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Put the eco back in economy
The language lovers among you will know that economy and ecology are twins, born and raised in the same ancient home the Greeks called oikos. They live estranged in our modern minds — a tragic separation with immense cost as the eco crashes its way back into the economy.
How immense? At least $38 trillion per year in a couple decades, according to the most advanced analysis yet conducted on the economic impact of climate change. The study was published in the journal Nature — by some cosmic coincidence, just one day after the latest federal budget.
The Liberal budget didn’t entirely ignore climate action, but there was no way to miss the downgrade in priority. The prime minister left his green tie at home and the finance minister, her green suit. All that talk about keeping pace with the U.S. investments in the Inflation Reduction Act seems so 2023. After winnowing out the back-loaded spending and reannouncements, there’s “only $2 billion in net new climate spending over the next five years,” estimates the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: “A small step forward when a bold stride was needed.”
Nature Canada was more enthusiastic, applauding funds and Indigenous leadership for three “hugely important” new national protected areas — the Great Bear Sea (Central Coast National Marine Conservation Area Reserve) in B.C.; Ojibway National Urban Park in Ontario; and Pituamkek National Park Reserve in P.E.I.
To the dismay of climate advocates, there was no windfall tax on fossil fuel profits. Although the Finance Department was considering a surtax like the one levied on banks last year, the lead-up to the budget was “a fossil fuel lobbyist frenzy,” reports John Woodside. Any windfall tax on oil profits was dropped “in the face of strong opposition from oilpatch executives and the Calgary-based Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers,” sources told the Globe and Mail.
Then, that study in Nature dropped, underlining just how crucial it is that our politics recouple the eco-twins economy and ecology. Just 26 years from now, climate change will be causing economic damage of at least $38 trillion — every year.
That’s a stunning bill. The entire global economy is about $105 trillion a year right now. In a scenario where the world economy keeps growing as it has over the past few decades, climate damage will cause “an income reduction of 19 per cent within the next 26 years” — so, one-fifth less income than an economy without climate change.
“Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected,” say the researchers.
And they find it’s much cheaper — six times cheaper — to put the eco back in economy than to blow through the limits agreed in the Paris Agreement. “These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 C by sixfold over this near-term time frame,” conclude the authors.
Unfortunately, there’s more to unpack. The researchers hail from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which is one of the premier institutes in the world and the peer-reviewed paper is published in Nature, one of the top journals.
Unlike most past economic studies, they amassed actual empirical evidence of impacts from more than 1,600 subnational regions over the past 40 years and then projected them forward.
That means we probably can’t avoid the $38-trillion bill — those are “committed damages,” or the damages we should expect as a result of our past emissions, even if the world suddenly moves to stop greenhouse gas pollution really quickly.
Countries least responsible for climate pollution will suffer the most, particularly countries in the tropics. Although Canada and Russia rank in the world’s top 10 for the cumulative emissions that drive climate change, we may suffer least, through sheer latitudinal luck.
Projected income changes in 2049 compared to an economy without climate change. Income changes are committed in the sense that they are caused by historical emissions. (Image: Kotz et al., Nature)
But the economic impacts could be much worse. The researchers acknowledge their findings are almost certainly conservative. For starters, you will have noticed the world is not drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions, so the $38--trillion figure is a low end.
And then, the real kicker — the authors didn’t include impacts they couldn’t reliably assess. So, they looked at known impacts on agricultural yields, labour productivity and infrastructure resulting from rising temperatures and changes in rainfall. But not heat waves — a pretty notable omission from the roster of climate impacts we are already experiencing. Nor health costs, sea-level rise or tropical cyclones. They did not speculate about future tipping points but they also could not account for existing impacts from extreme events like storms and wildfires, which were too hard to assess and obviously result in higher costs than projected.
If you start factoring in the heat domes, droughts and storms in Canada, it becomes clear there are serious economic impacts even in northern climates. “Life will become less affordable for (Canadian) households as economic growth slows, governments are forced to raise taxes to pay for climate disasters, job losses increase, and goods become more costly,” concludes the Canadian Climate Institute in its own analysis.
Nor is there some magic stabilizing point after 2050. “We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60 per cent on global average by 2100,,” says PIK scientist Leonie Wenz, who led the study in Nature.
“This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so,” she says. “And that is without even considering non-economic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity.”
Different people respond to different stimuli. Personally, I find it unfathomable that the pictures of worldwide coral bleaching aren't enough to catalyze a global mobilization against burning fossil fuels. For others, dollars make more sense. And if your neighbours aren’t moved by academics publishing in journals, perhaps they’ll tune in to their go-to folks for advice on cars, appliances and garden gear.
Consumer Reports just issued a $500,000 warning:
“Climate change will cost a typical child born in 2024 at least around $500,000 over the course of their lifetime — and possibly as much as $1 million — through a combination of cost-of-living increases and reduced earnings.”
So say the consumer advocates. But, in case German scientists are more your cup of schnapps, let’s give them the last word:
“It is on us to decide,” says the Potsdam Institute’s Anders Levermann. “Structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas and coal.”
Bone-white coral
Eerie underwater images of skeletal expanses keep arriving from coral reefs around the world. Corals are one of nature’s amazing symbiotic partnerships — but heat the water too much, and the reef-building polyps expel the nourishing algae that generate those acid-trip colours. Divorced for too long, the corals starve.
You may have heard the Great Barrier Reef is suffering the worst impacts on record but mass bleaching is occurring even in places previously spared, like the oceans off Brazil. Huge stretches of coral reefs are bone-white throughout the tropics, including Florida and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, the Middle East and in the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to East Africa.
Lethal levels of heat exposure are killing corals along 80% of the length of the Great Barrier Reef, and we have never seen anything like that. pic.twitter.com/Be7gyEQMVt
— Terry Hughes (@ProfTerryHughes) April 19, 2024
“It’s a shock. We clearly have to prevent governments from investing in fossil fuels, or we won’t have a chance in hell” says Prof. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a pioneer of coral research who was among the first to link bleaching to global heating.
Budget 2024
“Cash for home retrofits and a new investment tax credit to bolster electric vehicle supply chains are among the most notable climate measures in Budget 2024,” writes Natasha Bulowski. She breaks down the climate side of Budget 2024.
The lead--up was a fossil fuel lobbyist frenzy, reports John Woodside. There is a “vicious cycle” at play, says Climate Action Network Canada’s executive director Caroline Brouillette. Oil and gas record profits are reinvested into lobbying and advertising campaigns that misinform Canadians.
Ottawa is doubling carbon tax rebates for First Nation governments, reports Matteo Cimellaro. The Chiefs of Ontario had asked for an increase in carbon-pricing rebates and launched a judicial review of carbon pricing last fall, arguing the fuel charge is discriminatory since fuel prices in remote First Nations can be double or triple those in Canadian cities.
Budget 2024 also clarified that the Indigenous loan guarantee program will have no green strings attached — it will be “sector agnostic” and avoid telling Indigenous groups how they must pursue their economic development. The federal budget did provide $36 million over three years to renew the Clean Energy Program under the Strategic Partnerships Initiative.
Bury plans for farm soil offsets
The National Farmers Union says the feds should shelve their plans to allow carbon offsets from farm soil. Darrin Qualman writes that “Offsets are the wrong approach. It is wrong to release CO2 from fossil fuels and then pretend to store it in soil.
“We must avoid making a disastrous policy error: staking our future on offset protocols, emissions trading and similar schemes that will delay emissions reduction and will fail to stabilize the climate for farmers and all citizens of the world.”
Coal mining the Rockies
Alberta ranchers have forced the United Conservative government to release documents that show “years” of talks with the coal industry to open up the Rockies to open-pit mines.
Poilievre not fit to lead in emergency
Seth Klein wonders what Canada’s response to the Second World War would have looked like with Pierre Poilievre in charge:
“Yes, we agree the Nazis are bad guys, but the situation is not an emergency. Nor is this really Canada’s fight — we are only a small country, after all. If people want to volunteer to fight, go ahead; we won’t block you... But we don’t intend to spend ‘taxpayers’ money on this, nor do we think individual households should be required to do their bit, nor do we have plans to mass produce what is needed to meet this threat, nor for that matter will we regulate any kind of action... We do, of course, accept that the threat is real, even if exaggerated and its cause in dispute.”
Record wind power
The world installed a record 117 gigawatts of new wind power capacity last year — a jump of 50 per cent over the year before.
The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) says that China installed 65 per cent of the global total. “Growth is highly concentrated in a few big countries like China, the U.S., Brazil and Germany,” says GWEC's CEO Ben Backwell. “We need many more countries to remove barriers and … scale up wind installations."
Zurich Insurance halts covering new fossil fuel projects
The insurance giant Zurich Insurance Group “will no longer underwrite new oil and gas projects, and is cracking down on clients planning to expand in metallurgical coal mining.” Bloomberg has the story:
“Sierra Signorelli, chief executive of commercial insurance at Zurich, said the decision reflects the disconnect between such activities and the insurer’s overall goal of achieving net--zero emissions by 2050.
“Further exploration and development of fossil fuels isn’t required for the transition,” she said in an interview. “We think it’s the right time to evolve our position.”
Alberta family wins net-zero challenge
The Shannon family in Airdrie, Alta., won the grand prize of Canadian Geographic’s Live Net Zero challenge.
“We cut the natural gas line entirely, ditched the original 1980s furnace … and we used ground source heat pumps to heat our house,” said Samantha Shannon. The family also put solar panels on the roof and an air-source heat pump in the garage to use it as a workshop through the winter. No comment from the office of the premier who says these things don’t work in her province.
A word from California, several about China and a laugh
I’ll be away for the next couple of weeks and you won’t get your weekly Zero Carbon newsletter. So, I’ll leave you with three recommendations.
For those interested (and probably confused) about the goings-on in the world’s largest carbon emitter, Lauri Myllyvirta helps demystify China’s decarbonization efforts on the Volts podcast.
And Sammy Roth has penned a personal reflection about climate initiatives in California and the American West. Roth is one of the most astute reporters focused on the region that sets so many of the trends we all end up following. “There’s no such thing as a perfect climate change solution,” he writes. “Even climate-friendly energy has its warts.
“The problem is that dramatic changes are coming whether we want them or not. In fact, they’re already here.”
My column today is basically a plea for people who care about climate to stop yelling at each other about which solutions are “better” or “cheaper” and start coming to grips with the reality that it’s 2024 and we don’t have time for that shit anymore. https://t.co/HaQMXB4ZPg
— Sammy Roth (@Sammy_Roth) April 18, 2024
And, if you could use a laugh, check out the Big Oil Alliance video series from ARCA (Artists for Real Climate Action) Productions. You’ll meet Imperious Oil’s Tank Hightower, Novopus’s Marjory Storm, other executives (and a vampire) in what is absolutely not a satire of the Pathways Alliance. ;)