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TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES

Briefing date 30.01.2020
Church of England joins passive push with climate index

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News.

Church of England joins passive push with climate index
Financial Times Read Article

The Church of England pension board is today launching a “passive index” onto the London Stock Exchange, which will be aligned with the goals of the Paris climate deal, the Financial Times reports. It adds: “The church will invest an initial £600m in the FTSE TPI Climate Transition Index which follows calls from Mark Carney, the outgoing governor of the Bank of England, for pension funds to tackle the financial risk of climate change.” The paper says the church’s endowment and investment funds plan to sell shares in “fossil fuel companies that are slow to respond to global warming” starting in 2023. Separately, Reuters reports that the New York State pension fund is to put 27 coal companies under review, with a view to potential divestment. The Financial Times reports that the world’s largest mining firms are “failing to meet [the] Paris climate goals”, according to consultants McKinsey. Meanwhile, Press Association covers a report arguing that UK financial services firms are “not doing enough to manage climate change risks”. According to the newswire, the report from “global executive search firm Odgers Berndtson” says just one in five UK financial services firms has a well-developed strategy to manage climate risks. Finally, Reuters reports that the US Federal Reserve “can play a part in keeping global warming from destabilising US banks and financial markets”, according to comments from the organisation’s chair Jerome Powell yesterday.

German government defends coal phase-out against critics
Associated Press Read Article

The German government yesterday approved a bill on phasing out coal power by 2038 at the latest, reports the Associated Press, and “defend[ed] the plan against critics who say it’s not ambitious enough”. It adds that the legislation must still be approved by the German parliament. According to Reuters, environment minister Svenja Schulze told reporters: “This is not just an exit from coal, it’s an entry into renewable energy.” It adds that the phaseout plan includes financial support and compensation worth tens of billions of euros for coal mining regions and utility firms, with power plants fired by hard coal set to receive a declining sum starting at €165,000 per megawatt of capacity closed this year and falling to zero after 2026. Bloomberg also has the news.

Australia fires: NSW inquiry to probe climate change impact
BBC News Read Article

The Australian state of New South Wales has announced an independent inquiry into the ongoing bushfires, BBC News reports, with the contribution of “climate change, human activity and other factors” set to be examined. The Sydney Morning Herald reports comments from various “experts” saying that Australia’s response to the bushfires “must include climate change”. It says: “Coping with the growing bushfire risks under climate change will require a vast increase in public spending and big reforms to policies that haven’t properly accounted for the effects of climate change, experts warn.” Reuters reports that another heatwave and high winds are “threaten[ing] to rekindle Australian wildfires”, while the Washington Post reports that Canberra “faces [its] worst bush fire threat since 2003”. And the Guardian reports that bushfire survivors have joined a claim against ANZ bank “for financing [the] climate crisis”. Separately, the Sydney Morning Herald reports the comments of former UK prime minister David Cameron, saying that climate change should be a “natural” issue of concern for conservative politicians. The paper quotes Cameron saying: “And to conservative parties, I would definitely appeal and say, ‘Look, don’t leave the issues of climate and the future of the planet and what we leave to our children…to the left or you’ll get an anti-business, anti-enterprise, anti-technology response.’”

Drax postpones building new gas plant after legal action
Financial Times Read Article

UK power firm Drax has “been forced to pause” its plans to build a large gas plant at its site in Yorkshire, the Financial Times reports, following legal action by NGO ClientEarth. The paper says the approval of the plans by the UK government has been challenged in the High Court, with an in-house lawyer for ClientEarth quoted saying the 3.6 gigawatt gas plant “is at odds with the government’s own climate change plans to decarbonise in a cost-effective manner”. The Guardian says the government approval of what would be Europe’s largest gas plant had “overrul[ed] the climate change objections of its own planning authority”. The paper adds that the project had been “the first big project rejected because of the climate crisis”, until that advice was overruled by ministers. Bloomberg also has the story. Separately, MailOnline picks up a report showing that the UK’s carbon tax on power firms helped cut coal-fired electricity production by 93% since 2013. Drax was formerly Europe’s largest coal plant.

Guardian to ban advertising from fossil fuel firms
The Guardian Read Article

The Guardian newspaper will no long accept advertising from fossil fuel firms, reports the paper’s media editor Jim Waterson. He says: “The ban will apply [with immediate effect] to any business primarily involved in extracting fossil fuels, including many of the world’s largest polluters.” In an “Inside the Guardian” blog explaining the move, Anna Bateson and Hamish Nicklin write: “Our Guardian editorial colleagues have led the world in covering the crisis with expertise and urgency…Guardian Media Group has always tried to lead the way commercially, too.” They add that “fossil fuel-related investments now represent less than 1% of our total funds”. On the latest move, they say: “We have decided that we will no longer accept advertising from fossil fuel extractive companies on any of the Guardian’s websites and apps, nor in the Guardian, Observer and Guardian Weekly in print…Of course we know some readers would like us to go further, banning ads for any product with a significant carbon footprint, such as cars or holidays. Stopping those ads would be a severe financial blow, and might force us to make significant cuts to Guardian and Observer journalism around the world.” The news is also covered by the Hill, the Washington Post and BusinessGreen.

Greta Thunberg seeks to trademark her name to stem misuse
Reuters Read Article

Climate activist Greta Thunberg has applied to trademark her name and that of the Fridays for Future movement she started, Reuters says. Reporting on a social media post by Thunberg, the newswire adds: “The move would allow legal action against persons or companies trying to use her name or the movement’s which are not in line with its values, she said.” The news is also covered by Associated Press, the Hill and Axios.

Comment.

EU’s carbon border tax plan is risky but needed
Editorial, Financial Times Read Article

The EU’s planned carbon border adjustment is “a necessary step, but it must be taken with care”, says an editorial in the Financial Times. It notes that the idea of a carbon border tax has “until now…been considered too unwieldy, provocative and legally troublesome for any nation to adopt”. But it continues: “[T]he idea is conceptually attractive. First, it would stop what is known as ‘carbon leakage’, when climate action in one country pushes polluters to shift to another, and overall emissions stay much the same. In the process, it would reduce the risk of making domestic industries less competitive than rivals abroad. It also offers the distant but tantalising prospect of the EU joining forces with like-minded nations to create ‘climate clubs’ big enough to prod laggards into faster emissions cuts.” The editorial concludes: “[A]s global emissions keep rising, it is increasingly difficult to argue against measures of this kind. Critics should bear in mind there is an obvious way for countries to avoid the cost of a carbon border scheme: cut their own emissions faster.” In a separate comment for the Financial Times, Simone Tagliapietra and Georg Zachmann argue that while plans for a “European Green Deal” are positive, the EU needs to “reach beyond its borders” as it only accounts for 10% of global emissions. They write: “The only way for Europe to exercise global leadership on decarbonisation is to move beyond its own borders.” Another Financial Times comment, by Martin Sandbu, says the €1tn commitment towards the European Green Deal is “not quite what [it] seems”, with the money “mostly about redeploying funds”.

Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading
Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters, Nature Read Article

In a commentary for Nature magazine, Glen Peters and Carbon Brief climate science contributor Zeke Hausfather argue against the use of the phrase “business as usual” to describe the RCP8.5 emissions scenario. Expanding on a Carbon Brief article written by Hausfather last year, the pair say emissions as high as in RCP8.5 are “increasingly implausible” and that the scenario, while still useful to study, would be better described as a “worst case”. They conclude: “This admission does not make climate action less urgent. The need to limit warming to 1.5C, as made clear in the IPCC’s 2018 special report, does not depend on having a 5C counterpoint.” The commentary has been covered by BBC News under an inaccurate headline that suggests the RCP8.5 scenario itself – rather than the “business as usual” label – is “misleading”. Dutch publication de Volkskrant and Gizmodo also cover the commentary. A related story in the National Review, not picking up on the Nature commentary itself, but reflecting on other recent discussions around the RCP8.5 scenario, runs under the headline: “Good news from the apocalypse desk.”

How to broaden the coalition against climate change
Jason Bordoff, Foreign Policy Read Article

In a piece for Foreign Policy, Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, argues that corporations and activists “need to shift their focus to engage a much broader set of politicians and businesspeople who have the most potential to curb emissions”. Reflecting on the various corporate climate pledges at last week’s World Economic Forum and the related calls from climate activists, Bordoff says: “The pledges from corporate leaders at Davos are welcome, but still fail to address the root of the problem. There is a limit to what any one company can do when it operates within a system in which oil, gas, and even coal use are still rising globally.” He adds: “Company commitments are voluntary and individual, and they do not change the underlying systemic issues with how energy is used in the US economy.” As for activists, he says, given their main focus is on North American and European companies: “[They] were targeting only a narrow sliver of the firms needed to deliver a clean energy transition.” Relatedly, a comment by Greg Ip for the Wall Street Journal says: “Curbing consumption of fossil fuels requires changing the underlying economics.” As a result, and contrary to activists targeting banks and other financial institutions in Davos, Ip says: “Banks don’t hold the key to climate change.” Over at Vox, meanwhile, David Roberts writes about the concept of “social tipping points”, which he says are the “only hope for the climate”. Roberts explains: “If there is any hope at all, it lies in the fact that social change is often nonlinear. ” Finally, a comment by several researchers for the Conversation argues: “We often treat the decisions to find alternative ways of living more sustainably and to pursue political resistance against big polluters and inactive governments as separate. But our recent research found that the relationship between alternatives and resistance is really far more complex. One can often lead to the other.”

Science.

The impact of an intense cyclone on short‐term sea‐ice loss in a fully‐coupled atmosphere‐ocean‐ice model
Geophysical Research Letters Read Article

A new study uses high-resolution modelling to reexamine the impact of an intense Arctic storm on Arctic sea ice in 2012, which was a record-low year for ice cover. The study finds that the storm melted ice in two ways: by churning up the ocean and causing heat to rise to the ocean surface, which melted the ice from underneath, and by whipping up strong winds that brought warm air to the ice surface, which caused it to melt from above. Overall, though, the impacts lasted “only a few days”, the authors say, and so did not leave a “clear signature” on the record-low ice extent seen that year.

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