The Carbon Brief Profile: South Korea
COUNTRY PROFILES 6 April 2020 The Carbon Brief Profile: South Korea, 6 Apr 20,
As part of its series on how key emitters are responding to climate change, Carbon Brief looks at South Korea’s attempts to balance its high-emitting industries with its “green”aspirations.
the nation has drawn criticism for not always matching its green-growth rhetoric with action. Proposed phaseouts of coal and nuclear have been prompted primarily by concerns about air pollution and safety,as opposed to climate.
With an election approaching, many environmental groups joined together to call for more action from the major parties, which they claimed have prepared virtually “no countermeasures” against climate change.
In March, a group of Korean youth activists sued the government over its climate framework, which they deemed insufficient to meet the nation’s Paris Agreement targets.
According to a 2019 study by the Pew Research Centre, South Koreans place climate change highest in their list of potential national threats…….. Recent polling suggests 77% of voters would vote for political parties promising to respond to the threat of climate change in the general election……
This year, nations are expected – though not strictly required – under the Paris Agreement to come forward with updated plans that scale up the ambition of their original target. South Korea has yet to indicate whether it intends to meet this expectation. …….
Finally, South Korea is home to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), a UN body based in the “international business district” of Songdo, near the north-western city of Incheon. The fund is the main mechanism set up for mobilising $100bn every year “by 2020” from richer countries to finance climate mitigation and adaptation in the developing world…….
‘Green growth’ policies
In keeping with South Korea’s rapid industrialisation over the past few decades, the nation’s approach to climate and energy is best summarised by the principle of “green growth”.
Upon the inauguration of President Lee Myung-bak in 2008, he made it clear his overarching philosophy would be based on clean-energy technologies and environmentally friendly development in order to fuel long-term economic growth. In a speech at the time, he said:
“If we make up our minds before others and take action, we will be able to lead green growth and take the initiative in creating a new civilisation.”
This was reflected in the flagship Framework Act on Low Carbon, Green Growth (pdf), which was passed in 2009 and provided the legislative framework for emissions targets and renewable energy expansion, as well as the basis for a carbon trading system.
A five-year plan implemented the same year saw South Korea commit 2% of its GDP through to 2013 to invest in the green economy, which included investing in renewable energy, smart grids and green homes.
According to the World Bank, this focus on green investment is partly credited with the nation’s early recovery from the global financial crisis…….
there are concerns that this system still does not make it attractive enough for private entities to invest in renewables, with insufficient subsidies for solar and wind while coal is still being incentivised .
Another issue with the current Korean system concerns the electricity grid, with renewable energy facilities facing delays in being connected due to inadequate substations.
The government-owned KEPCO controls the grid and has a monopoly on electricity generation. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has identified restructuring of KEPCO as a key recommendation for energy reform.
There are also concerns in South Korea that expanding renewable capacity only benefits foreign companies that already dominate these markets. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy issued a press release reassuring people that reports of Chinese companies dominating the Korean solar market were “not true”.
Despite all these issues, the SFOC has identified the “biggest problem” facing renewable expansion as conflicts arising with local communities, when trying to construct new renewable facilities in their vicinity.
Conservatives politicians and news outlets, often with a pro-nuclear slant, have been blamed for “tarnishing” the reputation of renewables by stating that solar projects in particular are the cause of “environmental destruction”. According to SFOC:
“As a result, there is an increasing number of local governments autonomously establishing ordinances and rules restricting the sites for solar PV and wind power.”
Nuclear
Around a quarter of South Korea’s electricity comes from its 24 nuclear reactors, placing it “among the world’s most prominent nuclear energy countries”, according to the World Nuclear Association. Its nuclear power output is the fifth largest in the world…….
However, the nation has been shaken by two events that have, ultimately, left the future of South Korea’s
First came the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Most reactors in South Korea are located close nuclear energy looking highly uncertain.together, often near major population centres, and the accident in neighbouring Japan galvanised anti-nuclear movements across the country who feared a similar event closer to home.
The impact of the disaster on South Korea is reflected in the country’s NDC, which states:
“Given the decreased level of public acceptance following the Fukushima accident, there are now limits to the extent that Korea can make use of nuclear energy, one of the major mitigation measures available to it.”
Next, the industry was hit by a major scandal in which 100 people were indicted for corruption after fake safety certificates were issued at nuclear facilities.
This “mafia-style behaviour”, as one government official put it, led to several reactors being shut down so that cabling could be replaced after it emerged it had received certification through the corrupt operation.
The culmination of this was President Moon and his Democratic Party coming to power in 2017 with a pledge to phase out nuclear energy in South Korea.
While new reactors are still being constructed, Moon said they would not extend the operation of ageing reactors which will be decommissioned in the 2020s and 2030s. This is in line with “deliberative polling” conducted by the government to give a sense of the Korean population’s views on nuclear energy.
Analysis by SFOC found that South Korean public financial institutions have provided around $17bn (£13.7bn) of financial support for coal-power projects since 2008, around half of which was for schemes overseas.The group concludes that without this “easily available financing…such proliferation of coal-fired power plants would not have been possible”.
Another report by Carbon Tracker questions the economic viability of South Korean coal power, identifying the country as having “the highest stranded asset risk in the world” due to market structures which effectively guarantee high returns for coal.
It concludes that South Korea “risks losing the low-carbon technology race” by remaining committed to coal. A newer report from the thinktank says it is already cheaper to invest in new renewables than build new coal in South Korea and it will be cheaper to invest in new renewables than to operate existing coal in 2022. ………
https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-profile-south-korea
Despite propaganda from nuclear/coal front group, NOW IS the time to talk about climate change
This is exactly the time to be talking about climate change, Joel Makower, Chairman & Executive Editor, Green Biz Group, Green Biz, March 31, 2020 – I rarely get exasperated from reading environmental business media, but a quote last week in a Bloomberg article about sustainability and the U.S. economic crisis got me headed in that direction.
The quote came from Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a research group whose founders, self-described environmentalists, have made a career out of being gadflies — for example, arguing in favor of nuclear power and natural gas, arguing against putting a price on carbon emissions and claiming that there’s no real limit to the earth’s carrying capacity, or that energy efficiency doesn’t work because of something called the “rebound effect.”
I’ll leave it to you to proceed down the wormhole of websites critiquing the group’s analyses. Suffice to say that the Breakthrough Institute has become a darling of the anti-science, pro-pollution conservative right, which frequently cites its work in order to attack environmentalists and climate scientists and their fact-based policy recommendations.
Here’s last week’s quote, in reference to the notion of integrating climate measures into congressional appropriations as we rebuild the economy reeling from the coronavirus pandemic:
…… he says. “It would be tone-deaf to talk about climate change now.”
It’s a specious ploy often used by conservatives. Following a mass shooting, it’s not the right time to talk about gun control. Following a hurricane, it’s not the right time to talk about climate-exacerbated weather events. Following the police shooting of an unarmed black man, it’s not the right time to talk about race relations and inequality.
Of course, later on, when it’s presumably “the right time,” the public’s fickle attention likely has moved on to other front-burner topics.
Just because a problem isn’t in the news doesn’t mean it somehow has been solved. All of the above challenges remain, pandemic or not. And, to varying degrees, they all need to be kept alive, even amid other pressing priorities.
So, Nordhaus is dead wrong: This is exactly the right time to be talking about climate change.
In fact, we need to be talking unapologetically about climate, the clean economy, renewable energy, resilient food systems, sustainable mobility, the circular economy and the Sustainable Development Goals with more vigor than ever…….https://www.greenbiz.com/article/exactly-time-be-talking-about-climate-change
The pandemic is being used by Trump administration to help polluting industries
Trump Administration is using a pandemic to hand out gifts to its favorite polluters
The Trump Administration is using COVID-19 to further its dismantling of environmental protection. Environmental Health News, Peter Dykstra 5 Apr 20, “……… far away from the justifiably wall-to-wall coverage of COVID-19, the Trump Administration is unrepentantly using the pandemic to hand out gifts to its favorite polluters.COVID-19 news deeply saddens me. This other stuff infuriates me.
Last week, the American Petroleum Institute (API) sent a 10-page letter to the White House requesting a loosening of regulations, citing the COVID-19-related crash in oil and gas prices and the threat it posed to the fossil fuel industry. The White House, via Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler, granted their wish list and then some.
Past talk warning against the feds “picking winners and losers” in energy went by the boards.
Five days later, Wheeler issued an order that gave API even more than it asked for, calling for a suspension of any enforcement of EPA regulations if any company, fossil fuel-based or not, or local government can prove that COVID-19 was the cause of its failure to comply.
Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, now the President and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the move “an open license to pollute.”
The EPA required companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. No more. Because coronavirus.
Wheeler also took the heat off entities forced by court-sanctioned consent decrees to fix pollution problems. Because coronavirus.
EPA cut frackers a break on wastewater discharges. Because coronavirus………. https://www.ehn.org/trump-epa-pollution-coronavirus-2645628019.html
Wildfires in Ukraine: authorities say that those near Chernobyl are now extinguished
Ukraine Says Fire Extinguished Near Contaminated Site Of Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, Emergency authorities in Ukraine say there are no signs of any fire still burning in the uninhabited exclusion zone around the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant after firefighters mobilized to put out a blaze.
Radio Free Europe, 5 Apr 20, The country’s State Emergency Service said early on April 5 that background radiation levels were “within normal limits.”
More than 130 firefighters, three aircraft, and 21 vehicles were deployed on April 4 to battle the fire, which was said to have burned around 20 hectares (50 acres) in the long-vacated area near where an explosion at a Soviet nuclear plant in 1986 sent a plume of radioactive fallout high into the air and across swaths of Europe.
Fire and safety crews were said to be inspecting the area overnight on April 4-5 to eliminate any threat from sites where there was still smoldering.
The blaze required seven airdrops of water, officials said.
There was no threat to settlements, the State Emergency Service said.
Firefighters battle forest blazes near Chernobyl nuclear site
 Ukraine battles forest fires near Chernobyl https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/forest-fire-chernobyl-boosts-radiation-level-69983859
Ukrainian says firefighters are laboring to put out two forest blazes in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear power station that was evacuated because of radioactive contamination after the 1986 explosion at the plant By The Associated Press 6 April 2020 MINSK, Belarus — Ukrainian firefighters labored into Sunday night trying to put out two forest blazes in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear power station, which was evacuated because of radioactive contamination after the 1986 explosion at the plant.
Ukraine’s emergencies service said one of the fires, covering about five hectares (12 acres), had been localized. It said the other fire was about 20 hectares (50 acres). Earlier Sunday, the head of the state ecological inspection service, Yehor Firsov, said the fires had spread to about 100 hectares (250 acres). The discrepancy in sizes could not immediately be resolved. Firsov said radiation levels at the fire were substantially higher than normal. But the emergencies service said radiation levels in the capital of Kyiv, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south, were within norms. The fires were within the 2,600-square-kilometer (1,000-square-mile) Chernobyl Exclusion Zone established after the 1986 disaster at the plant that sent a cloud of radioactive fallout over much of Europe. The zone is largely unpopulated, although about 200 people have remained despite orders to leave. |
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Radiation spike as forest fire hits Chernobyl nuclear zone
Radiation spike as forest fire hits Chernobyl nuclear zone https://www.deccanherald.com/international/world-news-politics/radiation-spike-as-forest-fire-hits-chernobyl-nuclear-zone-821778.html AFP, Kiev, APR 05 2020, AFP, Kiev, APR 05 2020, 21:04 IST UPDATED: APR 05 2020, 21:31 IST AFP/file photo Ukrainian authorities on Sunday reported a spike in radiation levels in the restricted zone around Chernobyl, scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident, c aused by a forest fire.
To get a perspective – the climate crisis is a greater catastrophe than Coronavirus
While we fixate on coronavirus, Earth is hurtling towards a catastrophe worse than the dinosaur extinction, The Conversation, Andrew Glikson
Earth and paleo-climate scientist, 3 Apr 20, At several points in the history of our planet, increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have caused extreme global warming, prompting the majority of species on Earth to die out.
In the past, these events were triggered by a huge volcanic eruption or asteroid impact. Now, Earth is heading for another mass extinction – and human activity is to blame.
I am an Earth and Paleo-climate scientist and have researched the relationships between asteroid impacts, volcanism, climate changes and mass extinctions of species.
My research suggests the current growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions is faster than those which triggered two previous mass extinctions, including the event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The world’s gaze may be focused on COVID-19 right now. But the risks to nature from human-made global warming – and the imperative to act – remain clear………
My research suggests the current growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions is faster than those which triggered two previous mass extinctions, including the event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The world’s gaze may be focused on COVID-19 right now. But the risks to nature from human-made global warming – and the imperative to act – remain clear……
The next mass extinction has begun
Current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are not yet at the levels seen 55 million and 65 million years ago. But the massive influx of carbon dioxide means the climate is changing faster than many plant and animal species can adapt.
A major United Nations report released last year warned around one million animal and plant species were threatened with extinction. Climate change was listed as one of five key drivers.
The report said the distributions of 47% of land-based flightless mammals, and almost 25% of threatened birds, may already have been negatively affected by climate change.
Many researchers fear the climate system is approaching a tipping point – a threshold beyond which rapid and irreversible changes will occur. This will create a cascade of devastating effects.
There are already signs tipping points have been reached. For example, rising Arctic temperatures have led to major ice melt, and weakened the Arctic jet stream – a powerful band of westerly winds.
This allows north-moving warm air to cross the polar boundary, and cold fronts emanating from the poles to intrude south into Siberia, Europe and Canada.
A shift in climate zones is also causing the tropics to expand and migrate toward the poles, at a rate of about 56 to 111 kilometres per decade. The tracks of tropical and extra-tropical cyclones are likewise shifting toward the poles. Australia is highly vulnerable to this shift…….
Earth’s next mass extinction is avoidable – if carbon dioxide emissions are dramatically curbed and we develop and deploy technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But on the current trajectory, human activity threatens to make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable – a planetary tragedy of our own making. https://theconversation.com/while-we-fixate-on-coronavirus-earth-is-hurtling-towards-a-catastrophe-worse-than-the-dinosaur-extinction-130869
Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow postponed until 2021
Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow postponed until 2021, Crucial UN conference will be delayed until next year as a result of the coronavirus crisis, Guardian Jillian Ambrose Energy correspondent 2 Apr 2020 The UN climate talks due to be held in Glasgow later this year have been postponed as governments around the world struggle to halt the spread of coronavirus.
The most important climate negotiations since the Paris agreement in 2015 were scheduled to take place this November to put countries back on track to avoid climate breakdown. They will now be pushed back to 2021.
A statement from the UN on Wednesday night confirmed that the meeting of over 26,000 attendees would be delayed until next year. It said new dates for the conference would be decided in due course……. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/01/uk-likely-to-postpone-cop26-un-climate-talks-glasgow-coronavirus
Pandemic is distracting the world from an even bigger emergency – global heating
Beneath the virus lurks a bigger emergency, but the world is distracted from the climate threat, SMH, Bob Carr 2 Apr 20, What did our battered old planet do to bring this run of wretchedly bad luck? Just before the 2008 Wall Street disaster, Washington was about to force emitters to pay for the privilege of dumping carbon waste in the upper atmosphere. Congress approved a cap and trade scheme so its economy could trade its way to a low carbon future. In a similar spirit the Rudd government was legislating its own carbon trading model.
Last month the temperature on the Antarctic peninsular hit 65 degrees Fahrenheit, beating all previous records. For the globe, 2019 was the second hottest year on record, and the hottest without the contribution of a big El Nino.
The coming decade may be our last chance to contain the chaos driven by humankind’s craziest experiment: the idea that carbon can be stored in the thin filigree of air around the planet. The Paris Agreement provides a road map and the falling price of renewables a market impulse. ….
In the middle of the coronavirus crisis, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, to their credit, still find space to record the conclusion of leading reef scientist, Terry Hughes, that there is a third major bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef now under way. This follows the bleachings of 2016 and 2017. This is every bit a climate event as were the mega fires over Christmas.
Yet the irrevocable loss of healthy coral may not galvanise the way fires did…..
Meanwhile, the pandemic emergency may kill off the Glasgow conference on climate planned for November. The UN event is aimed at averting runaway climate change by keeping the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. ……
if the breaking up of permafrost in the Arctic circle assumes an extra ferocity. That would release plumes of methane, 30 times more lethal at trapping heat than carbon, but on a scale to blow apart every calibration of how fast climate is shifting.
For Australia, Black Swan climate events could include a cyclone beyond what we have seen before, hitting the Queensland coast. Experts say there is still enough unburnt bush to give us a fire season as bad as the last, even next season – if we suffer the same malevolent mix of heat, low humidity and strong wind……
Beneath news of virus and slump there simmers an even bigger story. The planet keeps warming. And there’s no guarantee the rate may not pick up alarmingly. ……https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/beneath-the-virus-lurks-a-bigger-emergency-but-the-world-is-distracted-from-the-climate-threat-20200328-p54et4.html
Trump doesn’t ‘get it’ -climate change as the next great engine for the next pandemic
With the Coronavirus, It’s Again Trump vs. Mother Nature, The president’s failure to understand his limits is very costly. NYT, By Thomas L. Friedman, March 31, 2020
- Today’s news quiz: What do these data points have in common?Jan. 22: President Trump is asked by CNBC: “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” Trump answers: “No. Not at all. And we’re, we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. … It’s — going to be just fine.”
Jan. 31: Moving to counter the spreading coronavirus outbreak, Trump bars entry by most foreign nationals who had recently visited China…….
Nov. 26, 2018: CNN reports that Trump “dismissed a study produced by his own administration … and more than 300 leading climate scientists, warning of the potentially catastrophic impact of climate change.” Asked why, Trump told reporters, “I don’t believe it.” Asked if he read it, Trump said, “some.”
March 30, 2020: This newspaper reports that Trump completed plans to scrap Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards that limited climate-warming tailpipe pollution — a move that will “allow cars on
American roads to emit nearly a billion tons more carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the vehicles.”
What’s the common theme? We have a president who is enamored with markets but ignorant of Mother Nature, and we have paid a steep, steep price for that — and will pay an even bigger price when it comes to climate change, if Trump remains in charge……..
there is one huge difference between the coronavirus and climate change: Climate change doesn’t “peak” — and then flatten out and then maybe dissipate or be permanently prevented by vaccine — so normal life resumes.
No, when the Greenland and Antarctic ice melts, it’s gone, and we humans will have to contend with the implications of sea level rise, mass movements of populations and various kinds of extreme weather — wetter wets, hotter hots and drier dries — forever.
There is no herd immunity to climate change. There are only endless impacts on the herd.
Thinking about climate change, even in the middle of this pandemic, is actually useful in a number of ways. For starters, they follow similar natural laws and have common mitigation strategies………
Finally, epidemiologists will tell you that climate change may well be the next great engine for the next pandemic — only this virus could easily be carried by mosquitoes, which, because of warmer temperatures in the global north, are able to migrate up from places they’ve never migrated from before.
For all these reasons, as we invest in infrastructure to stimulate our economy out of this corona crisis, we should be doing it to make our society more resilient against both pandemics and climate change. ……
Now that we have tasted Mother Nature’s wrath in the form of both Covid-19 and climate change, let’s get her on our side. She’s as happy to help as to destroy. Let’s use chemistry, biology and physics, not to mention sun and wind, to create the vaccines and power systems that immunize us from viruses and weather extremes — and not double down on bad habits that will only make us sick again. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/covid-trump-climate-change.html
The Climate Crisis Will Be Just as Shockingly Abrupt as the Coronavirus Pandemic
The Climate Crisis Will Be Just as Shockingly Abrupt https://newrepublic.com/article/157078/climate-crisis-will-just-shockingly-abrupt The coronavirus isn’t a reason to put climate policy on hold. It’s a warning of the calamities ahead., By MELODY SCHREIBER, March 27, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has reshaped the way we live, work, and interact in a matter of weeks. It has also shown that governments are able—and in many cases are expected—to take swift, significant action on crises. “Under these extraordinary circumstances, there can be quite decisive action from governance and policy that changes the way we’re all living day to day,” Lenton said. “It is possible to change large-scale patterns of human behavior, pretty quickly.”
The question is whether governments, and voters, can appreciate the true urgency of the task. In reality, the climate crisis cannot be solved incrementally, Lenton said, because it’s taken too long to spur action: Many warming-related changes are already underway. Global greenhouse gas emissions must be dramatically reduced and eventually eliminated. “If we’re going to avoid the worst of bad climate tipping points, then we’re going to need to find some positive tipping points in society and ourselves to transform the way we live—in a generation—to a more sustainable but also perhaps a more flourishing kind of future,” Lenton said.
Pandemics like this are expected to rise as the climate changes. The SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the disease known as Covid-19, scientists suspect, may have originated in a wild animal, like a bat, and transferred through an intermediate animal to people. Zoonotic spillovers like these, as well as illnesses carried by mosquitoes, ticks, and other animals, will likely increase on a hotter planet. It’s not just because more people are pressing into areas where wildlife lives; as their habitats change in new climate conditions, more animals are adapting to new environments and seeking relief in places where people live, thus increasing the chance of contact between people and animals.
“We are really messing up with the natural world, and with the climate system, and things like this can be expected to happen more often,” Otto said. “It’s one reason to think that climate change is actually a permanent threat and we have to think of fixing the whole system, not only the economy.”
The coronavirus is a real and urgent threat. But there’s also a pressing danger in failing to address climate change in policies and funding, both now and in the future. What’s happening to the planet, experts agree, isn’t going to stop just because we’re dealing with another crisis, and this is no time to ease up on the climate fight. In fact, because of the ways climate change contributes to poor health, it makes action even more urgent.
Melody Schreiber is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. @m_scribe
Countries may use coronavirus crisis to rein in climate commitments: Japan a case in point
Campaigners attack Japan’s ‘shameful’ climate plans release
Proposals criticised amid fears countries may use coronavirus crisis to rein in commitments, Guardian, Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent 30 Mar 20, Japan has laid out its plans to tackle greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris agreement in the run-up to UN climate talks this year, becoming the first large economy to do so.
But its proposals were criticised by campaigners as grossly inadequate, amid fears the Covid-19 crisis could prompt countries to try to water down their climate commitments.
The UK, which will host the talks, hopes every country will produce renewed targets on curbing emissions and achieving net zero carbon by 2050.
New commitments are needed to achieve the Paris goals of holding temperature rises to no more than 2C, and ideally 1.5C, above pre-industrial levels, as on current national targets the world would far exceed those limits.
Japan’s carbon targets – known as its nationally determined contribution (NDC) in the UN jargon – as announced on Monday morning are almost unchanged from its commitments made in 2015 towards the Paris accord, however.
The country’s target of a 26% reduction in emissions by 2030, based on 2013 levels, is rated as “highly insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker analysis, meaning that if all targets were at this level, temperature rises would exceed 3C.
The country, the world’s fifth biggest emitter and third biggest economy, is one of the only developed countries still building new coal-fired power stations, although there are signs it may hold back……
Campaigners fear the coronavirus pandemic will be seen by some countries as a way to weaken their commitment to the Paris accord and present less stringent targets instead of the strong cuts needed.
“Japan should not slow down climate actions even amid the Covid-19 global fights, and must revisit and strengthen this plan swiftly in order to be in line with the Paris agreement,” said Kimiko Hirata, the international director of the Kiko Network, a climate group in Japan……
Environmental regulations and climate commitments have come under attack in the context of the coronavirus crisis. Under Donald Trump’s administration in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back key regulations including car efficiency standards. In the EU, carmakers wrote to the European commission last week to demand a loosening of requirements on them to cut carbon.
There is still scope for Japan to revise its targets. Other countries have yet to submit their detailed NDCs, but several – including the UK and the EU, and more than 70 smaller economies – made public their intention to reach net zero carbon by 2050, at last year’s UN climate talks in Madrid……. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/30/campaigners-attack-japan-shameful-climate-plans-release
Some politicians realising that climate change needs dramatic action, too
FT 30th March 2020 As the coronavirus pandemic has sent governments scrambling to respond, many politicians have drawn a parallel with another global threat: climate change. “We have to act dramatically, boldly, if we’re going to save lives in this country and around the world,” Bernie Sanders, one of the Democratic presidential contenders, said recently. “I look at climate
change in the exact same way.”
Yet while the principles may be the same, the politics of the two pressing challenges are very different. The analogies between the coronavirus and climate change are easy to understand. The radical measures adopted to fight the pandemic look like precedents for addressing the potentially greater danger from climate change.
Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, has suggested that the need for widespread intervention by governments to
prevent economic collapse should be seen as a “historic opportunity” to
direct energy investment into technologies that reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. Large-scale investment to support solar and wind power,
batteries, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage would “bring the twin
benefits of stimulating economies and accelerating clean energy
transitions,” he wrote earlier this month.
https://www.ft.com/content/13ce469c-68fa-11ea-a6ac-9122541af204
Coronavirus Shows Us What Our Future Could Look Like During Climate Crisis
Coronavirus Shows Us What Our Future Could Look Like During Climate Crisis, BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout, March 29, 2020 The COVID-19 
pandemic has rapidly been absorbed into our collective consciousness, remaking the fabric of our lives. Suddenly, millions are sheltering in place, strangers have started wishing each other well when exiting grocery stores, people have stopped touching their faces and shelves that are normally stocked with bleach and hand sanitizer are barren.
For many, the looming sense of dread is a new sensation….
But for those of us who have lived in acute awareness of the reality of the climate crisis, the current state of pandemic dread feels awfully familiar — just a more imminent version of the dread about the climate that we have been feeling for years.
It’s a psychological phenomenon known informally in the climate community as climate anxiety, climate grief or eco-anxiety…….
Though the pandemic-panic that Mull and others have written on has been ongoing for the past few weeks, climate writers started opening up about their climate grief years ago. …….
But it’s not just psychological trauma that these two crises share — if you take the time to look, the similarities run wide and deep. These are twin worldwide crises that require global cooperation to defeat; they will ravage the way of life as we know it; they will affect, in one way or another, nearly every single person on Earth.
The economy as we know it — rather, as we knew it three months ago — will be a thing of the past if we let the climate crisis continue unmitigated…….
Economists are currently struggling to model all of the short-term effects of the pandemic, so many of those remain unknown. Climate researchers, however, have had much more time to model the future economic impacts of the climate crisis. By 2090, in the U.S. alone and under the same high emissions scenario, NCA researchers predict that costs from mortality due to extreme temperatures will total $141 billion a year, losses of coastal property will total $118 billion a year, and labor losses will cost $155 billion a year. That’s equivalent to a Hurricane Katrina every single year, just from lost labor.
The health care system, too, will be overwhelmed by the climate crisis, just as hospital beds are rapidly being filled by COVID-19 patients. In some places, the climate crisis has already given a preview of this: In 2018, record heat waves caused U.K. hospitals to utilize emergency procedures, when people were being sent to the hospital in such an overwhelming volume that ambulances had to line up outside.
Though COVID-19 is causing hospitals to fill up simultaneously nationwide, “climate-related events will be more limited in their spatial scale, but will be increasingly frequent over time,” says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. A heat wave in San Francisco won’t set the whole country ablaze, but it could overwhelm the local health care system.
The key difference between illness caused by a pandemic and the climate crisis, Dahl points out, is that it’s much easier to trace the illness caused by the former. “Things like hurricanes and heat waves and wildfires have always occurred,” she says, but, “to some extent, we know that we are amping them up by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”
This is likely, in part, why the federal government has quickly pivoted to action on COVID-19, while greenhouse gases have remained largely untouched by Congress for decades. While right-wing media and politicians denied the consequences of inaction on the virus just weeks ago, they have quickly had to change their tune as the spread of the virus has become undeniable. Whereas with long-term, gradual change, it’s easy for deniers to blame such things as the severity of the bushfires in Australia on anything but increasingly hot and arid conditions caused by climate change.
The ruling class has also had less motivation to address the climate crisis because the people suffering the most are, disproportionately, already marginalized. Poor, Black and health-compromised people are and will be the hardest hit by both crises — and some are already being affected by both at once. Air pollution is continually one of the most pronounced issues of environmental justice, and physicians have said those with continual exposure to air pollution are likely to be more vulnerable to the effects of coronavirus……..
“Coronavirus has made so clear that global issues can’t be easily categorized as just a health issue or just an environmental issue,” says says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They really encompass our broader economy and encompass or entire social systems and ways of life.” ….. https://truthout.org/articles/coronavirus-shows-us-what-our-future-could-look-like-during-climate-crisis/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=5e383daa-77a3-48e3-a6f5-f82b689f50fc
Action on Covid19 gives a lesson for action on climate change
Delay is deadly: what Covid-19 tells us 
about tackling the climate crisis https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/24/covid-19-climate-crisis-governments-coronavirus, Jonathan WattsRightwing governments have denied the problem and been slow to act. With coronavirus and the climate, this costs lives.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought urgency to the defining political question of our age: how to distribute risk. As with the climate crisis, neoliberal capitalism is proving particularly ill-suited to this.
Like global warming, but in close-up and fast-forward, the Covid-19 outbreak shows how lives are lost or saved depending on a government’s propensity to acknowledge risk, act rapidly to contain it, and share the consequences.
On these matters, competence and ideology overlap. Governments willing to intervene have been more effective at stemming the virus than laissez-faire capitalists. The further right the government, the more inclined it is to delay action and offload blame elsewhere. International comparisons suggest this could be making infection and death rates steeper.
Take the US, where Donald Trump is only now acknowledging the seriousness of the pandemic after weeks of claiming fears were exaggerated. Until recently, his government put more money into shielding the oil industry than providing adequate testing kits. He reportedly ordered officials to downplay early warnings because he did not want bad news in an election year. The US now has one of the fastest rising numbers of new cases in the world.
In Brazil, the ultra-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is equally reckless. He claimed the risks of coronavirus were overblown, until 17 of his aides and security detail tested positive after a trip to the US. Last weekend, he ignored his own government’s advice and chose to shake hands and pose cheek-to-cheek for selfies at a mass rally of supporters. As cases and deaths surge, his support has plummeted.
In the UK, Boris Johnson acknowledged the risk, but did little about it. Though not as extreme in his denial as Trump or Bolsonaro, Johnson’s government first dithered, then dabbled with a policy of “herd-immunity”that was reportedly driven by Dominic Cummings’ desire to protect the economy, even if it cost pensioners’ lives. The UK has since shifted tack and enforced a lockdown, but its controls are still haphazard. Last week, daily deaths in the UK were reckoned to be on a steeper upward curve than Italy was at the same stage.
By contrast, more interventionist governments – generally but not exclusively those which are centrist or leftwing – have acted more quickly and shared the burden of risk more widely. Norway, Denmark and Sweden already appear to have flattened the coronavirus curve. Spain and France implemented lockdowns at around 200 deaths, which the UK and US have far surpassed.
In Asia, China initially attempted to hide the problem from the public when the virus emerged in Wuhan, then mobilised huge public resources to enforce a strict lockdown and provide extra hospital beds. South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand also appear to have turned the corner thanks to different combinations of extensive testing, quarantine measures and public health education.
Other factors are at play. Asian countries with prior experience of the Sars epidemic appear to have been better prepared. Italy, one of the worst affected countries, has one of the world’s oldest populations. In Japan’s case, the relatively flat curve of confirmed cases may also be a result of the government’s unwillingness to do widespread testing because it could jeopardise the Olympics.
Similarly, the relatively low number of cases in the global south has raised hopes that warmer weather might slow the disease – but this is far from certain. A comparatively low number of coronavirus cases could be the result of a lag caused by distance from the origin of the disease, relatively lower levels of international traffic, and fewer resources for testing.
This pandemic has amplified the importance of assessing and controlling risk before it gets out of hand. But the political champions of the neoliberal right, such as Trump and Bolsonaro, are more inclined to deny and delay, as climate politics have shown us in recent years.
When it comes to a pandemic like Covid-19, that position is untenable. No leader can deny the science, nor can they endlessly delay action as they have done on global heating. Muddling through until the next election is not an option; leaders will be judged on deaths next week, not emissions reductions in 2050.
The demographics are also completely different. Unlike the climate crisis, the virus predominantly threatens the elderly – the right’s core support group – rather than millennials. So far, the worst affected regions are also closer to the centre of economic power: the cool industrialised north rather than the warmer developing south (though the latter may suffer more in the future due to weaker healthcare systems).
For the right, this makes the pandemic a greater political threat than the climate crisis has ever been. Unless they can quickly get on top of the disease, they will lose any claim to being champions of national security. It is entirely possible that the effects of this pandemic could be one of the most catastrophic failures of free-market capitalism.
This should also be a lesson for the left. If state intervention and scientific advice is effective in dealing with the virus, the same principles should be applied more aggressively towards the still more apocalyptic threats of climate disruption and the collapse of nature. Until now, the left has recognised these dangers, but done little to act on them because economic growth has always taken precedence.
The pandemic has proved that delays are deadly and expensive. If we are to avoid a cascade of future crises, governments must think beyond a return to business as usual. Our conception of what is “normal” will have to change. We’ll need to invest in natural life-supporting systems such as a stable climate, fresh air and clean water. In the past, those goals have been dismissed as unrealistic or expensive, but recent weeks have shown how quickly the political compass can shift.
First though, we need to accept – and share – risk. Instead of deferring risks to future generations, weaker populations and natural systems, governments need to transform risks into responsibilities we all bear. The longer we hesitate, the fewer resources we will have at our disposal, and the more risk we will have to divide.
• Jonathan Watts is the Guardian’s global environment editor
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