drift downward in the 22nd century. The rise in global temperatures is slowing and the natural world is gradually healing. The social contract largely held. And humanity as a whole is better fed, healthier, and more prosperous today than it was a century ago.

    This scenario of an imagined future raises a key question: What must we do in the 21st century—especially in 2009 and the years just following—to make such a future possible, and to head off the kind of climate catastrophe that many scientists now see as likely? This question inspires the theme of the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2009 report: how climate change will play out over the coming century, and what steps we most urgently need to take now.

    The year 2009 will be pivotal for the Earth’s climate. Scientists have warned that we have only a few years to reverse the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and help avoid abrupt and catastrophic climate change. The world community has agreed to negotiate a new climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009. Early that same year, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th U.S. President. The United States, one of the world’s largest producers of greenhouse gases, will have its best chance to provide global leadership by passing national climate legislation and constructively engaging with the international community to forge a new consensus on halting emissions

    Download Chapter one of the report

  • New EPA chief promises to listen to science

    Senator Barbara Boxer, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which is considering Ms. Jackson’s nomination, has regularly complained about alleged political interference in scientific and technical decisions on environmental matters.

    “Science must be the backbone of what E.P.A. does,” Ms. Jackson said in her prepared opening statement. “If I am confirmed, I will administer with science as my guide. I understand the laws leave room for policy-makers to make policy judgments. But if I am confirmed, political appointees will not compromise the integrity of E.P.A.’s technical experts to advance particular regulatory outcomes.”

    Ms. Jackson holds degrees in chemical engineering from Tulane University and Princeton University.

    Senator Boxer, in her opening statement, said she had waited a long time for new leadership at the environmental agency. “E.P.A. works for the American people and in my view we have seen it hurt the American people these past eight years.” She said that the agency “needs to be awakened from a deep and nightmarish sleep.”

    Ms. Jackson, who worked as a career employee at E.P.A. 15 years and most recently served as head of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, said that President-elect Barack Obama believes that sound stewardship of the economy can co-exist with economic growth. “Done properly,” she said, “these goals can and should reinforce each other.”

    She said that the administration’s environmental priorities were curbing global warming, reducing air pollution, cleaning up hazardous waste sites, regulating toxic chemicals and protecting water quality.

    Her confirmation appears on track. The ranking Republican on the committee, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a skeptic on global warming, called her “accessible and reasonable” and said he planned to vote to confirm her.

    Later on Wednesday, the committee was scheduled to consider the appointment of Nancy Sutley, currently deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and environment, to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

  • Coastal retreat plans recommended

    The rise in sea level is accelerating, the report said, because warmer water occupies more space and because of runoff from melting inland glaciers and ice sheets. The Middle Atlantic States are particularly vulnerable because the rates of rise are “moderately high” there, the region is subject to storms, it is densely populated and much of its infrastructure is in low-lying areas.

    The report, which is available at climatescience.gov, says that in the 20th century, rates of erosion in the region varied from 2.4 millimeters to 4.4 millimeters a year, or about a foot over 100 years. In the future, the report said, “it is virtually certain” that coastal headlands, spits and barrier islands will erode faster than they have in the past.

    If sea level rises at a rate of seven millimeters a year or about two feet per century, “it is likely that some barrier islands in this region will cross a threshold,” and begin to break up, the report said. The islands forming the Outer Banks of North Carolina are particularly threatened.

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations climate effort, estimated in its most recent report that sea level might rise by about as much as two feet by 2100. Many experts regard the estimate as optimistic.

    Even a modest acceleration of sea level rise will have a negative effect on the region’s coastal wetlands, the report says, adding, “It is likely that most wetlands will not survive” a two-foot rise.

    In natural environments, wetlands survive rises in sea level by shifting inland to higher ground. But in the Middle Atlantic States, the report notes, valuable infrastructure like buildings and roads stands in their way.

    The report said public officials should consider the vulnerability of coastal areas and take action when necessary, for example, by limiting development in vulnerable areas. But it noted that there was great uncertainty about the timing and extent of the effects of sea level rise and that the region had conducted “only a limited number of analyses and resulting statewide policy revisions” to address the issue.

     

  • Obama’s green plan ‘good for Australia’

    It comes on top of Obama’s election commitments to invest $US150 billion ($A210 billion) over ten years to create five million green jobs and reduce carbon pollution by 80 per cent by 2050.

    Obama’s proposed stimulus package is expected to total at least $US775 billion ($A1.1 trillion).

    A joint statement by groups including the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the ACTU says Australia has an opportunity to adopt a similar package to boost the economy and tackle climate change.

    It calls for a green building program to improve water and energy efficiency of commercial, residential and public buildings, and maximise short-term economic benefit by stimulating the construction industry.

    Investment in sustainable infrastructure across public transport and rail networks for freight to reduce carbon footprints is also critical, the statement says.

    The groups want green jobs made a “centrepiece of economic and industrial policy” and say the right mix of investment, skills and training could create market demand.

    “The green stimulus component is one of four major cornerstones in Obama’s proposed economic recovery package and there is a crucial opportunity for Australia to do the same,” ACF executive director Don Henry said.

    “There is no time to lose if we want to avoid falling behind the US and other developed nations in the race for green jobs growth and tackling dangerous climate change.”

  • Government faces gauntlet on first day back at work

    Thousands of ordinary Australians will form a human chain around Parliament House in Canberra on February 3rd to inisst that the government honour its election promise to significantly reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions. Treasury estimates revealed last week that the Rudd government’s proposed emissions trading scheme will actually increase emissions by 5.84 percent. Tim Colebatch wrote in The Age that the government is deliberately misleading the public by reducing emission allocations while giving polluters the right to offset unlimited quantities of pollution overseas. Scientists, church leaders and environmentalists have called on the government to invest in renewable energy infrastructure and green jobs. Marches in capital cities will coincide with the activities in Canberra on the weekend before parliament opens.

    Read Giovanni Ebono in the Tweed Daily News

    Read Tim Colebatch in The Age

  • One little word undoes Labor on climate

    It’s an ugly reality that exemplifies why the Government’s model is doomed to fail. It promises change, but tries to shield everyone from all the points that drive change.

    As I have argued before, the problem is not the targets themselves. If we were to cut our emissions in 2020 to 5 per cent below 2000 levels, that would be a rapid cut of 25 per cent in emissions per capita from current levels. A cut to 15 per cent below 2000 levels, promised if we get a good international agreement, implies a cut of 33 per cent per capita between 2006 and 2020. If we achieved that, it would be real progress towards the ultimate goal of halving global emissions.

    The problem is that with Rudd’s decision to shield companies and households from the changes the scheme is meant to drive, it’s unlikely that Australia will reduce its emissions. Yet that is what he promised to do.

    There’s a crucial point we all overlooked. Labor has not committed Australia to cut its emissions by 5 per cent, but to cut its emissions allocation by 5 per cent. And that is very different. In 2000, Australia emitted 553 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. In 2020, the Government will allocate permits for 525 million tonnes of emissions. But even before last week’s changes weakened the scheme, Treasury estimated that Australia would emit 585 million tonnes.

    The key to it is that the scheme allows companies to use unlimited numbers of permits from other countries instead of our own. And the permits we import will be subtracted from our emissions tally.

    They would come from other Western countries or (more likely) from developing countries, under rules such as the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism (CDM), which allows Western companies to buy permits for emissions saved in developing countries by using cleaner technology. A noble idea, unfortunately it has proved easy to rort.

    The Garnaut report proposed a tighter test, but the Government refused. Permits from CDM and “joint initiative” projects in countries with emission reduction targets are expected to be plentiful and cheap. That’s why Treasury estimates that emissions trading will prove cheap.

    On Treasury modelling, even with constraints that will no longer apply, Australia in 2020 would import permits for another 46 million tonnes from other countries. And by 2050, Rudd pledges, Australia will reduce emissions by 60 per cent from 2000 levels, to 221 million tonnes. But Treasury projects that in fact Australia would cut its emissions by only 24 per cent, to 420 million tonnes, and buy 199 million tonnes of permits overseas.

    Moreover, its modelling assumed Labor would limit the use of foreign permits, to supply at most half the cut in emissions. But Rudd threw out that constraint, allowing an even larger share of our “emissions cuts” to be bought overseas.

    What’s wrong with that? Nothing, so long as it really cuts emissions. But we have seen China sell “certified emissions reduction” permits for phasing out hydrochlorofluorocarbons, which it has to do anyway under the Montreal Protocol. The ease of rorting is one reason why economists such as Jeffrey Sachs plead instead for a carbon tax.

    The Government’s spurned climate change adviser Ross Garnaut spelt out eloquently in Saturday’s Age how its scheme would waste the revenue from emissions trading in unjustifiable and/or extravagant compensation payouts to interest groups, rather than using it to drive change. It’s a sad picture of a weak Government that crumbles under pressure from big business.

    The net effect will be to reduce emission cuts in Australia, so the targets are achieved by buying dubious overseas permits. The scheme won’t be a write-off, but it will be rorted, and it will not achieve what it claims to do.

    Labor has tried to deflect criticism by focusing on the cuts in per capita emissions. That would be fine if the cuts really happened, and if, like Garnaut, it proposed that contraction and convergence to a global per capita emissions target by 2050 be the framework for an international agreement.

    But when Penny Wong addressed other environment ministers at Poznan, she did not mention per capita emissions. Why? Because Australia’s per capita emissions are the sixth highest in the world — and under Garnaut’s framework we would have to make (or buy) the sixth biggest cuts.

    Yet there is no other viable way for the world to cut emissions to levels that would end global warming. The greenhouse gases that threaten environmental catastrophe are not those already up there, but the far greater volume to be emitted in future, mostly from developing countries.

    We need real leadership — not this.