Climate politics – Page 66

Exxon boss: intellectually obtuse position on climate impacts

I sometimes wonder what the CEOs of fossil fuel companies think about the effect of their products on the atmosphere and whether they harbour any anxieties about climate change. One of them, Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil, has told us how he views the matter in his reply to a question following a speech he gave to the Council of Foreign Relations last week, a speech in which he had explained how unexpectedly vast the sources of extractable natural gas and oil in North American rocks are proving to be.

To get a full sense of his reply to the question you’ll need to look at it on the website – it’s about two thirds the way down the page. It’s copyrighted but I’ll try to give a fair paraphrase of his main points albeit accompanied by my criticisms. Tillerson is answering a question, not delivering a prepared statement, but his answer no doubt broadly reveals his basic stance on the question.

The questioner briefly outlined some of the devastating consequences for humanity of the burning of all the reserves Tillerson had talked about in his speech and asked what he was going to do about it. “We need your help to do something about this.”

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Rationality wins US greenhouse gas case

Tom Bennion, a Wellington environment lawyer who has not flown since 2009, takes a look at the recent Environmental Protection Agency versus the “Coalition for Responsible Regulation” case in the USA.

Opponents of regulation of greenhouse gases in the US, including a number of states, have just received a spanking in the DC Court of Appeals, a level just below the Supreme Court. The court has thrown out a variety of challenges to EPA rules regulating greenhouse gases. I will briefly explain the ruling (pdf here) and then comment on prospects from here.

The background is that in 2007 the Bush era EPA argued that it could not regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. In Massachusetts v. EPA the Supreme Court determined that it could.

Subsequently, the Obama era EPA has made an “Endangerment Finding” that greenhouse gases may “reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Then it issued a “Tailpipe Rule” setting emissions standards for cars and light trucks which would save around 960 million metric tons of CO2e emissions. It also issued “Timing and Tailoring Rules” requiring only the largest stationary sources such as new power stations to meet emissions standards, on the basis that regulating every small polluter would be overly onerous.

Various states (drought afflicted Texas and thawing Alaska among them) and industry groups attacked both the Endangerment Finding and the rules on the basis that the Endangerment Finding and Tailpipe rules were “arbitrary and capricious” exercises of discretion by the EPA resulting from factual and procedural errors, and a misreading of the Clean Air Act.

The three member appeal court threw out all of the challenges.

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Introducing the Kyoto Escalator: did anyone sign the protocol in good faith?

Simon Johnson introduces the Kyoto Escalator chart (inspired by the Skeptical Science Escalator chart) and argues that New Zealand was just as complicit as the major European countries in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol so that it could be complied with while gross and net emissions continued to increase.

New Zealand's Gross net and Kyoto greenhouse gas emissions 1990 to 2012 — The Kyoto Escalator: New Zealand’s Gross greenhouse gas emissions (blue) increase by 19%; Net emissions (brown) increase by 23% and ‘Kyoto’ emissions (red) are less than average 1990 gross emissions.

Professor Dave Frame is the new director of the Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington. He is a University of Canterbury-trained scientist who has worked for some years in Britain. He has just joined the climate change fray with a very interesting opinion editorial “International focus needed over climate” in the Dominion Post. Welcome to climate change issues back in New Zealand, David.

Frame notes that New Zealand does not want to be thought of as the country that reneges on international treaties.

“Reputationally, accepting commitments and then failing to deliver on them is not a look New Zealand likes. “Doesn’t honour the treaties it’s signed” is not one of the few sentences we want people to remember about us.”

So, yes, I agree, New Zealand should honour the treaties it signs. I hate to nitpick, but isn’t New Zealand a country that is remembered for a treaty that we didn’t honour? Is our record on international climate change treaties any better?

Frame goes on to describe some of the different motivations underlying the negotiations that lead to the Kyoto Protocol.

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No dallying with denial

Will Hutton’s Observer column this week was forthright on the folly and danger of climate change scepticism. “Climate change is already hurting and, unchecked, will turn into a catastrophe.” Against that statement he points to the intellectual bankruptcy of allowing ideological preference for reducing the role of government in society to somehow justify climate change scepticism. It’s not even as if capitalism is under threat of disappearance. “Capitalism is not going away: the task is to reform it deploying a more agile, intelligent state.” But taxation and regulation will be part of that reform and the climate sceptics on the right need to come to their senses on that necessity.

Hutton’s was the sort of direct statement we should expect from informed journalists. He notes in passing that the media is often less interested in the evidence that it should be. “It likes a spat: the idiosyncratic brave climate change dissenter is pitched as the David against the Goliath of established opinion.”

The day after I’d read Hutton’s column the NZ Herald’s monthly magazine Element accompanied Monday’s edition of the paper and cheered up my morning. There was no dallying with denial here. Editor James Russell gave voice to the slight embarrassment many of us who worry about climate change probably feel in some company.

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Rio wrap: a real limp deal (where’s the way out?)

So it ended, as have most of the recent UN conferences on climate change, with a statement of platitudes and good intentions but nothing in the way of firm commitments to action. George Monbiot called the conference text 283 paragraphs of fluff, The Economist called the outcome “a limp agreement” and “a poor result for a summit billed by some as a “once in a generation” chance to save the planet from its intolerable burden.” Despite warnings of ecological tipping points looming, and the world’s top scientific organisations urging action on population and consumption, the leaders of the world (or at least, the ones who could be bothered to turn up) managed only to boot the ball downfield about as effectively as an English footballer in a penalty shoot out. It was all just too difficult. So they left it for another day — perhaps another generation — to sort out.

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