EU heads of state and government agreed that nuclear energy will be recognized as a way to fight climate change
EU leaders include nuclear energy in green transition, By SAMUEL PETREQUIN, Associated Press Dec. 13, 2019 BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union leaders agreed Friday that nuclear energy will be part of the bloc’s solution to making its economy carbon neutral by 2050, allowing them to win the support of two coal-dependent countries.
EU heads of state and government agreed that nuclear energy will be recognized as a way to fight climate change as part of a deal that endorsed the climate target. While Poland did not immediately agree to the plan, the concessions on nuclear energy were enough for the Czech Republic and Hungary to give their approval…….. (subscribers only) https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/world/article/EU-leaders-include-nuclear-energy-in-green-14904378.php
Water shortages to hit 1.9 billion people as glaciers melt
1.9 billion people at risk from mountain water shortages, study shows https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/09/billion-people-risk-water-supply-rising-demand-global-heating-mountain-ecosystem
Rising demand and climate crisis threaten entire mountain ecosystem, say scientists, Jonathan Watts Global environment editor, @jonathanwatts, Tue 10 Dec 2019 A quarter of the world’s population are at risk of water supply problems as mountain glaciers, snow-packs and alpine lakes are run down by global heating and rising demand, according to an international study.
The first inventory of high-altitude sources finds the Indus is the most important and vulnerable “water tower” due to run-off from the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Ladakh, and Himalayan mountain ranges, which flow downstream to a densely populated and intensively irrigated basin in Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan.
The authors warn this vast water tower – a term they use to describe the role of water storage and supply that mountain ranges play to sustain environmental and human water demands downstream – is unlikely to sustain growing pressure by the middle of the century when temperatures are projected to rise by 1.9C (35.4F), rainfall to increase by less than 2%, but the population to grow by 50% and generate eight times more GDP.
Strains are apparent elsewhere in the water tower index, which quantifies the volume of water in 78 mountain ranges based on precipitation, snow cover, glacier ice storage, lakes and rivers. This was then compared with the drawdown by communities, industries and farms in the lower reaches of the main river basins.
The study by 32 scientists, which was published in the Nature journal on Monday, confirms Asian river basins face the greatest demands but shows pressures are also rising on other continents.
“It’s not just happening far away in the Himalayas but in Europe and the United States, places not usually thought to be reliant on mountains for people or the economy,” said one of the authors, Bethan Davies, of Royal Holloway University.
“We always knew the Indus was important, but it was surprising how the Rhône and Rhine have risen in importance, along with the Fraser and Columbia.”
The study says 1.9 billion people and half of the world’s biodiversity hotspots could be negatively affected by the decline of natural water towers, which store water in winter and release it slowly over the summer.
This buffering capacity is weakening as glaciers lose mass and snow-melt dynamics are disrupted by temperatures that are rising faster at high altitude than the global average.
“Climate change threatens the entire mountain ecosystem,” the report concludes. “Immediate action is required to safeguard the future of the world’s most important and vulnerable water towers.”
As well as local conservation efforts, the authors say international action to reduce carbon emissions is the best way to safeguard water towers.
Citing recent research by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Davies said 75% of high-altitude snow and ice would be retained if global warming could be kept within 1.5C. However, 80% would be lost by 2100 if the world continued on a path of business as usual.
Religion and climate change – Dr Katharine Hayhoe
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Climate Change But Were Afraid to Ask, Forbes, Devin Thorpe 9 Dec 19, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist who leads the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and is the host and producer of the PBS series Global Weirding. I asked her everything you want to know about climate change but were afraid to ask…..
DT: What would you tell someone who wants to do their part to solve climate change?
Nuclear power useless as a technology to counter global heating
The Tantalizing Nuclear Mirage, Many see nuclear power as a necessary part of any carbon-neutral mix. The reality isn’t so simple. The American Prospect, BY ALEXANDER SAMMON DECEMBER 5, 2019 “………..
If it’s going to take 10 to 15 years to see a plant through to completion, even with massive financial backing, that’s seemingly impossible to square with the 11 years to decarbonize. At the very least, we’d need hundreds, if not thousands of plants already under construction just to make a dent. Booker, Yang, and other advocates are betting that R&D might accelerate that process, but in a real sense it’s already too late.
So if new construction can’t be counted on, and the window for adding new nuclear to the fleet has already shut, what about the reactors we currently have? Has their environmental potential gotten short shrift?
While nuclear fission emits far less carbon dioxide than energy production by oil and gas, the process of getting to that energy generation complicates nuclear’s claim to zero-carbon status. Uranium mining, processing, and transport are all carbon-intensive procedures done by diesel-powered heavy machinery. Instead of carbon, the plants themselves emit heat, often in great quantities, which can warm nearby air and water dramatically, killing fish and wildlife and afflicting neighboring habitats.
And while nuclear may maintain a cleaner sheet than fossil fuels when it 
comes to CO2, its record on H2O is less rosy. An American nuclear plant can require between 19 million and 1.4 billion gallons of water a day, just for purposes of cooling. Because of that implacable thirst, it’s imperative that nuclear plants are constructed near major water sources.
Thus, nuclear plants dot our rivers and coastline, each of which carries with it its own climate-specific challenges. Plants built near abundant freshwater—rivers and lakes—have been forced to contend with the twin challenges of too much water and not enough. In recent years, nuclear reactors, like those on the Great Lakes, have been forced to shut down when droughts have plagued rivers and lakes, reducing water levels to perilous lows. Meanwhile, in places like Nebraska, flood risks have necessitated shutdowns. And in France, which sports one of the most robust nuclear programs in the world, heat waves have caused water temperatures to surge to the point of shutdowns multiple summers in a row.
In fact, a 2012 study published in Nature Climate Change forecasted a decrease in thermoelectric power generating capacity of up to 19 percent in Europe and 16 percent in the United States for the period 2031-2060, just due to lack of cooling water. Extant nuclear plants may not accelerate a rapidly warming climate, but it remains to be seen if they can functionally exist in one.
Coastal plants face climate-induced challenges of their own. Hurricane Sandy, which laid siege to the Atlantic coast in 2012, forced seven nuclear plant shutdowns due to flooding, storm debris, and wind damage. Earlier this year, Bloomberg Businessweek identified 19 U.S. nuclear plants under threat from rising seas, and 54 facilities (out of a national total of 60) that “weren’t designed to handle the flood risk they face.” And that was before a November report found nearly four times as many people as previously thought are living on land that is likely to flood at least once a year on average by mid-century. Large-scale retreat from low-lying coastal cities is going to be a reality, and nuclear power plants can’t move with a shifting coastline. Even if they could, plants that draw on saltwater for cooling would suffer similarly diminished capacity as global ocean temperatures rise, as well.
Those rising sea levels are also a problem for the ever-perplexing, still unresolved issue of waste disposal. Beyond the controversial Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada, which has failed to get off the ground, much nuclear waste is simply stored on site. At the now-decommissioned San Onofre plant in Southern California and the Pilgrim plant in Cape Cod, the waste is buried beneath the sand at the water’s edge. “Four decades of radioactive waste being stored right there on the water line,” says Kate Brown, a professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. “It’s a short-term solution for a long-term problem.”
That also means that sea-level rise threatens waste disposal, and with no way to check for leaks, the impact of rising seas on that waste remains largely unknown. But in the Marshall Islands, the site of one of the largest American nuclear waste disposal venues, known as the Runit Dome, the effect of sea-level rise is certain: The concrete encasement is now at risk of collapsing as rising seas encroach.
If nuclear is too costly to factor in long-term, and too unstable to subsist in the present, the question remains of when to begin the transition away from it. The concern that an immediate shutdown of existing nuclear plants would lead to accelerating carbon emissions from either coal or natural gas as a substitute has led certain countries, like Sweden, to favor a slow phaseout of its nuclear fleet. France, too, despite heavy reliance on nuclear, has been discussing a slow, partial phaseout, in accordance with that rationale.
This was the fear when Germany, not long after the Fukushima meltdown, announced it would quickly shutter its entire nuclear power program. Initially, those concerns seemed vindicated. Carbon emissions spiked, as reliance on coal production increased. The country was quickly branded as a cautionary tale. But just a few short years after this campaign was waged, that analysis has changed dramatically. “Today renewables account for 40 percent of German energy production; 15 years ago it was in the single digits,” says Greg Jaczko, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission under Obama. Not only have renewables taken over the energy share once produced by nuclear, “they’ve done enough of a build that they’re going to eat into coal.”
It’s the same story in Japan, where emissions spiked briefly after Fukushima caused a wide-scale shutdown. Even today, only a couple of the country’s nuclear reactors have been brought back online. But thanks to an aggressive build-out of renewables, emissions are below where they were with a fully operating nuclear fleet. Countries that have chosen to decommission slowly have seen their renewable build-outs stymied accordingly; dependence on nuclear has decelerated an inevitable process. Sweden’s reliance on nuclear has been an impediment to renewable development, which is part of the reason the deadline for decommissioning keeps getting pushed. Bridge fuels have a way of making themselves permanent………….https://prospect.org/greennewdeal/the-tantalizing-nuclear-mirage/
Paducah, Kentucky – its nuclear waste tragedy is compounded by climate change
“I never said a bad thing about the plant the whole time I was growing up,” Lamb said. “It made the economy good. But then we got sick.”
“People who were not highly educated could make really good money working in these industries
“Not only that but the government was saying, this is your patriotic duty. We need this. So everybody just went along because the compensation was pretty good.”
a GAO report released in November showed that 60 percent of U.S. Superfund sites are at risk from the impacts of climate change.
Instead of focusing on cleanup plans, some state lawmakers and federal agencies are loosening regulations on hazardous sites…… Last year, the DOE also moved to relax restrictions on the disposal and abandonment of radioactive waste
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For over half a century, the plant was Paducah’s main employer, providing up to 7,000 jobs in a place where nearly a quarter of people now live in poverty. But poor working conditions and unregulated waste disposal also harmed Paducah residents. The legacy of these problems have cost the town and taxpayers. Despite multiple recommendations from a watchdog government agency, the Department of Energy is decades behind schedule on cleanup efforts.
Some experts say the federal government doesn’t know the full cost or scope of what cleaning them up will entail, and that becomes more complicated with more frequent extreme weather. It’s a problem Superfund sites — and especially nuclear waste sites — around the country face.Lynn said there’s a lot of secrecy surrounding the cleanup, as well as the health risks that may be associated with it. He’s just one Paducah resident, along with a slew of former workers, who say they’ve been left in the dark about problems with a complex cleanup. ….
There are 16 nuclear sites still managed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) across the country — from Vermont to Washington, Nevada to South Carolina — most of them built between the 1940s and 1950s. Some created nuclear defense materials like plutonium — a core ingredient in atomic bombs that is 100,000 times as radioactive as uranium and can cause liver, lung, and bone cancer.
The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant was one of the smallest projects in the U.S. When the plant was built in 1952, the town proudly adopted a new moniker: “Atomic City.” While gaseous diffusion was the public face of the plant, there were other operations, including programs with NASA, storing defunct materials from Oak Ridge, and work for Sandia, a nuclear security laboratory. By the early 1990s, many of the plants, including Paducah, had started transitioning to produce uranium for the nuclear power reactors that now provide a fifth of U.S. electricity generation.
“People who were not highly educated could make really good money working in these industries so you could have a good house, a boat, a couple of cars, raise your kids and send them to college,” said Mark Donham, who used to manage the DOE’s Citizens Advisory Board, which helps the agency monitor the plant’s environmental remediation. “Not only that but the government was saying, this is your patriotic duty. We need this. So everybody just went along because the compensation was pretty good.” However, a 1999 investigation by The Washington Post revealed the federal government used the plant to illegally recycle over 103,000 tons of used nuclear reactor fuel containing plutonium and other transuranics — man-made heavy metals derived from splitting atoms. The same year, workers filed a $10 billion class action lawsuit against three federal government contractors that led to the passage of a federal law intended to compensate current and former employees (or their survivors) for exposure to cancer-causing radiation.
Greg Landhorff, a utilities worker at the plant for 30 years, wasn’t involved in the lawsuit, but said he was exposed to “all kinds of different chemicals.” He said the exposure was an open secret, and workers weren’t given proper equipment or training. He claims operators told him about the exposure when he was hired, but didn’t report it because they didn’t want to lose their jobs. Landhorff now rattles off his health issues like a grocery list: beryllium disease, COPD, chronic bronchitis, and skin cancer.
Although the plant closed in 2013, hundreds of people still work on site. Nuclear sites often function like small towns, with wastewater treatment and steam plants, sewers, landfills and lagoons, administrative offices, enormous water towers, and medical centers. David Trimble, director of the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, said 30 to 60 percent of the DOE’s cleanup budget goes toward these “recurring activities.” The same is true for Paducah: Dawn Harris-Young, a spokesperson for the southeast regional EPA, said that only a “small fraction” goes toward environmental cleanup post-closure. This means that until the site is torn down, day-to-day operation often takes up more of the DOE’s cleanup budget than the necessary environmental remediation.
The DOE has demolished 84 facilities, removed over 66 million pounds of contaminated scrap material, and dug up over a million cubic feet of contaminated soil. While there is no official estimation of how much contaminated material remains, at least 400 buildings — and everything inside them — still need to be decontaminated and demolished at the Paducah site. The DOE requested $277 million specifically for Paducah in 2020, despite its budget for nuclear cleanup shrinking by $50 million in the last five years. But it’s still a small fraction of the budget DOE will need: cleanup isn’t expected to be completed until 2065, and the EPA has said it could take even longer because of the lack of knowledge about sources of contamination and the vast size of the facility. The waste at Paducah includes the gaseous diffusion plant, buried radioactive disposal sites, and waste leftover from neighboring nuclear sites in Ohio and Tennessee. It also includes over 52,000 cylinders of uranium hexafluoride, or spent uranium fuel, much of it from Oak Ridge. But there is still no solution for how to dispose of spent nuclear fuel, except to bury it. In recent decades, federal and state regulators have strategized for the remediation of these sites. But some have faced major problems like fires, radioactive leaks, and spills. According to Rodney Ewing, nuclear security expert at Stanford University, “there’s no path forward” to dispose of uranium hexafluoride, either. “That’s why they’re still stored in tanks out back,” he said. When the leaves fall on Ronald Lamb’s property, he can see the water tower and the grey siding of facility buildings at the Paducah plant just two miles away. On the road near Big Bayou Creek, which runs through both the plant and his 120-acre property, signs warn against getting in the water. His well is padlocked because of groundwater contamination from trichloroethylene, or TCE — a degreaser used to clean uranium equipment — which can impact childhood development, damage the central nervous system, and is linked to cancer. Lamb said the well water left his family with severe gastrointestinal problems. “I never said a bad thing about the plant the whole time I was growing up,” Lamb said. “It made the economy good. But then we got sick.” DOE officials report that the agency has cleaned over four billion gallons of contaminated groundwater through a pump and treat system, but two toxic plumes of TCE still flow through four miles of groundwater that lead to the Ohio River. The DOE lacks a national strategy for nuclear cleanup, instead relying on site managers to contract with companies that manage, operate, and cleanup nuclear facilities. The Paducah cleanup is now being managed by Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership, a conglomeration of companies hired by the DOE for soil and groundwater remediation. One of them is Jacobs Engineering, a contractor that was sued for exposing hundreds of workers to toxic substances during cleanup of the nation’s largest coal ash spill in Tennessee; more than 40 have died. At least three other nuclear sites — Oak Ridge, Hanford in Washington, and Savannah River in South Carolina — have also contracted with Jacobs. (Jacobs Engineering declined an interview for this story.) The DOE also declined to answer questions but said the agency was committed to the safe remediation of the plant and that they “look forward to continuing successful cleanup efforts in the future.” The agency works with the Citizens Advisory Board — a group of community members who apply and are appointed as well as liaisons from Kentucky and the regional EPA office — on environmental management at the Paducah site, including the monitoring of groundwater and planning for the site’s future use. Lamb advocated for the board many years ago, and the bi-monthly meetings are supposed to serve as a public comment period. The board doesn’t have any power beyond giving recommendations to the agency, and current and former members are divided about its effectiveness. Lesley Davis joined for about a year in 2016; her grandfather had worked at the plant and died of cancer. “It was informational at times, but it didn’t feel like it was making much of a difference,” she said. “In hindsight, it felt like they were trying to keep a good public face.”…….. In February, Paducah put up its floodgates, families stacked sandbags, and the bridge over the Ohio River to Illinois closed as floodwaters as rains drowned the region. According to local news stations, highway crews reported so much water they had trouble setting up warning signs. Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin declared a statewide emergency due to heavy rainfall and flooding. The Ohio River, three miles north of the Paducah plant, had record flooding in 2018 and 2019. Record flooding this year across the Midwest hit eight Superfund sites, and a GAO report released in November showed that 60 percent of U.S. Superfund sites are at risk from the impacts of climate change. By mid-century, there will be heavier rainfall, increased flooding, and more intense hurricanes in the Southeast, which has nearly a quarter of the 1,335 active Superfund sites on the EPA’s National Priority List. ……… The Green New Deal resolution, which has not yet passed through the U.S. House of Representatives, identified cleaning up brownfields — contaminated sites previously used for development — and hazardous waste sites like Paducah as a key priority in restoring the American landscape — but there’s not yet a road map for that plan. While underground waste repositories may provide a solution, Ewing said that over the long term, the changing climate could make it more challenging: in a wetter environment, the amount of water leaking through the rock over the repository could be expected to increase. Instead of focusing on cleanup plans, some state lawmakers and federal agencies are loosening regulations on hazardous sites. In 2017, Kentucky passed a bill lifting a nuclear moratorium, a move that some hope will turn the site into a research facility or nuclear reactor; the law loosens the requirements for toxic waste management. Last year, the DOE also moved to relax restrictions on the disposal and abandonment of radioactive waste………..https://www.scalawagmagazine.org/2019/12/nuclear-waste-paducah-kentucky/ . |
European report: don’t sacrifice the planet’s ecology in the drive for economic growth
Don’t pursue economic growth at expense of environment – report
Europe’s environmental watchdog gives warning as climate crisis continues, Guardian, Fiona Harvey 4 Dec 19, in Madrid Pursuing economic growth at the expense of the environment is no longer an option as Europe faces “unprecedented” challenges from climate chaos, pollution, biodiversity loss and the overconsumption of natural resources, according to a report from Europe’s environmental watchdog.
Europe was reaching the limits of what could be achieved by gradual means, by making efficiencies and small cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, with “transformational” change now necessary to stave off the impacts of global heating and environmental collapse, warned Hans Bruyninckx, executive director of the European Environment Agency…..
The EEA scored 35 key measures of environmental health, from greenhouse gases and air pollution, waste management and climate change to soil condition and birds and butterfly species, and found only six in which Europe was performing adequately.
“Incremental changes have resulted in progress in some areas but not nearly enough to meet our long-term goals,” said Bruyninckx. Further marginal changes would grow only more expensive, he predicted, making large-scale change necessary. “We already have the knowledge, technologies and tools we need to make key production and consumption systems such as food, mobility and energy sustainable.”
Wholesale changes could include banning internal combustion engines and scaling up public transport, abandoning fossil fuels in favour of 100% renewable energy, stipulating that products must be designed and manufactured to create no waste, and changes to our diets and agricultural production. Environmental goals could not be seen as separate to or lesser than economic goals, and accepting environmental damage as an inevitable cost would lead to ecological collapse, Bruyninckx warned.
The old system – of “continuing to promote economic growth and seeking to manage the environmental and social impacts” – would not deliver the EU’s long-term vision of “living well, within the limits of the planet”, the report warned.
The report, known as European Environment – State and Outlook (SOER), is a comprehensive study produced every five years and details the health or otherwise of all natural systems across EU member states and others including Norway, Switzerland and Turkey. The 2020 edition was brought forward to inform the incoming European commission as they discuss a promised “green new deal”, and for delegates at COP25, the UN conference on climate change currently taking place in Madrid.
There has been little improvement since the last report in 2015, despite promises, policies and targets, according to SOER 2020. Fewer than a quarter of protected species and only 16% of habitats are in a good state of conservation. Reduced pollution has improved water quality, but Europe will miss by a long way its goal of having a “good” rating for all water bodies by 2020. Though air quality has improved, about a fifth of the urban population live in areas where concentrations of pollutants exceed at least one EU air quality standard, and 62% of ecosystems are exposed to excessive nitrogen levels.
Global heating has added to the risks to health……https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/dont-pursue-economic-growth-at-expense-of-environment-report
Research shows that Climate models have correctly predicted global heating
Climate models have accurately predicted global heating, study findsFindings confirm reliability of projections of temperature changes over last 50 years, Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli, Thu 5 Dec 2019 Climate models have accurately predicted global heating for the past 50 years, a study has found.The findings confirm that since as early as 1970, climate scientists have had a solid fundamental understanding of the Earth’s climate system and the ability to project how it will respond to continued increases in the greenhouse effect. Since climate models have accurately anticipated global temperature changes so far, we can expect projections of future warming to be reliable as well.The research examines the accuracy of 17 models published over the past five decades, beginning with a 1970 study and including 1981 and 1988 models led by James Hansen, the former Nasa climatologist who testified to the US Senate in 1988 about the impacts of anthropogenic global heating. The study also includes the first four reports by the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC).
“We found that climate models – even those published back in the 1970s – did remarkably well, with 14 out of the 17 model projections indistinguishable from what actually occurred,” said Zeke Hausfather, of the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the paper.
Based on modern climate model projections, if countries follow through with current and pledged climate policies, the world is on track for about 3C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 – a situation the IPCC and others predict would be catastrophic…….
Based on modern climate model projections, if countries follow through with current and pledged climate policies, the world is on track for about 3C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 – a situation the IPCC and others predict would be catastrophic. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/climate-models-have-accurately-predicted-global-heating-study-finds
Bacteria to consume CO2 – a climate change solution?
Some startups are already beginning to use microbes to transform CO2 into products; Air Protein, launched in November, uses CO2 to make protein for alternative meat. But microbes that these new companies use are proprietary. “They’re using microbes that are much harder to engineer than E. coli, and therefore the variety of products that these microbes can manufacture from the capture of CO2 is very limited compared to E. coli,” he says. ……
If the production process uses renewable energy, “then we will basically have negative emissions of CO2,” says Gleizer. Some products may be carbon neutral—if the bacteria make jet fuel, for example, the planes that use it will still emit greenhouse gases, but no more than the CO2 that was originally used to produce the fuel. The CO2 could potentially come from direct air capture.
Several steps are still necessary before it’s clear that the process is feasible. When the current strain of the bacteria feeds on CO2, it grows much more slowly than if it was eating sugar; the researchers think that future versions can be faster. The E. coli will also have to be further modified to produce specific products. And production equipment in biotech factories might also have to change. “There’s still a long way to optimize this process,” says Gleizer. https://www.fastcompany.com/90438169/scientists-just-engineered-bacteria-to-eat-co2
Disasters fuelled by climate change are the top driver of human displacement.
Nobody is immune’: Climate-fuelled disasters forcing millions from their homes, As the 25th UN climate summit gets underway in Spain, a new report by Oxfam has found disasters fuelled by climate change are the top driver of human displacement.
SBS NEWS BY CASSANDRA BAIN 2 DEC 19 More than 20 million people across the globe have been displaced by “climate-fuelled” disasters in the past decade, new research by Oxfam has revealed.The Oxfam report found people are three times more likely to be internally displaced by cyclones, floods and bushfires, than they are by conflict, and seven times more likely than earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
It linked a number of recent catastrophic events to climate change, including Cyclone Winston which devastated Fiji in 2016, the prolonged drought in Guatemala, and recent bushfires across NSW and Victoria.
“The current bushfires in Australia have shown that nobody is immune to the impacts of the climate crisis,” Oxfam Australia climate change advisor Simon Bradshaw told SBS News.
“Our research reaffirms that communities in the Pacific face particularly severe impacts from global heating, including being forced from their homes by extreme weather disasters.”
The report found small island nations, including Fiji and some of Australia’s other Pacific neighbours, make up seven of the 10 countries facing the highest risk of internal displacement from extreme weather events.
On average, nearly five per cent of the populations of Tuvalu, Cuba and Dominica were displaced by extreme weather each year in the decade between 2008 and 2018.
Emissions per capita from developing small island nations are about a third of those of high-income countries.
We can see clearly that extreme weather disasters, many of which of course are being heavily exacerbated by the climate crisis, have been by far the biggest driver of displacement within countries over the last decade,” Mr Bradshaw said.
Mr Bradshaw said the report shone a light on the unequal impacts of the climate crisis across the globe.
It found people living in low-income countries such as India, Nigeria, and Bolivia are more than four times likely to be displaced by extreme weather disasters than people in richer countries, such as the United States or Australia…….
Oxfam is now calling on world leaders at COP25 to reduce their country’s carbon emissions and provide more support to help low-income communities recover from climate disasters.
During the summit, delegates from 125 countries will discuss climate-related challenges and progress towards the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius……. HTTPS://WWW.SBS.COM.AU/NEWS/NOBODY-IS-IMMUNE-CLIMATE-FUELLED-DISASTERS-FORCING-MILLIONS-FROM-THEIR-HOMES
COP 25 – a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Earth has a couple more chances to avoid catastrophic climate change. This week is one of them https://theconversation.com/earth-has-a-couple-more-chances-to-avoid-catastrophic-climate-change-this-week-is-one-of-them-128120 Robert Hales
Director Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith University, December 3, 2019 Almost 200 world leaders gather in Madrid this week for climate talks which will largely determine the success of the Paris agreement, and by extension, the extent to which the planet will suffer under climate change.
Negotiations at the so-called COP25 will focus on finalising details of the Paris Agreement. Nations will haggle over how bold emissions reductions will be, and how to measure and achieve them.
Much is riding on a successful outcome in Madrid. The challenge is to get nations further along the road to the strong climate goals, without any major diplomatic rifts or a collapse in talks.
What COP25 is about
COP25 is a shorthand name for the 25th meeting of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (or the nations signed up to the Paris agreement).
After Paris was signed in 2015, nations were given five years in which to set out bolder climate action. Current targets expire in 2020. At next year’s November COP in Glasgow, nations will be asked to formally commit to higher targets. If Madrid does not successfully lay the groundwork for this, the Glasgow talks are likely to fail.
The United Nations says the world must reduce overall emissions by 7.6% every year over the next decade to have a high chance of staying under 1.5℃ warming this century.
The 1.5℃ limit is at the upper end of the Paris goal; warming beyond this is likely to lead to catastrophic impacts, including near-total destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
Presently, emissions reduction targets of nations signed up to Paris put Earth on track for a 3.2℃ increase.
A global carbon market
Parties will debate the mechanism in the Paris agreement allowing emissions trading between nations, and via the private sector.
Such mechanisms could lower the global cost of climate mitigation, because emissions reduction in some nations is cheaper than in others. But there are concerns the trading regime may lack transparency and accountability.
Among the risks are that emissions cuts are “double counted” – meaning both the buying and selling nation count the cuts towards their targets, undermining the aims of the agreement.
Help for vulnerable nations
Small island states say COP25 is the last chance to take decisive action on global emissions reduction.
Fossil fuel burning in the developing world is largely responsible for the carbon dioxide that drives global warming. Developing nations are particularly vulnerable to the loss and damage caused by climate change.
Parties will discuss whether an international mechanism designed to assess and compensate for such damage is effective.
Developing nations are expected to contribute to the Green Climate Fund to help poorer nations cope with and mitigate climate change. Some 27 nations contributed US$9.78 billion in the last funding round.
Some nations have indicated they will not contribute further, including Australia, which says it already helps Pacific nations through its overseas aid program.
Arguments about cost
Nations opposed to adopting stronger emissions reduction targets often argue the costs of decarbonising energy sectors, and economies as a whole, are too high.
However, recent cost benefit analysis has found not taking action on climate change will be expensive in the long run.
Realisation is also growing that the cost of emissions reduction activities has been overestimated in the past. In Australia, prominent economist Ross Garnaut recently said huge falls in the cost of equipment for solar and wind energy has created massive economic opportunity, such as future manufacturing of zero-emission iron and aluminium.
The shift in the cost-balance means nations with low ambition will find it difficult to argue against climate mitigation on cost grounds.
Australia’s position at Madrid
At the Paris talks, Australia pledged emissions reduction of 26-28% by 2030, based on 2005 levels. The Morrison government has indicated it will not ramp up the goal.
About 68 nations said before COP25 they will set bolder emissions reduction targets, including Fiji, South Africa and New Zealand. This group is expected to exert pressure on laggard nations.
This pressure has already begun: France has reportedly insisted that a planned free trade deal between Australia and the European Union must include “highly ambitious” action on climate change.
The Climate Action Tracker says Australia is not contributing its fair share towards the global 1.5℃ commitment. Australia is also ranked among the worst performing G20 nations on climate action.
The Madrid conference takes place amid high public concern over climate change. Thousands of Australians took part in September’s climate strikes and the environment has reportedly surpassed healthcare, cost of living and the economy as the top public concern.
Climate change has already arrived in the form of more extreme weather and bushfires, water stress, sea level rise and more. These effects are a small taste of what is to come if negotiations in Madrid fail to deliver.
Johanna Nalau, Samid Suliman and Tim Cadman contributed to this article.
UN chief praises youth leadership on climate action, deplores government inaction
COP25: youth ‘leadership’ contrasts with government inaction, says UN chief, Ahead of Madrid climate change conference António Guterres says political will missing, Guardian, Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent, 2 Dec 19, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, contrasted the “leadership” and “mobilisation” shown by the world’s youth on the climate emergency with the lack of action by governments, which were failing to keep up with the urgency of the problem despite increasing signs that the climate was reaching breakdown.
Before the start of a critical conference on the climate crisis on Monday, he said the world had the technical and economic means to halt climate chaos, but what was missing was political will.
“The technologies that are necessary to make this possible are already available. Signals of hope are multiplying. Public opinion is waking up everywhere. Young people are showing remarkable leadership and mobilisation. [But we need] political will to put a price on carbon, political will to stop subsidies on fossil fuels [and start] taxing pollution instead of people.”
Guterres called for further investment from rich countries and support for poor nations to make the changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of global heating. Amid rising temperatures, wildfires, heatwaves, droughts and floods, the danger signals were clear and must be acted on without further delay, he said…..
The countries most at risk of deluge from climate chaos have issued an impassioned plea to the industrialised world ahead of crucial negotiations on the Paris agreement that start on Monday in Madrid.
“We see [these talks] as the last opportunity to take decisive action,” Janine Felson, deputy chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) told the Guardian.
“Anything short of vastly greater commitment to emission reduction, a new climate finance goal and tangible support for disaster risk reduction will signal a willingness to accept catastrophe.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/01/island-states-want-decisive-action-to-prevent-inundation
Antarctic ice sheets could be at greater risk of melting than previously thought
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Coal power becoming ‘uninsurable’ as firms refuse cover
Coal power becoming ‘uninsurable’ as firms refuse cover, US insurers join retreat from European insurers meaning coal projects cannot be built or operated, Guardian, Julia Kollewe, Mon 2 Dec 2019 The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time US companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd’s of London and Asian insurers as the “last resort” for fossil fuels, according to a new report.The report, which rates the world’s 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal – the biggest single contributor to climate change – “is on the way to becoming uninsurable” as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance.
Ten firms moved to restrict the insurance cover they offer to companies that build or operate coal power plants in 2019, taking the global total to 17, said the Unfriend Coal campaign, which includes 13 environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Client Earth and Urgewald, a German NGO. The report will be launched at an insurance and climate risk conference in London on Monday, as the UN climate summit gets underway in Madrid.
The first insurers to exit coal policies were all European, but since March, two US insurers – Chubb and Axis Capital – and the Australian firms QBE and Suncorp have pledged to stop or restrict insurance for coal projects.
At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9tn, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry’s global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6tn in assets were divesting from fossil fuels…… https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/02/coal-power-becoming-uninsurable-as-firms-refuse-cover
Climate activists protest Black Friday shopping sprees
Climate Activists Protest Black Friday Around the World https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/11/climate-activists-protest-black-friday-around-the-world/
27 people were arrested in New York City while calling for action to fight climate change. NATHALIE BAPTISTE ON BLACK FRIDAY,
Climate change activists in cities all over the planet took to the streets to decry the biggest shopping day of the year.According to the New York Post, 300 protesters marched down a busy street in New York City then blocked traffic near Herald Square by sitting in an intersection. Police arrested 27 people after they refused to clear the road. Law enforcement said the individuals would be charged with disorderly conduct.
Protests were widespread across Europe. In France, protesters targeted Amazon’s French headquarters. Other climate demonstrators protested at a shopping center in Paris. At a Lyon protest, video captured riot police dragging protesters. In the United Kingdom, protesters chanted outside of shopping centers.
COP25: UN climate conference to tackle global challenges
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