Message of climate hope
“So, for me, optimism is not simply the result of having attained something. It is rather a strategy, the input, the approach with which we must face climate change because it is the only way to enhance the probability of success.”
It’s an arresting thought – the only way to succeed, or merely survive, is to hope. Not a passive hope, but a hungry and angry hope, one that will force us to act.
No wonder people are overwhelmed about the future of the planet, feel helpless, overcome with grief and worried nothing is being done, that nothing can be done, that it’s all too late. Our children are having nightmares, wracked with a sense of loss before they full possessed anything. The term “eco-anxiety” was defined by the American Psychological Society as “”a chronic fear of environmental doom” in a 2017 report which cited evidence of people “deeply affected by feelings of loss, helplessness, and frustration due to their inability to feel like they are making a difference in stopping climate change”.
Polar ice melting at an accelerating rate
Polar ice caps melting six times faster than in 1990s https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/11/polar-ice-caps-melting-six-times-faster-than-in-1990s
Losses of ice from Greenland and Antarctica are tracking the worst-case climate scenario, scientists warn Damian Carrington Environment editor @dpcarrington,Thu 12 Mar 2020 The polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the 1990s, according to the most complete analysis to date.
The ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is tracking the worst-case climate warming scenario set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists say. Without rapid cuts to carbon emissions the analysis indicates there could be a rise in sea levels that would leave 400 million people exposed to coastal flooding each year by the end of the century.
Rising sea levels are the one of the most damaging long-term impacts of the climate crisis, and the contribution of Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating. The new analysis updates and combines recent studies of the ice masses and predicts that 2019 will prove to have been a record-breaking year when the most recent data is processed.
The previous peak year for Greenland and Antarctic ice melting was 2010, after a natural climate cycle led to a run of very hot summers. But the Arctic heatwave of 2019 means it is nearly certain that more ice was lost last year.
The average annual loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctica in the 2010s was 475bn tonnes – six times greater than the 81bn tonnes a year lost in the 1990s. In total the two ice caps lost 6.4tn tonnes of ice from 1992 to 2017, with melting in Greenland responsible for 60% of that figure.
The IPCC’s most recent mid-range prediction for global sea level rise in 2100 is 53cm. But the new analysis suggests that if current trends continue the oceans will rise by an additional 17cm.
“Every centimetre of sea level rise leads to coastal flooding and coastal erosion, disrupting people’s lives around the planet,” said Prof Andrew Shepherd, of the University of Leeds. He said the extra 17cm would mean the number of exposed to coastal flooding each year rising from 360 million to 400 million. “These are not unlikely events with small impacts,” he said. “They are already under way and will be devastating for coastal communities.”
Erik Ivins, of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in California, who led the assessment with Shepherd, said the lost ice was a clear sign of global heating. “The satellite measurements provide prima facie, rather irrefutable, evidence,” he said.
Almost all the ice loss from Antarctica and half of that from Greenland arose from warming oceans melting the glaciers that flow from the ice caps. This causes glacial flow to speed up, dumping more icebergs into the ocean. The remainder of Greenland’s ice losses are caused by hotter air temperatures that melt the surface of the ice sheet.
The combined analysis was carried out by a team of 89 scientists from 50 international organisations, who combined the findings of 26 ice surveys. It included data from 11 satellite missions that tracked the ice sheets’ changing volume, speed of flow and mass.
About a third of the total sea level rise now comes from Greenland and Antarctic ice loss. Just under half comes from the thermal expansion of warming ocean water and a fifth from other smaller glaciers. But the latter sources are not accelerating, unlike in Greenland and Antarctica.
Shepherd said the ice caps had been slow to respond to human-caused global heating. Greenland and especially Antarctica were quite stable at the start of the 1990s despite decades of a warming climate.
Shepherd said it took about 30 years for the ice caps to react. Now that they had a further 30 years of melting was inevitable, even if emissions were halted today. Nonetheless, he said, urgent carbon emissions cuts were vital. “We can offset some of that [sea level rise] if we stop heating the planet.”
The IPCC is in the process of producing a new global climate report and its lead author, Prof Guðfinna Aðalgeirsdóttir, of the University of Iceland, said: “The reconciled estimate of Greenland and Antarctic ice loss is timely.”
She said she also saw increased losses from Iceland’s ice caps last year. “Summer 2019 was very warm in this region.”
Coronavirus poses threat to climate action
IEA warns that Covid-19 could cause a slowdown in world’s clean energy transition, Guardian, Jillian Ambrose, Fri 13 Mar 2020 The coronavirus health crisis may lead to a slump in global carbon emissions this year but the outbreak poses a threat to long-term climate action by undermining investment in clean energy, according to the global energy watchdog.The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the economic fallout of Covid-19 to wipe out the world’s oil demand growth for the year ahead, which should cap the fossil fuel emissions that contribute to the climate crisis.
But Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director, has warned the outbreak could spell a slowdown in the world’s clean energy transition unless governments use green investments to help support economic growth through the global slowdown……..https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/12/coronovirus-poses-threat-to-climate-action-says-watchdog
Groups question the viability of the three coastal sites for UK’s new nuclear plants
Hinkley, Sizewell and Bradwell, Stop Hinkley 10th March 2020, A meeting between representatives of groups opposing new nuclear development, the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) the independent nuclear safety regulator, and the Environment Agency discussed how the ONR regulates against external hazards.2018. According to minutes of meetings held by ONR’s group of climate
change experts, projections of sea level rise for the year 2100 contain
“considerable uncertainty” and ” small changes to UK storm systems can
alter the height of storm surges significantly”. Crucially, sea level has a
huge effect on the severity of storm surges. An increase in sea level of
one metre could mean that a storm of a severity currently expected only
once every thousand years is likely to occur once every decade. The meeting
took place in Bridgwater on 28th January 2020. Stop Hinkley was joined by
Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) and Blackwater Against New Nuclear Group
(BANNG). The groups are questioning the viability of the three coastal
sites which are all vulnerable to the impacts of flooding, storm surges and
coastal processes which will inevitably intensify in coming years.
Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?
Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus? Owen Jones Guardian, 6 Mar 2020 No Cobra meetings, no sombre speeches from No 10, yet the consequences of runaway global heating are catastrophic, It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us. While coronavirus is understandably treated as an imminent danger, the climate crisis is still presented as an abstraction whose consequences are decades away. Unlike an illness, it is harder to visualise how climate breakdown will affect us each as individuals. Perhaps when unprecedented wildfires engulfed parts of the Arctic last summer there could have been an urgent conversation about how the climate crisis was fuelling extreme weather, yet there wasn’t. In 2018, more than 60 million people suffered the consequences of extreme weather and climate change, including more than 1,600 who perished in Europe, Japan and the US because of heatwaves and wildfires. Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were devastated by cyclone Idai, while hurricanes Florence and Michael inflicted $24bn (£18.7bn) worth of damage on the US economy, according to the World Meteorological Organization.As the recent Yorkshire floods illustrate, extreme weather – with its terrible human and economic costs – is ever more a fact of British life. Antarctic ice is melting more than six times faster than it was four decades ago and Greenland’s ice sheet four times faster than previously thought. According to the UN, we have 10 years to prevent a 1.5C rise above pre-industrial temperature but, whatever happens, we will suffer.
Pandemics and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity. “It’s strange when people see the climate crisis as being in the future, compared to coronavirus, which we’re facing now,” says Friends of the Earth’s co-executive director, Miriam Turner. “It might be something that feels far away when sitting in an office in central London, but the emergency footing of the climate crisis is being felt by hundreds of millions already.”
Imagine, then, that we felt the same sense of emergency about the climate crisis as we do about coronavirus. What action would we take? ….. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis
The world’s Big Oil giants now turn to plastics to grow their industries
PLANET PLASTIC, How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades, Rolling Stone, By TIM DICKINSON, MARCH 3, 2020
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As the world begins to wean itself off of fossil fuel for transportation, Big Oil giants from Texas to Saudi Arabia are turning to plastic to support future growth. The International Energy Agency predicts that “oil demand related to plastic consumption overtakes that for road-passenger transport by 2050,” and its top executive warns plastics are “one of the key blind spots in the global energy debate.” The industry is counting on a tidal wave of new demand from emerging economies. A 2018 IEA report underscores that advanced economies use up to 20 times more plastic per capita than consumers do in India or Indonesia. And it warns that increased recycling and single-use bans in places like Europe and Japan “will be far outweighed by developing economies sharply increasing their shares of plastic consumption (as well as its disposal).” Global plastics production and incineration currently creates the CO2 pollution of 189 coal plants. By 2050, that’s expected to more than triple, to the equivalent of 615 coal plants. At that rate, plastics would hog about 15 percent of the world’s remaining “carbon budget,” or what can be emitted without crossing the 2-degrees Celsius threshold in global temperature rise that scientists warn can trigger calamity. The plastic industry’s damage to the planet is vast, but not immeasurable. In fact, the industry has published a detailed accounting that reveals its pollution is on pace to cause trillions in environmental harm by midcentury……… “The environmental cost to society of consumer plastic products and packaging was over $139 billion in 2015,” the report reveals. Without a dramatic change in course, Trucost predicts, that annual figure will soar to “$209 billion by 2025.”……… Much of the world is waking up to the plastics crisis. As China has shut its doors to the global plastic-waste trade, the European Union, Canada, and India are stepping up bans on single-use plastics like cutlery, plates, straws, and ear swabs. “How do you explain dead whales washing up on beaches across the world, their stomachs jam packed with plastic bags?” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked, introducing his country’s initiative. “As a dad, it is tough trying to explain this stuff to my kids.” But under President Trump, the United States is lurching in the opposite direction, promoting the plastic industry’s aggressive expansion. “It’s war,” says Puckett of BAN, “between policies that are totally at odds with each other — of making more plastics and banning plastic.” American fracking is literally fueling the global surge in plastics. The glut of cheap natural gas here has sparked an explosion in new plastics infrastructure. Since 2010, according to the ACC, U.S. companies have ramped up “334 chemical and plastics projects cumulatively valued at $204 billion.” Europe has built new plastics plants fed by fracked U.S. exports. Environmentalists warn that these facilities will lock in demand for fossil-fuel consumption for a generation. Trump is an unabashed booster of plastics — in keeping with his service to the fossil-fuel industry. The former CEO of Dow led Trump’s manufacturing council. And last July, the president visited a new Shell plastics complex outside Pittsburgh. “This facility will transform abundant natural gas — and we have a lot of it — fracked from Pennsylvania wells into plastic,” Trump said. That material, he boasted, would be embossed with “that very beautiful phrase: ‘Made in the USA.’” With the president championing its interests in Washington — and even triggering the libs with Trump 2020 campaign-branded plastic straws — the plastics industry is working to undermine grassroots activism in cities and states across the country. The Plastics Industry Association, or PLASTICS, is a top trade group headquartered on K Street in Washington, D.C. Hiding its handiwork inside a nesting doll of front groups, PLASTICS has worked to thwart state and municipal bans on single-use plastics. PLASTICS has gotten an assist from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which pushes right-wing state legislatures to pass nearly identical bills. In 2013, the plastic trade group wrote a pitch to ALEC members, arguing a ban on plastic “results in the picking of winners and losers in a ‘not-so-free’ marketplace.” By 2015, ALEC began advocating state laws best known for “banning bans” on plastic bags, but which are often far more sweeping, prohibiting limits on styrofoam and “auxiliary containers” — a catchall term for to-go packaging. PLASTICS obscures its involvement in these state fights through a “special purpose” front group called the Progressive Bag Alliance, which rebranded in January as the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance. The organization runs public relations through another front group, Bag the Ban, which touts plastic as “the most environmentally friendly option at the checkout.” (The bag alliance claims it is self-funding, but PLASTICS employs its director, per IRS filings, and the groups share offices and overhead.)…… The success of blue states, from Hawaii to New York, in banning plastic bags has been countered by the industry-led push. PLASTICS says it has parted ways with ALEC, but some 15 red states now have laws pre-empting local plastic bans, with Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Tennessee joining the pack in 2019. (ALEC did not respond to questions from Rolling Stone.) For now, the state bans on bans are holding up in court……. As the global plastics crisis grows — and photos of albatross chicks decomposing around the indigestible plastic waste that killed them go viral — the industry is quietly agonizing over backlash from the metal-straw and Hydroflask-toting members of Generation Z. “The [plastic] water bottle has, in some way, become the mink coat or the pack of cigarettes,” a senior sustainability manager for Nestlé Waters confessed at a conference last year. “It’s socially not very acceptable to the young folks, and that scares me.” In contrast to climate change, the plastics crisis has not been met with corporate denial. The companies of Big Plastic are instead seeking to convince consumers and regulators that — despite having unleashed this torrent of pollution on the planet — they can be trusted to pioneer solutions that will make plastic use sustainable. They’re touting a “circular economy,” in which used plastic doesn’t become waste but, instead, a feedstock for new products. A cynic might translate the concept into: Recycling, but for real this time. “There are a lot of different corporate commitments,” says Shilpi Chhotray, a leader of the Break Free From Plastics movement. While some show promise, others “are just greenwashing,” she insists, with the intent of giving the industry cover for its true aim: “growth.”……… The industry’s voluntary actions to curb plastic pollution are driven by two clear motives: One is protecting the environment, the other is protecting profits from regulation…….. In Washington, the plastics industry is asking government, and American taxpayers, to foot the bill to revitalize the moribund recycling industry. The RECOVER Act — backed by both PLASTICS and the ACC — would offer $500 million in federal-matching funds for investment in new infrastructure……. For Sen. Tom Udall, our involuntary ingestion of plastic waste is proof that the country can’t wait decades for plastic polluters to reform their own practices, or rely on half-measures to bolster the current recycling system. “We are beyond the crisis point on plastic waste,” he says, “and people are starting to wake up.” Udall wants consequences for an industry that has sloughed its environmental harms onto the rest of us for long enough. Washington is late to the game when it comes to plastics regulation, and Udall’s strategy is to adopt best practices from across the globe. . The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act would mimic Europe in banning commonly polluted single-use plastics, including plastic bags, styrofoam cups and carry-out containers, and plastic utensils. Plastic straws would be allowed only by request. The bill would expand the market for recycled plastics by creating a minimum recycled content for beverage containers, while also imposing a 10-cent deposit on each container sold — roughly nationalizing the models of Michigan and Oregon, where residents return nearly nine in 10 containers for recycling. The bill would create “extended producer responsibility” — making the industry responsible for the waste it creates by requiring that producers “design, manage, and finance programs to collect and process waste that would normally burden state and local governments.” Udall emphasizes that today’s industry is hardly trying, often slapping an unrecyclable label on an otherwise recyclable bottle….. The companies of the plastics industry, Lowenthal says, are ultimately “going to have to deal with the sticker shock that they are now responsible and they’re going to have to pay” to keep plastics out of the environment. The alternative, he insists, has become untenable: “What we have in plastic is something that has made our lives more convenient and easier. But unless we figure out how to keep this out of the waste stream, it’s just going to kill us.” https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/plastic-problem-recycling-myth-big-oil-950957/?fbclid=IwAR2i19CqoMXj7HMbvmzM6uGkEx02ESd69vjlxVVgpUZV-VMbhPQJ_iZ3o3w
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Big climate change policy unlikely no matter who wins the White House
Big climate change policy unlikely no matter who wins the White House
Amy Harder Don’t hold your breath for big climate policy changes — even if a Democrat wins the White House.Why it matters: Congress is likely to remain gridlocked on the matter, leading to either more of the same with President Trump’s re-election or a regulatory swing back to the left no matter which Democrat wins — but far short of a legislative overhaul.
The big picture: Climate change is reaching a new high-water mark as a political concern for American voters, and Democratic presidential nominees are promising aggressive policies.
- That in and of itself is a sea change from prior elections. Even still, these worries and pledges are unlikely to translate into any major new laws in the next few years (at least).
Here’s why, with potential scenarios mapped out.
Trump wins re-election
While Trump is uniquely unpredictable in presidential history, he’s made it clear since moving into the White House that he’s not interested in pursuing any sort of actual climate legislation on Capitol Hill.
More of the same is most likely, in two important ways:
- More curtailing of environmental regulations — and defending them in court.
- More pressure on other actors — like companies, states and other countries — to take bigger action on their own as the void of U.S. presidential leadership grows.
Any Democrat wins
All Democrats have aggressive climate plans, but it’s an open question whether any would first push climate legislation over other priorities — especially health care………
Regardless of congressional priority, any Democratic president would swing Washington’s executive-action pendulum far back in the other direction. …..
A progressive Democrat wins
… like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. ……This type of all-encompassing and hyper-aggressive legislation is unlikely to get universal support among Democrats (to say nothing of universal Republican opposition) — which makes them extremely unlikely to get through the Senate.
- This is because Democrats with more moderate ideologies or those representing energy-intensive states are unlikely to support the broader socioeconomic measures and such aggressive moves away from fossil fuels, partly because many of those jobs are represented by unions……..
A more moderate Democrat wins
… like Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg.
I anticipate these politicians would be (relatively) more open to trying to work with Republicans on climate change than their progressive counterparts……
As Congress talks climate policy, carbon price gets no love
New lobbying urging Congress to support a price on carbon emissions is not convincing lawmakers to warm up to the policy.
Why it matters: A carbon price is widely considered one of the most economically efficient ways to tackle climate change. But, economics be damned, its politics remain deeply unpopular. https://www.axios.com/climate-policy-changes-unlikely-7ecf6cc3-c42c-4d7c-b492-41d73433a015.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top
Climate action? – you simply couldn’t build enough nuclear reactors
New Scientist 26th Feb 2020, Paul Dorfman, University College London Energy Institute, UK; Tom Burke,E3G; Steve Thomas, University of Greenwich, UK; Jonathan Porritt,
environmental campaigner; and David Lowry, Institute for Resource and
Security Studies. Reporting the decline of nuclear power generation, you quote Michael Shellenberger’s view that nuclear power is necessary to prevent climate change (8 February, p 20).
This view is truly dangerous. Climate change poses a number of unique challenges to humanity. One of the most difficult is that the world not only needs to get to a specific place
– a carbon-neutral global energy system – but also must get there by a specific time – the middle of the century. Otherwise the policy fails.
You simply couldn’t build enough nuclear reactors fast enough, even to
replace the existing reactors that will reach the end of their life by
2050, let alone to replace fossil fuels in the existing electricity system
or in the more electricity-intensive global economy we are currently
building. This would be true even if we were willing and able to overcome
all the other unsolved problems that nuclear reactors face. These include
their affordability, accidents, waste management, nuclear weapons
proliferation, the scarcity of talent and system inflexibility.
Antarctic ice walls protect the climate
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Antarctic ice walls protect the climate, EurekAlert 27 Feb, UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG Inland Antarctic ice contains volumes of water that can raise global sea levels by several metres. A new study published in the journal Nature shows that glacier ice walls are vital for the climate, as they prevent rising ocean temperatures and melting glacier ice.The ocean can store much more heat than the atmosphere. The deep sea around Antarctica stores thermal energy that is the equivalent of heating the air above the continent by 400 degrees. Now, a Swedish-led international research group has explored the physics behind the ocean currents close to the floating glaciers that surround the Antarctic coast. “Current measurements indicate an increase in melting, particularly near the coast in some parts of Antarctica and Greenland. These increases can likely be linked to the warm, salty ocean currents that circulate on the continental shelf, melting the ice from below,” says Anna Wåhlin, lead author of the study and professor of oceanography at the University of Gothenburg. “What we found here is a crucial feedback process: the ice shelves are their own best protection against warm water intrusions. If the ice thins, more oceanic heat comes in and melts the ice shelf, which becomes even thinner etc. It is worrying, as the ice shelves are already thinning because of global air and ocean warming”, says Céline Heuzé, climate researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences of Gothenburg University. The stability of ice is a mystery Inland Antarctic ice gradually moves towards the ocean. Despite the ice being so important, its stability remains a mystery – as does the answer to what could make it melt faster. Since the glaciers are difficult to access, researchers have been unable to find out much information about the active processes. More knowledge has now been obtained from studying the measurement data collected from instruments that Anna Wåhlin and her researcher colleagues placed in the ocean around the Getz glacier in West Antarctica. The ice’s edge blocks warm seawater……https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/uog-aiw022720.php |
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Nuclear lobby attacks Australia’s Nuclear Prohibition laws
Jim Green, Online Opinion, 27 Feb 2020, https://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=20758&page=0
Nuclear power in Australia is prohibited under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999. A review of the EPBC Act is underway and there is a strong push from the nuclear industry to remove the bans. However, federal and state laws banning nuclear power have served Australia well and should be retained.
Too cheap to meter or too expensive to matter? Laws banning nuclear power has saved Australia from the huge costs associated with failed and failing reactor projects in Europe and North America, such as the Westinghouse project in South Carolina that was abandoned after the expenditure of at least A$13.4 billion. The Westinghouse / South Carolina fiasco could so easily have been replicated in any of Australia’s states or territories if not for the legal bans.
There are many other examples of shocking nuclear costs and cost overruns, including:
* The cost of the two reactors under construction in the US state of Georgia has doubled and now stands at A$20.4‒22.6 billion per reactor.
* The cost of the only reactor under construction in France has nearly quadrupled and now stands at A$20.0 billion. It is 10 years behind schedule.
* The cost of the only reactor under construction in Finland has nearly quadrupled and now stands at A$17.7 billion. It is 10 years behind schedule.
* The cost of the four reactors under construction in the United Arab Emirates has increased from A$7.5 billion per reactor to A$10‒12 billion per reactor.
* In the UK, the estimated cost of the only two reactors under construction is A$25.9 billion per reactor. A decade ago, the estimated cost was almost seven times lower. The UK National Audit Office estimates that taxpayer subsidies for the project will amount to A$58 billion, despite earlier government promises that no taxpayer subsidies would be made available.
Nuclear power has clearly priced itself out of the market and will certainly decline over the coming decades. Indeed the nuclear industry is in crisis ‒ as industry insiders and lobbyists freely acknowledge. Westinghouse ‒ the most experienced reactor builder in the world ‒ filed for bankruptcy in 2017 as a result of catastrophic cost overruns on reactor projects. A growing number of countries are phasing out nuclear power, including Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Taiwan and South Korea.
Rising power bills: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because nuclear power could not possibly pass any reasonable economic test. Nuclear power clearly fails the two economic tests set by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Firstly, nuclear power could not possibly be introduced or maintained without huge taxpayer subsidies. Secondly, nuclear power would undoubtedly result in higher electricity prices.
Nuclear waste streams: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because no solution exists to for the safe, long-term management of streams of low-, intermediate- and high-level nuclear wastes. No country has an operating repository for high-level nuclear waste. The United States has a deep underground repository for long-lived intermediate-level waste ‒ the only operating deep underground repository worldwide ‒ but it was closed from 2014‒17 following a chemical explosion in an underground waste barrel. Safety standards and regulatory oversight fell away sharply within the first decade of operation of the U.S. repository ‒ a sobering reminder of the challenge of safely managing dangerous nuclear wastes for tens of thousands of years.
Too dangerous: The Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters results in the evacuation of over half a million people and economic costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition to the danger of nuclear reactor meltdowns and fires and chemical explosions, there are other dangers. Doubling nuclear output by the middle of the century would require the construction of 800−900 reactors. These reactors not only become military targets but they would produce over one million tonnes of high-level nuclear waste containing enough plutonium to build over one million nuclear weapons.
Pre-deployed terrorist targets: Nuclear power plants have been described as pre-deployed terrorist targets and pose a major security threat. This in turn would likely see an increase in policing and security operations and costs and a commensurate impact on civil liberties and public access to information. Other nations in our region may view Australian nuclear aspirations with suspicion and concern given that many aspects of the technology and knowledge-base are the same as those required for nuclear weapons.
Former US Vice President Al Gore summarised the proliferation problem: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … then we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”
Too slow: Expanding nuclear power is impractical as a short-term response to climate change. An analysis by Australian economist Prof. John Quiggin concludes that it would be “virtually impossible” to get a nuclear power reactor operating in Australia before 2040. More time would elapse before nuclear power has generated as much as energy as was expended in the construction of the reactor: a University of Sydney report concluded that the energy payback time for nuclear reactors is 6.5‒7 years. Taking into account planning and approvals, construction, and the energy payback time, it would be a quarter of a century or more before nuclear power could even begin to reduce greenhouse emissions in Australia (and then only assuming that nuclear power displaced fossil fuels).
Too thirsty: Nuclear power is extraordinarily thirsty. A single nuclear power reactor consumes 35‒65 million litres of water per day for cooling.
Water consumption of different energy sources (litres / kWh):
* Nuclear 2.5
* Coal 1.9
* Combined Cycle Gas 0.95
* Solar PV 0.11
* Wind 0.004
Climate change and nuclear hazards: Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to threats which are being exacerbated by climate change. These include dwindling and warming water sources, sea-level rise, storm damage, drought, and jelly-fish swarms. Nuclear engineer David Lochbaum states. “I’ve heard many nuclear proponents say that nuclear power is part of the solution to global warming. It needs to be reversed: You need to solve global warming for nuclear plants to survive.”
In January 2019, the Climate Council, comprising Australia’s leading climate scientists and other policy experts, issued a policy statement concluding that nuclear power plants “are not appropriate for Australia – and probably never will be”.
By contrast, the REN21 Renewables 2015: Global Status Report states that renewable energy systems “have unique qualities that make them suitable both for reinforcing the resilience of the wider energy infrastructure and for ensuring the provision of energy services under changing climatic conditions.”
First Nations: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because the pursuit of a nuclear power industry would almost certainly worsen patterns of disempowerment and dispossession that Australia’s First Nations have experienced ‒ and continue to experience ‒ as a result of nuclear and uranium projects.
To give one example (among many), the National Radioactive Waste Management Act dispossesses and disempowers Traditional Owners in many respects: the nomination of a site for a radioactive waste dump is valid even if Aboriginal owners were not consulted and did not give consent; the Act has sections which nullify State or Territory laws that protect archaeological or heritage values, including those which relate to Indigenous traditions; the Act curtails the application of Commonwealth laws including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 and the Native Title Act 1993 in the important site-selection stage; and the Native Title Act 1993 is expressly overridden in relation to land acquisition for a radioactive waste dump.
No social license: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because there is no social license to introduce nuclear power to Australia. Opinion polls find that Australians are overwhelmingly opposed to a nuclear power reactor being built in their local vicinity (10‒28% support, 55‒73% opposition); and opinion polls find that support for renewable energy sources far exceeds support for nuclear power (for example a 2015 IPSOS poll found 72‒87% support for solar and wind power but just 26% support for nuclear power). As the Clean Energy Council noted in its submission to the 2019 federal nuclear inquiry, it would require “a minor miracle” to win community support for nuclear power in Australia.
The pursuit of nuclear power would also require bipartisan political consensus at state and federal levels for several decades. Good luck with that. Currently, there is a bipartisan consensus at the federal level to retain the legal ban. The noisy, ultra-conservative rump of the Coalition is lobbying for nuclear power but their push has been rejected by, amongst others, the federal Liberal Party leadership, the Queensland Liberal-National Party, the SA Liberal government, the Tasmanian Liberal government, the NSW Liberal Premier and environment minister, and even ultra-conservatives such as Nationals Senator Matt Canavan.
The future is renewable, not radioactive: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because the introduction of nuclear power would delay and undermine the development of effective, economic energy and climate policies based on renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. A December 2019 report by CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator finds that construction costs for nuclear reactors are 2‒8 times higher than costs for wind or solar. Levelised costs for nuclear are 2‒3 times greater per unit of energy produced compared to wind or solar including either 2 hours of battery storage or 6 hours of pumped hydro energy storage.
Australia can do better than fuel higher carbon emissions and unnecessary radioactive risk. We need to embrace the fastest growing global energy sector and become a driver of clean energy thinking and technology and a world leader in renewable energy technology. We can grow the jobs of the future here today. This will provide a just transition for energy sector workers, their families and communities and the certainty to ensure vibrant regional economies and secure sustainable and skilled jobs into the future. Renewable energy is affordable, low risk, clean and popular. Nuclear is not. Our shared energy future is renewable, not radioactive.
More Information
* Don’t Nuke the Climate Australia, www.dont-nuke-the-climate.org.au
* Climate Council, 2019, ‘Nuclear Power Stations are Not Appropriate for Australia – and Probably Never Will Be’, https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/
* WISE Nuclear Monitor, 25 June 2016, ‘Nuclear power: No solution to climate change’, https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/806/nuclear-power-no-solution-climate-change
Dr. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia.
The Planet Is Screwed, Says Bank That Screwed the Planet
 The New Republic A report from two economists at JP Morgan Chase pushes back against traditional economic wisdom on climate change. By KATE ARONOFF, February 25, 2020 JP Morgan Chase is the world’s leading financer of fossil fuel projects. And according to a report from within the company, recently leaked to the press, the world is seriously underestimating the adverse effects of climate change.
The 22-page report, entitled “Risky Business: the climate and the macroeconomy” and dated January 14, 2020, has been reported by multiple outlets since Friday as containing a gloomy assessment of the risk presented by climate change in the near future. But it also offers a withering takedown of how economists in particular have tended to think about the climate crisis, criticizing findings from several of the field’s experts by name, including a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.
“We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened,” the report concludes. It’s a stunning bit of cognitive dissonance from a bank that is doing so much to fuel the crisis. It also shows a growing push for a more grounded assessment of the crisis than mainstream economics has offered in recent decades….
Essentially an informational document, the report—written by U.K.-based JP Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray—reviews a battery of academic literature on climate change. It examines several predictions of climate change’s impact on gross domestic product, including economist Richard Tol’s 2018 survey of 26 different climate models—one of the more comprehensive recent works. While Tol has links to organizations that have cast doubt on the scientific consensus around the climate crisis, as his own research has, the findings listed are not especially controversial. But the JP Morgan Chase report authors push back on those and other prominent predictions. “Most likely,” the authors conclude, “these estimates of the income and wealth effects of unmitigated climate change are far too small.”……..
The JP Morgan report doesn’t include clear recommendations for what the company’s own risk analysts should do with the information presented. “Most likely,” it states, “business as usual will be the path that policymakers follow in the years ahead”—something its authors say “opens the earth to a greater likelihood of a catastrophic outcome” than previously estimated. The report does not discuss the bank’s support for polluting industries, which have spent handsomely to block climate action at virtually every level of government.
“It is depressing that JP Morgan are trying to evade responsibility for this thorough and useful report that restates what climate scientists, Greta Thunberg, and Extinction Rebellion alike have been saying for some time now: that our very future as a species is at stake,” Rupert Read, who originally obtained the report, wrote in an email. “It would be so much better if they owned up fully to what is in this report. But then, that would of course require them to completely transform their business model.”
All that dissonance may be starting to wear thin. Ahead of its annual investor day Tuesday and under persistent pressure from Gwich’in Steering Committee and green groups, JP Morgan Chase said it would stop any new financing of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and expand restrictions on financing coal projects. https://newrepublic.com/article/156657/planet-screwed-says-bank-screwed-planet
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USA fails to stop G20 finance ministers and central bank governors warning on climate change
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Sources told the news agency that the statement of priorities included the importance of examining the implications of global heating for financial stability, as part of the work of the G20’s Financial stability Board, the steering group for international banking industry rules. The language represented a compromise to overcome opposition from US officials at the first major meeting of Saudi Arabia’s year-long presidency of the G20, according to the sources. An attempt to include references to the downside risks for global growth posed by the climate crisis was dropped……. The International Monetary Fund included climate-related disasters in a list of the risks facing a highly fragile recovery in the global economy this year. However, the increasing focus comes as US officials resist naming global heating as an economic risk, following Trump’s move at the outset of his presidency to withdraw the world’s largest economy from the Paris climate accords. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/23/g20-sounds-alarm-over-climate-emergency |
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USA at G20 tried to stop any mention of climate change
US blocking mention of climate change in G20 statement, diplomats say Independent UK, ‘Oliver O’Connell, New York, 24 Feb 20,
1 day ago G20 diplomats say the US is against mentioning climate change in the communique of the world’s financial leaders.
A new draft of the joint statement shows the G20 considering including it as a risk factor to growth.
Finance ministers and central bankers from the world’s 20 largest economies are discussing the main challenges to the global economy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this weekend.
G20 sources told Reuters that the US was reluctant to accept language on climate change as a risk to the economy.
The US is represented at the meeting by treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin…….. G20 diplomats say the US is against mentioning climate change in the communique of the world’s financial leaders.
A new draft of the joint statement shows the G20 considering including it as a risk factor to growth. Finance ministers and central bankers from the world’s 20 largest economies are discussing the main challenges to the global economy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this weekend.
Climate denialists using bots on Twitter to get their message across
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Draft of Brown study says findings suggest ‘substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages’ Guardian, Oliver Milman in New York @olliemilman, Fri 21 Feb 2020 The social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise. An analysis of millions of tweets from around the period when Donald Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science. The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account…….. An analysis of millions of tweets from around the period when Donald Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science. The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account…….. Trump has consistently spread misinformation about the climate crisis, most famously calling it “bullshit” and a “hoax”, although more recently the US president has said he accepts the science that the world is heating up. Nevertheless, his administration has dismantled any major policy aimed at cutting planet-warming gases, including car emissions standards and restrictions on coal-fired power plants……. number of suspected bots that have consistently disparaged climate science and activists have large numbers of followers on Twitter. One that ranks highly on the Botometer score, @sh_irredeemable, wrote “Get lost Greta!” in December, in reference to the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg……. ohn Cook, an Australian cognitive scientist and co-author with Lewandowsky, said that bots are “dangerous and potentially influential”, with evidence showing that when people are exposed to facts and misinformation they are often left misled. “This is one of the most insidious and dangerous elements of misinformation spread by bots – not just that misinformation is convincing to people but that just the mere existence of misinformation in social networks can cause people to trust accurate information less or disengage from the facts,” Cook said. .. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise.ast |
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Huge rise predicted for Britain’s seas and tidal rivers
 Times 23rd Feb 2020, Britain should be preparing for its seas and tidal rivers to rise by up to 6½ ft in the next 80 years, according to the scientist in charge of protecting Holland against flooding and sea level change. Peter Glas, head of Holland’s Delta Programme, which oversees long-term flood risk management, will tell a UK conference that the rise in the level of theNorth Sea may accelerate sharply from 2050, potentially reaching 2 metres (6½ ft) by 2100. That is nearly double the Met Office’s worst-case
predictions. It follows research at Holland’s Deltares centre, commissioned by the Delta Programme, into the impact of rising sea levels on northern Europe. “The rise could potentially accelerate with effect from 2050, entailing far-reaching consequences,” said Glas’s latest report to the Dutch government, which he will cite at this week’s Floodex conference in Peterborough. The Delta report added that effects of “the more rapid melting of Antarctic ice sheets” had not yet been incorporated into the programme’s predictions. |
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1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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