Major Australian companies under the gun from investors over carbon emissions

Twelve major Australian companies are being targeted over greenhouse emissions by a coterie of global investors who speak for $US32 trillion ($A45.11 trillion) and have already won a fight with the world’s largest commodity trader, Glencore.

Some of the world's biggest investors are taking
on pollution among industrial giants. 

Glencore on Thursday announced it would cap its coal production at 2019 levels, despite spending $US3.5 billion ($4.92 billion) on coal expansion in recent years. The move came after it locked horns with Climate Action 100+, the outfit fighting the greenhouse battles of more than 300 global investors.

Now Climate Action 100+ is hunting more big corporate game, including some of the biggest household names in Australia, in pursuit of its emissions reductions ambitions.

Read the story from The New Daily by Rod Myer - “Major Australian companies under the gun from investors over carbon emissions.”

Fossil fuel emissions hit record high after unexpected growth: Global Carbon Budget 2017

Global greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels and industry are on track to grow by 2% in 2017, reaching a new record high of 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to the 2017 Global Carbon Budget, released today.

The rise follows a remarkable three-year period during which global CO₂ emissions barely grew, despite strong global economic growth.

But this year’s figures suggest that the keenly anticipated global peak in emissions – after which greenhouse emissions would ultimately begin to decline – has yet to arrive.

The Global Carbon Budget, now in its 12th year, brings together scientists and climate data from around the world to develop the most complete picture available of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Read the piece on The Conversation - “Fossil fuel emissions hit record high after unexpected growth: Global Carbon Budget 2017.”

Coal smoke and mirrors reflect poorly on what's really happening

See if you can pick it. The economy-wide plan calls for a halt to new coal-fired generators and a tripling of renewable energy generation within five years to deliver 175GW of green power in a bid to clear the air and curb sky-rocketing greenhouse emissions.

Workers take break at a coal wholesale
market in Mumbai, India.

South Australia? Denmark? China even? No. It's India.

But isn't India hungry for as much Australian coal as it can get with one of its companies, Adani, developing the world's largest coal mine in Queensland's Galilee Basin?

Yes, but that is only part of the India picture.

Read Mark Kenny’s comments in today’s Melbourne Age - “Coal smoke and mirrors reflect poorly on what's really happening.”

A degree by degree explanation of global warming

Global warming,
Our future!

Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight the concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global rise of between 0.5 and 1C.

A shift of a single degree is barely perceptible to human skin, but it’s not human skin we’re talking about. It’s the planet; and an average increase of one degree across its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes.

Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great feat of imagination.

Read the Global Warming, Our Future story - “A degree by degree explanation of what will happen when the earth warms.”

Climate myopia risks bringing on the 'sixth extinction'

Climate myopia causes us to lose
sight of species extinction

The immense challenge of climate change has caused myopia among a lot of politicians, sending them into a self-destructive state of denial.

More quietly, though, that immensity has triggered another kind of myopia, this one among conservationists. In focusing on the staggering planetary impacts of greenhouse emissions, they are losing sight of the other ways that human beings lay a heavy hand on the planet. In particular, they are paying too little attention to the true causes of (and potential solutions to) the loss of species around the world – a massive die-off often referred to as ‘the sixth extinction’.

Read the 1000-word essay on Aeon by freelance writer, William Funk - “We are missing our chance to stop the sixth mass extinction.”

'Wrong on both counts' - David Spratt

David Spratt.

It's taken a hundred years of human-caused greenhouse emissions to push the global temperature up almost one degree Celsius (1C°), so another degree is still some time away. Right?  And there seems to have been a "pause" in warming over the last two decades, so getting to 2C° is going to take a good while, and we may have more time that we thought. Yes?

Wrong on both counts. 

The world could be 2C° warmer in as little as two decades, according to the leading US climate scientist and "hockey stick" author, Dr Michael E. Mann. Writing in Scientific American in March 2014 (with the maths explained here), Mann says that new calculations "indicate that if the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise to 2C° by 2036" and to avoid that threshold "nations will have to keep carbon dioxide levels below 405 parts per million", a level we have just about reached already.  Mann says the notion of a warming "pause" is false.

Read the David Spratt story on Climate Code Red  - “Two degrees of warming closer than you may think.”