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    Trump Administration Is Planting Loyalists in Biden Transition Meetings

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Administration Is Planting Loyalists in Biden Transition MeetingsSupporters of the president are monitoring many of the conversations between Biden teams and civil servants, chilling the flow of information.Trump allies have been joining and monitoring transition conversations at the Environmental Protection Agency.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBy More

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    Scott Morrison's climate language has shifted – but actions speak louder than words

    Scott Morrison’s language about Australia adopting an emissions reduction target of net zero by 2050, and about climate action more generally, is starting to warm up. The recent shift in the prime minister’s language invites two questions: is there a pivot under way, and is the shift real?The story so farWe know the Coalition’s history on climate policy. The Abbott government repealed Labor’s climate price, attempted to gut the Renewable Energy Target and abolish agencies driving a transition to low emissions energy. Morrison while treasurer brandished a lump of coal in the parliament, telling his opponents not to be “scared”. For much of this year, the Coalition has ignored persistent entreaties from environmentalists and major business groups to adopt a target of net zero emissions by 2050 (at the latest), and to use the economic recovery from Covid-19 to lock in the transition to low emissions. Morrison has never ruled out adopting a net zero target but has created the impression the government wasn’t interested – an impression reinforced by the government’s declaration that it would pursue a “gas-led recovery” after the pandemic.When and why did the language change?In the couple of weeks before the US presidential election on 3 November, Japan, China and South Korea adopted pledges taking them closer to net zero. Morrison also had a private conversation with the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, in which net zero was raised. Leaders were anticipating the likely election of Joe Biden. The Democrat had promised to end the backsliding of the Trump era and revitalise international climate negotiations, starting with bringing the US back into the Paris deal. Biden’s appointment of John Kerry as his climate envoy after winning the election is a further signal of seriousness. From the moment Biden was projected as the likely winner, Morrison’s language began to change. It became noticeably warmer. Morrison now says Australia wants to “reach net zero emissions as quickly as possible”.What about 2030?Before we get to 2050, Australia has an emissions reduction target for 2030, and the government will be under pressure to update that commitment with a higher level of ambition in the next round of international climate talks.Australia’s current target is a 26%-28% cut below 2005 levels, and the government has been planning to meet that (not very ambitious) target using carryover credits from the Kyoto period. Official government emissions projections released in December last year found Australia was not on track to meet the 2030 target unless it used the credits. Australia’s use of the Kyoto-era concessions has been strongly opposed by a large number of nations in international climate discussions, and experts say there is no legal basis for their use under the Paris agreement.After Biden’s victory, Morrison used a speech to business leaders to signal, hey presto, magic happens: Australia might not deploy the accounting trick to help meet the 2030 target after all. The prime minister said: “My ambition is that we will not need them and we are working to this as our goal, consistent with our record of over-delivering.” The hint from Morrison was that new projections, expected to be released in December, will show Australia is on track to meet the promised cut without carryovers.How can that happen?In part, because the Australian government has not been great at forecasting future emissions and tends to substantially change its estimates each year.Estimating future emissions is difficult. Each year, officials make assumptions about what will happen in 50 areas of the economy and come up with projections of how much will be emitted. For more than a decade, they have significantly over-estimated how much CO2 the country will emit in the years ahead before revising down the projections, sometimes significantly.The biggest miscalculation has been in electricity generation. Renewable energy has come into the grid much faster than the government expected – the national 2020 renewable energy target was met ahead of time, state targets in Victoria and Queensland have started to have an impact and the cost of solar and wind energy continues to drop, making investment more attractive. Officials also overestimated how much grid electricity the country would use – demand has fallen, in part due to nearly a third of homes now having solar panels.For reasons that are not clear, the official projections have assumed there would be less renewable energy in the system than the models used by the Australian Energy Market Operator, which runs the power grid. Addressing this will bring future projections down.There are other anomalies. The projections do not factor in drought, which in recent years has reduced emissions from agriculture as farmers have had to substantially reduce cattle and sheep numbers.Officials last year revised down the emissions forecast for the next decade by 344m tonnes. If a similar readjustment were to happen this year, it could lead to the government saying it was now on track to meet its modest 2030 target without the carryover credits.Has anything else changed that could affect the projections?The only new policy of note from the Morrison government this year has been its low-emissions technology roadmap. Released in September, it claimed developing five new technologies could “avoid” 250m tonnes of emissions a year by 2040.There was been no explanation of how that number was reached, and with the arguable exception of “clean” hydrogen, the government has not yet committed significant new funding to develop the technologies. It is unclear how this policy could reasonably change the projections in a meaningful way.More noteworthy is that, while the federal government has tried to slow the influx of solar and wind by neither continuing nor replacing the renewable energy target, the states keep stepping in to fill the gap.The big one is the NSW plan to underwrite 12 gigawatts of new wind and solar over the next decade – a development that will be banked by Canberra as “progress” in terms of projected national emissions reductions, but also criticised by the federal energy minister, Angus Taylor, because it might bring forward the closure of coal plants, which is of course a necessary development if you are a government now wanting to trumpet a downward trend in emissions. You know it makes sense.Would a lower emissions forecast be good news?Lower emissions would, of course, be great. But if it happens it isn’t something we should get too excited about, for two reasons.The first should be pretty obvious – the government will not have actually done anything yet. These are projections, not actual emissions.Before Covid-19 hit, Australia’s national emissions remained stubbornly flat under the Coalition, having dipped only about 2% in the more than six years since it was elected. They will be lower this year due to the pandemic, but that is not something the government can claim credit for, and it may not continue.The second reason is, as mentioned above, Australia’s target is nothing to crow about. It was a fudge from the beginning. The size of the cut – 26%-28% – was just a lift of the US commitment under the Paris agreement, with one notable difference – the Obama administration promised that target for 2025, while the Australian government pushed it back to 2030.Getting to net zero emissions, as scientists say is necessary, isn’t just about the end goal. It’s about how much you emit as you get there. To play its fair part in meeting the goals of the Paris agreement, Australia can only emit so much over the next three decades.Advice to the government in 2015 suggested playing its part would require a cut equivalent to between 45% and 65% by 2030. A recent analysis by analysts at the Climate Action Tracker found Australia’s fair share over that timeframe was 66%. The current target does not get the job done.So will the government do more on climate?It is not impossible, but it is far from guaranteed.There will be pressure on Australia over the next year not only to set a target of net zero by 2050, but to go further by 2030 than promised. The US under Biden will be required to set a new target for that date and other major countries are expected to do the same. Dropping the plan to use carryover credits will not be enough to satisfy their expectations.Apart from saying we can meet our (lowball) 2030 target without a Kyoto-era accounting trick (cue applause) there’s no sign at the moment the government is working up a higher 2030 target. It is working on a long-term climate strategy, which was a commitment under the Paris agreement. It was due this year, but has been pushed back to before the next major climate summit in Glasgow late next year. It is expected, but not guaranteed, to include modelling of what future action on climate will mean for Australia.There are a couple of other policies in the works. The government has dumped a long-promised electric vehicle strategy and replaced it with the promise of a “future fuels” plan on hydrogen, electric and bio-fuelled vehicles, but it is not expected to deliver significant new commitments to accelerate an emissions cut.Potentially more significantly, it has also said it will look at the safeguard mechanism, a Tony Abbott-era policy that was supposed to limit emissions from big industrial sites. So far, the scheme has barely justified its existence. Companies have mostly just been allowed to increase their CO2 limit, known as a baseline, and pollute more.Presumably recognising this is not sustainable, the government earlier this year said it accepted a recommendation from a review headed by former Business Council of Australia president Grant King that the mechanism should be changed so that companies would be rewarded for cutting emissions below their baseline if they were undertaking “transformative” projects and not just producing less or shutting down. It sounds like a step back towards carbon pricing – rewarding cuts and, if the Coalition can stomach it, finally penalising increases in emissions.Would the government go back to carbon pricing?Morrison should use his political capital and his internal authority to drive a substantive change – but he won’t want to lose his job over it. Part of what’s going on with Morrison’s shift in language is the prime minister testing how much he can get away with: how positive can he sound about emissions reduction before the right of the Liberal party starts having a tantrum, or before the National party has a public meltdown because someone has whispered coal is not good for humanity after all? Think of Morrison as inching along a dimly lit ledge several stories above the ground.But the rest of the world isn’t waiting for the Coalition to get its act together. Action on emissions is picking up elsewhere and at some point Australia will have to deal with rising CO2 from big industry and transport. In the meantime, as the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO recently reported, climate change is already here and extreme weather events are getting worse. More

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    G20 leaders pledge to distribute Covid vaccines fairly around world

    G20 leaders meeting remotely pledged on Sunday to “spare no effort” to ensure the fair distribution of coronavirus vaccines worldwide, but offered no specific new funding to meet that goal. The virtual summit hosted by Saudi Arabia was an awkward swan song for Donald Trump, who skipped some sessions on Saturday to play golf, paid little attention to other leaders’ speeches and claimed the Paris climate agreement was designed not to save the planet but to the kill the US economy.Joe Biden has promised to rejoin the accord on day one of his presidency, giving other world leaders hope that the UN climate change conference at the end of next year will see more ambitious pledges, including from China, to cut carbon emissions by 2050.Trump’s isolationist diplomacy has allowed China to escape some scrutiny both on its climate and debt forgiveness measures. “To protect American workers, I withdrew the country from the unjust Paris agreement,” Trump told the G20. “I refuse to surrender millions of American jobs and send trillions of American dollars to the world’s worst polluters and environmental offenders, and that’s what would have happened.”The bulk of the summit focused on ensuring that the coronavirus vaccines expected to hit the market imminently are available for distribution at affordable prices in poorer countries.The EU and the UN say there is a £4.5bn funding shortfall this year that the G20 nations should fill. Countries have so far invested $10bn in the Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator and its vaccine pillar, the Covax Facility. The two schemes are designed to ensure the vaccines do not remain the preserve of the wealthiest economies.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “The recent breakthroughs on Covid-19 vaccines offer a ray of hope. But that ray of hope needs to reach everyone. That means ensuring that vaccines are treated as a global public good, a people’s vaccine accessible and affordable to everyone, everywhere,” he said.“This is not a ‘do-good’ exercise. It is the only way to stop the pandemic dead in its tracks. Solidarity is indeed survival.”The final G20 communique simply said: “We have mobilised resources to address the immediate financing needs in global health to support the research, development, manufacturing and distribution of safe and effective Covid-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.“We will spare no effort to ensure their affordable and equitable access for all people, consistent with members’ commitments to incentivise innovation.” It gave no supporting evidence or statistics.In a sign of the competition for access to vaccines and national prestige, Russia said its Sputnik V would be much cheaper than those offered by Pfizer and Moderna. More

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    The Guardian view on Biden and the climate crisis: fight for net zero | Editorial

    There is no question that Joe Biden’s win will make a big difference to international efforts to deal with the climate emergency. A US president who recognises global heating as an “existential threat” will be a vital extra pillar propping up the teetering edifice of climate diplomacy. Four years of Donald Trump have done huge damage to the US’s reputation. But the world’s biggest economy, and second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (after China), remains vastly influential. With President Biden in charge, the prospects for next year’s Cop26 talks in Scotland, when drastic emissions cuts must be agreed if the world is to stand a chance of avoiding catastrophic heating, are already brighter.
    President Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris agreement was a key plank of his nationalist “America first” agenda and an act of sabotage against both the UN climate process and the principle of a rules-based international order. It also gave cover to the world’s other climate vandals: Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Russia and Australia. With Mr Biden, that cover is gone, and ecocidal policies such as Amazon rainforest destruction and coal-power expansion should come under renewed and relentless pressure. It is striking that the president-elect put climate at the heart of his phone calls with foreign leaders.
    The path ahead is anything but smooth. A green stimulus package on the scale promised by Mr Biden’s campaign is unlikely to pass through Congress, with control of the Senate hinging on two undecided seats in Georgia. Conservative judges are a further roadblock. Legislation to limit emissions and punish polluters is certain to be challenged all the way to the supreme court. Fossil-fuel companies and other vested interests remain a formidable force. Nor can public support be taken for granted. Most voters are on board in principle, recognising the dangers of unchecked global heating. But the changes in lifestyle that will be needed to meet new targets, including reductions in meat-eating and flying, are challenging in the US as in other rich countries.
    Still, Mr Biden’s presence in the White House will be a huge opportunity, and one that the environmental movement and its supporters must seize with every hand they have. Global heating is a fact, not a hypothesis or ideology. It is not just the vast majority of Democrats who want their politicians to do more to tackle it, but also a sizable minority of Republicans. Younger people are the most anxious. Mr Biden will perform a valuable public service simply by doing the opposite of his predecessor, and telling the truth.
    Democrats have shown that climate can be a unifying force within their party. Mr Biden’s climate taskforce was chaired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman and star of his party’s progressive wing. Now, if they are to create sufficient momentum, Democrats must look beyond the ranks of committed green supporters, as the writer Arlie Russell Hochschild did in her book Strangers in Their Own Land, about environmental politics in Tea Party-supporting Louisiana. Already, Mr Biden has signalled that the harm caused by pollution to poorer Americans will be among his priorities.
    In recent weeks China, South Korea and Japan have all announced net zero emissions targets. Rapid falls in the price of renewables have made the process of weaning away from fossil fuels far less painful than most experts predicted. Climate protesters have shown how effective they can be in mobilising support for strong action. Now that the election is over, they must keep pushing Mr Biden and other legislators as hard as they can. More

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    Joe Biden’s move to net zero emissions will leave Australia in the (coal) dust | Bill Hare

    The election of Joe Biden to the White House is likely to see Australia increasingly isolated as the world heads to net zero emissions, with quite fundamental implications for our economy. Let’s have a look at what has happened in the last two months.In September, the European Union proposed increasing its 2030 target from 40% to at least 55% reduction below 1990 levels in order to meet the net zero by 2050 target it adopted in 2019. Critically, the EU has made climate action one of its three main Covid-19 response priorities, so that at least 30% of its multi-annual budget and recovery fund is to be spent on achieving its increased 2030 emission reduction targets and its climate neutrality goal for 2050. These new goals for the EU27 would bring its domestic emissions very close to a 1.5°C Paris compatible level for the period to 2050. The UK has similar goals and ambitions to the EU27.Shortly afterwards, President Xi Jinping announced that China would “aim to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060”, the first time China has acknowledged the need to reach anything close to zero CO2 emissions by mid-century. If it covers all greenhouse gas emissions it would also be very close to what is needed by mid-century to be in line with the Paris agreement’s long-term goal. If this goal covers CO2 only, then China would need to achieve carbon neutrality around 2050 for this to be compatible with the Paris agreement.With China responsible for about a quarter of the world’s emissions, a move to net zero by mid-century has very significant implications for global temperature, lowering the Climate Action Tracker’s end of century projections by 0.2-0.3oC towards 2.4-2.5oC, compared with the previous 2.7oC projection.In October, both Japan and South Korea also announced net zero GHG goals for 2050. Japan’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, announced Japan would aim for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 with several specific measures, including a fundamental revision of its policy on coal-fired power plants. In an important change to Japan’s narrative, Suga emphasised the benefits to economic growth from the net zero commitment, whereas he’d previously characterised it as a cost.Getting to net zero essentially means the phasing out of coal, gas and oilThis was followed two days later by the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, announcing his commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, replacing coal power generation with renewable energy to create new markets, industries and jobs.Taken together, these four countries account for about 40% of global GHG emissions. There is also a large number of smaller countries with comparable net zero emissions commitments that would bring the total global coverage to about 48% of global emissions.What’s notable about all of these announcements is that they were made in the absence of any commitment by the United States and before any US presidential election outcome. China’s announcement in particular seems to reflect a geopolitical judgement by the Chinese government that they intend to move forward with ambitious climate goals even without the US.Arguably, these moves by this set of countries on their own will generate a major global move towards increased ambition and towards net zero by 2050.So where does this leave Australia? These net zero by mid-century moves by its major export markets create huge challenges.In 2019 China, South Korea and Japan accounted for 72% by value of Australia’s exports of LNG and coal: 88% of Australia’s LNG exports; 75% of thermal coal exports; and 51% of metallurgical coal exports. It is notable that none of these countries have focused on natural gas and all have mentioned renewable energy and other technologies, and all recognise that early action on coal is needed.The election of Joe Biden could trip this already major momentum into a landslide towards higher climate ambition. His election means the US will re-enter the Paris agreement, reverse the Trump administration’s rollbacks and make a significant contribution to closing the Paris agreement’s ambition gap with a new 2030 target. If he took the initiative to reboot US action in line with his plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050, Biden could reduce US emissions substantially by 2030.If he is able to fully implement his proposed Energy and Climate Package, and continues to be supported by the existing strong sub-national action in the US, the US could significantly reduce its 2030 emissions, reducing the gap between where it is headed now and a Paris agreement-compatible emission range for that year.Even in the case of delays and challenges to federal action, the efforts of state and local actors, such as the We Are Still In campaign, are expected to continue. A recent study estimated that enhanced action by subnational actors in the US could reduce emissions by 37% below 2005 levels by 2030. Biden as US president may not have control of the Senate (although the vote count on this result is far from over – and may not be resolved until January), but there are workarounds.Biden also has a net zero 2050 goal, which will place the US close to a Paris agreement-compatible emissions pathway. This would further lower the 2100 projected warming by about 0.1°C, and further if America undertook negative emissions action of scale beyond 2050. So the EU, China, Japan, South Korea and the US – about two thirds of the global economy, about half the world’s emissions and close to 75% of our fossil fuel export markets –will have net zero goals for 2050 or shortly afterwards. This is a massive shift.Let there be no misunderstanding about what this means. Getting to net zero essentially means the phasing out of coal, gas and oil, with markets more or less halved by 2030. This is a seismic shift for Australia and it means that it’s very likely that demand for our coal and gas will drop at least as fast as it has risen in the past few decades.It would hardly be a strategy for Australia to follow Poland’s lead and simply start to stockpile coal in warehouses. Diplomatically, Australia will find itself increasingly isolated, even in its own region and in particular with its close Pacific Island neighbours, not to mention the two superpowers, China and the US.Australia needs a forward-looking strategy aimed at taking advantage of its massive natural advantages in renewable energy and the resources essential for the low and zero carbon transition, and one that provides for a just transition for the communities and workforces affected by the rapid reduction in the markets that they have hitherto dependent upon.There is no time to be lost dithering, denying and obfuscating.• Bill Hare, a physicist and climate scientist, is the managing director of Climate Analytics More

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    The Guardian view on Boris Johnson's Cop26: ask if GDP growth is sustainable | Editorial

    Saving the planet ought to be a goal for, not a cost to, humanity. Yet this insight appears lost in the discussion about the climate emergency. Last week, it emerged that the Treasury was thinking about levying a UK-wide carbon tax. This approach, it was suggested, could be sold as a way of “raising revenue while cutting emissions”. Properly targeted taxes can change behaviour. But “revenue raising” green policies invariably end up being valued by the amount of taxes they produce rather than on their effectiveness in combating the climate crisis. UK governments have frozen fuel duties for a decade because it is politically easier to rake in cash than deter driving.A carbon tax is superficially appealing. The Treasury desires taxes to offset government spending. No 10 would like to align, rhetorically, with the green agenda. But without careful thought a carbon levy could backfire. A maladroit attempt to tax fuel on environmental grounds kindled France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests.By law, Britain has to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. To get there, life in the country will have to change. For example, for the next stage of a net-zero transition, the public should shift away from heating their homes with gas boilers. Raising taxes on voters until they squeal and switch to lower carbon intensive heating systems would not be popular or necessarily progressive. A better strategy would be for the state to finance new green technologies and to regulate energy companies to recoup the investment. The Treasury dislikes spending and then taxing. Rightwing governments resist interfering in markets. But a focus on ecological sustainability would provide a reason to act in such a way.The UK government requires an environmental sense of purpose that specifies the appropriate ends for economic activity. The economist Kate Raworth has pointed out that a failure to do so has left a gap, which politicians fill by maximising national income. They are not obliged to ask if additional economic growth is sustainable. Governments ought to confront whether the growth of real GDP is too destabilising for global ecosystems. For decades the planetary boundary for resource use has been exceeded because conventional economics has encouraged political leaders to concentrate on goals that are largely irrelevant to human welfare.A confluence of world events provides a rare opportunity to change such thinking. Owing to the pandemic, global greenhouse emissions are forecast to drop by about 5% this year, compared with 2019. If sustained this would be the largest year-to-year drop since the second world war, and it could mark a turning point. If Joe Biden wins the US presidential election the world’s top three emitters, China, the US and the EU, which account for nearly half of global emissions, should all have mid-century net-zero targets, placing the 1.5˚C warming limit of the Paris agreement within reach. Preparations for the postponed Cop26 climate summit, to be held in Glasgow, are the ideal way for Britain to take a lead in a global discussion. Boris Johnson should use the platform to frame UK policy proposals boldly in terms of their impact on people and the planet, not just the economy. More

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    Biden has shown that bold climate action is now common sense. Will UK politicians learn? | Matthew Pennycook

    Opinion

    Joe Biden

    Biden has shown that bold climate action is now common sense. Will UK politicians learn?

    Matthew Pennycook

    His pledge to create millions of well-paid jobs, boost public transport and cut inequality highlights Britain’s lack of ambition
    • Matthew Pennycook MP is the shadow minister for climate change More