Nothing Found
Sorry, no posts matched your criteria
Tag Archive for: Climate Change
Tag Archive for: Climate Change
No security without climate security
In July, CIA Director William Burns gave a 45-minute interview at the Aspen Security Forum. Only at the very end, following questions about the Russia–Ukraine war, China, Taiwan, Iran and Afghanistan, was Burns asked what the CIA can do to identify where climate change is most likely to cause conflicts to erupt.
Burns’s answer was unequivocal. First, he noted that climate change is ‘an important priority for the CIA and the US intelligence community’. He then said that while he considers China ‘the biggest geopolitical challenge that our country faces in the 21st century’, he also views climate change as the ‘biggest existential threat’ to the United States.
An existential risk, as the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative defines it, is a risk that ‘could cause the collapse of human civilization or even the extinction of the human species’. Burns probably had something less extreme in mind—perhaps a catastrophic event that would wreak irreparable harm and change life as we know it. But still, in this weeklong forum dedicated to national and international security discussions, no panel focused specifically and entirely on climate change.
That’s not unusual. As Burns pointed out, climate change doesn’t fit the traditional definition of a national-security threat. As such, it falls within the jurisdiction of other government departments.
Yet if climate change poses an existential threat to the US, then the US defence apparatus must participate in the fight against it. Under Burns’s leadership, the CIA has established a mission focused on helping ‘policymakers in the US government understand the consequences of climate change in already fragile societies’. The National Security Council, the State Department and the Pentagon all have units that focus on climate-change-related conflicts abroad. Still, what about the direct impact of climate change on the US? Generals, after all, don’t stop fighting wars when the fighting spreads from foreign to American soil.
Science-fiction writers have no trouble bringing the future home to the present. For example, Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel American war opens with a map of the US in 2075: Florida, New Orleans, New York City, Long Island and Los Angeles are all underwater. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The ministry for the future begins with a heatwave in India that overwhelms the power grid and kills 20 million people.
In the scenario Robinson imagines, temperatures in Uttar Pradesh reach a ‘wet bulb temperature of 42 degrees centigrade’. An extreme scenario? Consider that in California’s recent heatwave, temperatures in the Bay area and Sacramento Valley reached 46.6°C and that California prepared for brownouts and blackouts. As the thermometer breaks records, the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Americans dying in a heatwave doesn’t seem far-fetched.
Perhaps the problem is that an existential ‘risk’ is not yet an existential ‘threat’, whereas the war in Ukraine, Chinese militarism and Iranian nuclear aspirations demand immediate attention. But tell that to the hurricane, fire and flood victims who have suffered the consequences of catastrophic weather over the past decade. The Colorado River, Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake are disappearing now. Sea-level rise is already making itself felt in Norfolk and Miami. The future, as scientists keep telling us, is already here.
To be fair, the US Congress and President Joe Biden have done more than any previous administration. With the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden has secured a historic legislative victory that will enable the US to meet its international obligations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. At the most recent United Nations climate change conference, the US special presidential envoy for climate, John Kerry, negotiated a crucial deal with the Chinese to allow the world to move forward with its climate commitments.
And US national-security officials have their hands full. The risk that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine is real and rising, and violating the nuclear taboo could draw NATO countries into a nuclear great-power war that could wipe out all of humanity. A nuclear conflict with China would be equally deadly, and Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would also lead to nuclear proliferation across the Middle East, effectively gutting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and significantly increasing the risk of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism.
Still, the real measure of how much importance the American government attaches to a particular threat is the amount of time and money it invests in addressing it, and I doubt that Biden and his advisers spend more than 10% of their time on preparing for the impact of climate change. The issue is one of perspective: national-security officials operate in a world of geopolitics, competition and cooperation among countries. They are trained to deter, prevent and fight wars or to negotiate peace with other governments, not to deal with global threats that transcend national borders. As the adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Burns got it right. Climate change is an existential threat, and the Biden administration and the US national-security establishment must treat it like one. Doing so would require reallocating substantial funds from the military to government agencies that focus on building domestic resilience and civil protection. It would also require creating new security agencies whose mandate would be to address global threats.
Minimising the risk of climate change won’t be easy, but we have no choice. To paraphrase Game of Thrones, a long and deadly summer is coming. If we don’t rise to the challenge, many Americans won’t survive.
China facing devastating impacts from climate change
Climate change has been, and will continue to be, a persistent and growing challenge for many parts of the world. Over recent weeks there has been a steady flow of striking imagery of the impacts of extreme weather in China—fishing ships grounded on the Poyang Lake floor, the outskirts of city districts inundated with flood waters, and the drying up of parts of the Yangtze. In isolation, each of those climate hazards is a reminder of the vulnerability of human systems to environmental changes. Together, however, they constitute an urgent monition of the serious consequences of climate change for national security interests.
According to UN data, China is already the most exposed country in the Asia–Pacific in terms of the number of climate disasters and the number of affected people—by mid-century, 85% of China’s population will be exposed to climate-related hazards. Such hazards already cost the Chinese economy billions of yuan annually and cause major disruptions to human settlements and activities. These impacts deserve greater attention from policy analysts, particularly given that they’ll increasingly shape China’s economic, foreign and security policy choices in coming decades.
Sea-level rise will undermine access to fresh water for China’s coastal cities and increase the likelihood of flooding in China’s highly urbanised delta regions. Droughts are projected to become more frequent, more extreme and longer lasting, juxtaposed with increasingly intense downpours that will inundate non-coastal regions. Wildfires are also projected to increase in frequency and severity, especially in eastern China. China’s rivers, which have historically been critical to the county’s economic and political development, will experience multiple, overlapping climate (and non-climate) impacts.
An ASPI report released today provides a preliminary survey of the literature on the impact that climate change will have on China. It concludes that relatively little attention has been paid to this important topic, which is surprising, given China’s key role in international climate-change debates, immense importance in the global economy and major geostrategic relevance. That’s especially true for rapid-onset hazards such as flooding and wildfires, which remain relatively understudied compared to slow-onset impacts such as changes in mean temperature and precipitation. Much of the scientific literature surveyed in the report notes that limited data and methodological challenges are significant barriers to better understanding the climate impacts and consequences for China.
There’s also a lack of secondary research integrating the impacts of climate hazards affecting China at local and national levels alongside the climate disruptions to globally integrated systems such as trade, technology and people flows. With a specific examination of China’s food and energy security, the report concludes that very little, if any, research address the complete range of climate-change impacts on these systems central to the country’s economic and political wellbeing. For the most part, research in these areas is highly siloed in nature and most makes no attempt to take a whole-of-system view of China’s food and energy security in a climate-changing world.
On one level, this is understandable. Building a comprehensive sense of the earth’s changing climate is hard; there are many different parts that interact with each other in complex ways. Drawing the connections between this complex picture and our even more complicated human systems is harder still. But in a world where the costs incurred by climate change will almost certainly rise for at least the remainder of the 21st century, building an understanding of these costs must be a research priority.
Climate change will be one of the most, if not the most, profoundly destabilising process in modern history. For policymakers in Australia, China and around the world to navigate those disruptions, there’s a need for holistic and multidisciplinary research that captures the pathways for simultaneous hazards to compound each other, with cascading impacts at both the national and the global scale. As this report identifies, that work still needs to be done.
Marine ecology is a key to maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific
Environmental challenges in the Indo-Pacific region’s maritime domain have both ecological and strategic implications, and are at the top of the agenda of challenges faced by many Indo-Pacific states. This was clearly recognised in 2019 when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative at the East Asia Summit. A key purpose of the initiative is to help shape maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific to support a rules-based maritime order. Australia’s participation provides many opportunities to work with India and other Indo-Pacific countries on a range of maritime-based initiatives to strengthen and enhance regional cooperation. It will be a valuable way of building relationships, resilience and mutual respect around the region.
The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative is a non-treaty-based mechanism for countries to work together for cooperative and collaborative solutions to common ocean challenges in the region. The Australia–India Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative Partnership sits under the two countries’ joint declaration on a shared vision for maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. Australia is taking the lead in the field of marine ecology, while other Indo-Pacific partners are leading in areas such as security, infrastructure and resources.
In this context, we co-directed a year-long project, the Australia–India Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative: regional collaborative arrangements in marine ecology. Our research collaborators were the Observer Research Foundation, Kolkata and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The study was launched last month in Kolkata.
The report sets out baseline studies on regional arrangements in the Pacific (for marine plastics; illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing; and ocean science), Southeast Asia (marine plastics, emergency response and coastal conservation) and the Bay of Bengal region (marine litter, IUU fishing and marine disaster management).
The report didn’t identify any single form of regional implementation that’s optimal for all types of marine ecology challenges: an arrangement that works well in one setting may fall flat in another. Generally speaking, we found that the more well-understood problems were found to be easier to solve than those associated with a lot of uncertainty and that a favourable political context greatly helped achieve positive outcomes.
Unsurprisingly, the most successful regional cooperative arrangements are often built upon broad, pre-existing regional cooperative arrangements, such as arrangements to combat IUU fishing in the Pacific and to tackle marine debris in ASEAN. But that’s not always the case. The study found that the Coral Triangle Initiative that brings together Southeast Asian states including Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia with Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands was a cross-regional initiative that’s relatively successful despite there being no prior history of substantial cooperation among those countries.
A key factor in the success of regional initiatives in marine ecology was the extent to which regional understandings were implemented in national legislation or by national authorities. In most cases, regional groupings won’t have the legal authority and will rely on the implementation of agreements by national members. Combatting IUU fishing in the Pacific was found to provide a good example of countries successfully coordinating the national implementation of agreed measures, such as through the creation of standardised licensing terms applicable to all distant-water fishers. But this coordination is facilitated and supported by relatively well-resourced regional institutions, such as the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency.
The baseline studies found substantially differing levels of cooperation on marine ecology issues in different parts of the Indo-Pacific. Regional mechanisms in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands were found to be generally more developed. In contrast, regional cooperation in the Bay of Bengal region in the areas of marine plastics, IUU fishing and disaster management is weak. Even where declaratory statements exist, they aren’t backed by effective regional mechanisms and are poorly enforced or not enforced at a national level.
But these deficiencies can’t be addressed simply by trying to apply regional models that may work in, say, Southeast Asia or the Pacific, where there’s a much more established web of institutions and arrangements and habits of cooperation on a wide range of issues.
The study identified potential benefits from pursuing an inter-regional Indo-Pacific approach to marine ecology challenges. The development and application of norms across the Indo-Pacific in relation to marine ecology challenges could be extended to other issues beyond environmental challenges, thus encouraging habits of trans-Indo-Pacific cooperation.
We found that there should be much greater sharing between the Pacific and Indian Oceans of the lessons from and benefits of well-functioning regional arrangements or institutions with regions in which arrangements are less developed or don’t function well.
The report includes recommendations for how Australia can promote regional cooperation in marine ecology with its Indo-Pacific partners, including:
- working with India to co-sponsor an Indo-Pacific declaration and action plan on marine plastics
- undertaking a quantitative study on IUU fishing in the Bay of Bengal area
- seeking observer status with key regional groupings, with a focus on engagement on marine ecology issues
- promoting the pairing of Australian and Indian coastal cities to share experiences in addressing marine ecology challenges
- facilitating sharing of experiences of Pacific and Indian Ocean island states on marine ecology issues by hosting events, workshops and training exercises
- increasing support to the Group of 16 coastal states to strengthen regional fisheries management in the Indian Ocean
- working with Pacific partners to establish a Pacific Ocean expedition modelled on the Second International Indian Ocean Expedition
- sponsoring an Indo-Pacific environmental security centre as a regional hub for professional development and research in environmental security.
The last is a key recommendation. We are now preparing a detailed implementation strategy that will set out the processes required to establish an Indo-Pacific centre for environmental security, its functions and the resources necessary to support its services and activities. Our report will be released later this year.
The Indo-Pacific environmental security centre would be a key regional maritime confidence-building measure. It would fill a gap in professional development in regional environmental security affairs and play a critical role in securing a healthy marine ecology for the region.
The good news about cutting methane emissions
One of the most important achievements of last year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow was the Global Methane Pledge, a commitment by more than 100 countries to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Reducing methane emissions is not only among the quickest and most effective ways to stem climate change, but will also go a long way towards improving public health.
A highly potent greenhouse gas, methane traps at least 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide does, and methane emissions account for roughly a quarter of current global warming. They thus bear significant responsibility for climate-related threats like more intense and frequent extreme weather events, increased food insecurity, greater infectious-disease risk, reduced access to clean water and deteriorating air quality.
The public health implications are severe, especially for the marginalised and under-resourced communities that already face disproportionate risks owing to factors like lack of access to medical care, poor nutrition, unsafe living or working conditions, discrimination and exposure to other types of pollution. Beyond undermining public health by exacerbating climate change, methane (and co-emitted pollutants) damages public health by contributing to ground-level ozone and particulate pollution.
Exposure to such pollution damages airways, aggravates lung diseases, causes asthma attacks, increases rates of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, and boosts stroke risk. The consequences include lost productivity, higher medical costs and greater pressure on health systems due to the increase in emergency visits and hospitalisations. By suppressing crop growth, ozone can also exacerbate food insecurity.
The good news is that, unlike CO2, methane doesn’t linger in the atmosphere, so the effects of reducing emissions would be felt quickly. And the Global Methane Pledge is clearly a step in the right direction. But, to keep the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C within reach and improve public health, the world must take even more ambitious action. Cutting methane emissions by 45% by 2030 would reduce warming by 0.3°C by 2040.
To accelerate progress, major philanthropic organisations have come together to create the Global Methane Hub, which launched last year with nearly US$330 million in philanthropic commitments. Already, the hub has announced that it will allocate US$10 million to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to assist 30 countries in developing plans to reduce their methane emissions. The hub has also joined the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate to support ‘innovation sprints’ to mitigate methane emissions.
The hub will aim to catalyse progress in all major methane-emitting sectors—livestock (which accounts for about 30% of the global total), oil and gas (which produce around 25%) and landfills (15%)—including by supporting non-governmental and grassroots organisations. While it aims to lay the groundwork for long-term transformation in challenging sectors, the hub will also emphasise achieving deep reductions quickly.
In the oil and gas sector, the International Energy Agency estimates that methane emissions can be halved almost immediately through the wider adoption of practices already required in many countries, such as the replacement of valves and pumps with more efficient versions. According to the IEA, with additional available measures, it’s technically possible to slash methane emissions from global oil and gas operations by up to three-quarters.
We have the technologies to prevent vented and fugitive emissions, and our capacity to identify methane leaks—and thus to grasp the scale of toxic emissions—has improved significantly. By taking full advantage of such tools, and targeting super-emitters, policymakers can advance climate action while delivering enormous health benefits to communities living near oil and gas operations.
In places as different from each other as southern Iraq, Chiapas, Mexico, and West Texas, communities have raised concerns about the health effects of nearby oil and gas activities, such as acute respiratory symptoms and cancer. A growing body of evidence documents elevated rates of asthma and poorer birth outcomes, including low birth weight and pre-term birth among communities living in close proximity to oil and gas wells, from which methane is co-emitted with hazardous air pollutants.
Cutting methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure is thus crucial, but it is only the first step. Recent studies have also highlighted the threat posed by gas-fuelled stoves and water heaters, which leak methane and contribute to indoor and outdoor air pollution. To address this problem, policymakers must significantly expand renewable-energy capacity and electrification.
Further opportunities to reduce methane emissions lie in agriculture and waste management. Providing higher-quality feed to livestock can reduce enteric methane emissions. Capturing methane from manure and treating digestate to minimise ammonia emissions (precursors of particulate matter) would provide a local source of energy, reduce odours and mitigate public health risks. Meanwhile, practices like composting can avert methane from organic wastes and generate valuable resources to improve soil quality.
The case for immediately slashing methane emissions is strong, and the Global Methane Pledge is increased global awareness of such efforts’ importance to combating climate change. But translating commitments into real progress won’t be easy.
That is why it’s crucial also to highlight the health benefits of cutting methane emissions. With the help of researchers and community health practitioners who understand the issue best, our aim should be to generate the support, collaboration and investment needed to cut methane emissions and improve public health worldwide.
Policy, Guns and Money: International Women’s Day 2022
In this episode, ASPI’s Anastasia Kapetas, Daria Impiombato and Katja Theodorakis explore the nexus of climate change and gender, considering the official 2022 International Women’s Day theme, ‘Changing climates: equality today for a sustainable tomorrow’.
They discuss the disproportionately gendered impacts of climate change, the agency of women in climate and security narratives, and the intersectional dimensions of the climate movement in different regions.
Great-power competition and climate security in 2035
This is the second in a series of edited extracts from a forthcoming ASPI publication, The geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific. The first article presented a 2035 climate security scenario, which is the reference point for subsequent articles, including this one.
In the past few years, much ink has been spilled by international relations and climate experts on whether tackling climate change is compatible with competition with China. At one extreme, there are China hawks who argue that climate change is a ‘dangerous distraction’ for the US Defense Department. At the other extreme are China doves, a group of whom wrote a letter in 2020 calling for an end to antagonism from the West towards China because it undermines global goals on climate.
This debate rests on the assumption that the behaviour of the US is a central factor in Chinese decision-making on climate policy. It largely ignores China’s understanding of the risks and opportunities posed by climate change, and the possibility that elements within the Chinese government may view cutting emissions and moving more quickly towards net zero as in China’s own security interests.
The climate hazards facing mainland China are well studied, including by the country’s own scientists. For example, sea-level rise threatens millions of people in China’s coastal megacities. By 2050, most of Shanghai could be under water at high tide, according to research by Climate Central. China’s own internal national climate assessment found that the country’s sea levels could rise by 40–60 centimetres above 20th-century averages by the end of this century. Interior flooding is an additional problem for China, as observed in the subway flooding in Henan Province in the summer of 2021.
Climate change also threatens China’s long-term food security. The 2035 scenario provided as a starting point for this discussion posits an all-too-believable global food security crisis as an El Niño event affects the rice bowls of China and Vietnam. Reports suggest that Chinese government officials are concerned about just such an occurrence and the impact it could have on stability within the country. The government worries about the potential challenges posed by the fact that the country’s rural minority populations in places such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are highly vulnerable to climate shocks.
As historian Adam Tooze argues, ‘The future for Beijing’s authoritarian China Dream looks far more uncertain in a world of runaway global warming.’
In April 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed this assessment, but from the American perspective: ‘It’s difficult to imagine the United States winning the long-term strategic competition with China if we cannot lead the renewable energy revolution. Right now, we’re falling behind.’
Hence, great-power competition, harnessed correctly, could drive climate progress as countries try to outdo each other in technology and market share of renewables.
The 2035 scenario appears to reflect a version of this ‘compete to save the planet’ framing. In this scenario, both the US and China are likely to be relative winners, in that their economies and standing on the world stage benefit from the energy transition and they aren’t feeling the worst of climate change’s effects, compared to the most vulnerable nations. However, the intersection of intensifying climate impacts and continued geopolitical competition is likely to create flashpoints for potential hot conflict.
While the ‘incident’ in the South China Sea in the 2035 scenario—the fourth in less than a decade—isn’t described in detail, it’s very likely such incidents could relate to competition over access to rapidly dwindling fish stocks in the area. Stocks have declined by one-third over the past 30 years due to a combination of overfishing, pollution and climate change. In 2020, the US for the first time took a clear position on maritime disputes over water and seabed rights in the region, suggesting an increased willingness to more forcefully defend its allies in the region when they complain of illegal behaviour by Beijing.
A second key flashpoint in the region, based on the 2035 scenario, is likely to be shared river basins, particularly the Mekong, shared by China, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and the Brahmaputra, shared by India and China. In each case, China controls the headwaters and is actively pursuing dam-building projects that will affect water flow downstream, with the states of the Mekong River basin increasingly caught between China and the US.
Finally, as the 2035 scenario mentions, the hazards and shocks brought on by climate change in the Indo-Pacific will increase the demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, as well as support for adaptation and resilience, providing another pathway through which the US and China can attempt to build influence in the region. China has a history of leveraging development and climate-related support in exchange for other political goals. If China follows through on its pledge to eliminate funding for overseas coal-fired power plants by substituting clean, renewable energy projects for them, that could also give it more leverage in the region.
For its part, US President Joe Biden’s administration has proposed a range of actions to support Indo-Pacific partners in tackling climate change. Those measures include building combined response capabilities for climate-related emergencies through ASEAN and the Pacific Islands Forum, sharing climate risk-assessment tools for military infrastructure and installations, and highlighting climate risks in regional high-level dialogues. A turn away from such efforts, or the election of another US president hostile to international negotiations towards emissions cuts, could further strengthen China’s position in the region between now and 2035.
Overall, looking out to 2035, it’s apparent that the best understanding of the trajectories for both climate security and great-power competition will come from integrating the two issues in a systems analysis approach. Scholar Jeff Colgan terms this mode of thinking about climate change as an ‘altered landscape’ that sees ‘climate change not as an issue area at all, but as a pervasive background condition that is intrinsically connected to most other areas of interstate competition and cooperation’.
Oz election 2022: Covid, climate and China
Big international issues shape a nation’s domestic equations.
And so the Australian election to be held by 21 May will be shaped by pandemic, decarbonisation and geopolitical rivalry.
Covid, climate and China are problems so big as to be obvious; you’re entitled to a cynical, ‘No kidding, Sherlock!’ Yet the big three are shapeshifters, as the international merges with the domestic.
Covid-19 is a global event of such encompassing magnitude that it becomes a totally domestic issue for the voters who will pass judgement on Scott Morrison’s government and Anthony Albanese’s opposition.
Relative to the rest of the world, Australia performed brilliantly: the second lowest Covid death rate in the OECD; 94% of Australians aged over 16 now double-dose vaccinated. With lots of missteps and mishaps along the way, our state and federal system adapted and delivered.
The polls, though, say the domestic reckoning is harsh.
Rather than using international comparisons, the vote on the pandemic will be on domestic competence. ScoMo has to banish SlowMo, the view that he’s too often a yard short and a minute late.
The Labor–Liberal fight of ScoMo versus Albo will be also a contest between ScoMo and SlowMo (aided by ScareMo).
The prime minister needs a blinder of a federal budget on 29 March and then much to go right when the formal campaign launches.
At the 2019 poll, Morrison delivered a ‘miracle’ win by making the dangers of the Labor opposition the key question. ScareMo will again promise safety in dangerous times. But the SlowMo bogey hurts the reassurance message. The 2022 poll takes us back to a basic of Oz politics—the vote is for or against the sitting government.
Climate change and China will play differently compared to 2019: then the government’s scare campaign with an international flavour was climate; this time it’s China.
Morrison now talks about ‘decarbonisation’ as a positive not a negative. That word ‘decarbonisation’ started to slip into the prime minister’s public utterances in 2021.
As treasurer, Morrison took a chunk of coal into the House of Representatives in 2017 and taunted Labor: ‘This is coal, don’t be afraid.’ He still loves coal, but in the decades ahead the carbon love affair must be remade. The Morrison version of the road to the net-zero future was well expressed in June with the ‘Japan–Australia partnership on decarbonisation through technology’.
Shifting language is how politicians point the way. John Howard preferred ‘climate change’ to ‘global warming’ to take the heat out of the issue. In today’s political vocabulary, ‘decarbonise’ is a verb demanding profound change.
The Liberals can’t wedge Labor as hard on climate policy—the two parties are standing as close together on the issue as they have in 15 years.
The political difference, according to the Libs, is that they’ll get us to zero-net emissions by tech while Labor loves taxes; it works as a debating point rather than an answer.
For the Libs, a carbon tax is taboo; for Labor, it’s toxic.
By saying ‘decarbonisation’, Morrison at least faces the taboo. The logic of economically efficient decarbonisation is to make clear the cost and set the price. Tax is taboo and toxic for this election. When Australia faces the need for a carbon tax in the years ahead, it’ll edge towards a serious think about broader tax reform, a discussion we’ve avoided for decades.
In these election months, the questions will be about what decarbonisation means for my job and my family and my industry and my neighbourhood. And as the domestic fuses with the international, the questions become the geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific and the future of the planet. Tough themes to cram into a slogan.
Morrison offered a campaign glimpse in his January ‘state of the world’ speech, listing five political, economic and technological changes, all accelerating: the digital economy, the need for skills and training, hyper-globalisation and supply chains, decarbonisation (yep, ‘decarbonisation’ was the word he used), and ‘sharper geopolitical competition’.
Jagged geo-jostling is what the voters have been watching for a while.
In the 2019 election, the big chill with China had just set in. Three years on, we’ve hit permafrost.
The relationship has changed because China has changed. The Indo-Pacific has understood hard messages from Xi Jinping. Quad 2.0 had two leaders’ summits last year and AUKUS was born in September. Fear of China’s ‘repression and aggression’ might just be enough to forge a new world order.
After the Quad foreign ministers’ meeting in Melbourne, Michael Shoebridge saw a sense of ‘common, positive purpose’, a contrast with ‘the last five years, when China had seemed to have the momentum’.
This is a foreign affairs stoush with significant domestic dimensions, as set out in ASPI’s new report on China’s influence in our states and territories, city councils, universities, research organisations and non-government organisations.
Australia hasn’t flinched at Chinese trade coercion, and the five-year decline in Australians’ views of China has hit a record low. Election stress now strains the bipartisan Labor–Lib unity ticket on facing China.
Being strong on security and alliance is a government vote-winner, and that means painting the opposition as weak. ScoMo became ScareMo to argue that China prefers Albo.
Trouble is, ScareMo got pushback from Canberra’s wise owls, pecked by the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, and savaged by Dennis Richardson, former head of the Department of Defence, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and ASIO, who sees no Lib–Labor division on China.
Richardson’s scornful disdain was masterful, with anger expressed as puzzled sorrow: ‘Why would any sensible government seek to create circumstances which could work against our own national interests, for party political purposes? It is a long, long time—many decades—since we have seen a government do this. And it’s dangerous. And it’s best avoided.’
In May’s election, a China scare campaign could scare away the votes of Chinese Australians who will have a large say in deciding crucial seats in Sydney and Melbourne. In a piece headed ‘Coalition facing a Chinese burn’ on 12–13 February, The Australian reported Liberal fears that the government faces a backlash from Chinese Australians because of ‘empathy for their mother country, if not communism’. The threat of such voter punishment saw the prime minister and minister for multicultural affairs front a special briefing for Australia’s Chinese media on 8 February.
Setting up for the election, the federal budget will have Covid-19 at its centre, while climate and strategic rivalry will do framing duty.
If we’re smart and lucky, this will be one of the federation’s rare pandemic elections (following the Spanish flu election in December 1919). Covid might be an electoral one-hit wonder—not on the horizon in 2019, a decisive factor in this poll, and something we’re living with three years from now.
By contrast, decarbonisation and strategic competition are generational. They’ll be with us for many elections to come.
Water-for-energy deal could help prevent climate conflict in the Middle East
The climate crisis is both a multiplier of current security crises and a driver of new threats. This relationship between a worsening climate and conflict means that both need to be addressed together, according to Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of EcoPeace Middle East, the world’s only NGO that combines environmentalism and peace-building.
At the end of 2021, Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates signed a declaration of intent that was a world first—an agreement to move forward on the ‘green–blue deal’ that would see the UAE building solar farms in Jordan to produce energy that would supply energy-poor Israel, in exchange for water produced by expanding Israel’s state-of-the-art desalination facilities on the Mediterranean.
That this agreement was reached among three countries that have had extremely difficult relations historically is a testament to the strategic imperatives of climate change, says Bromberg.
EcoPeace has been championing the ‘green blue’ approach for many years and has been instrumental in providing research and advocacy support for the Israel–Jordan–UAE deal. And in late January, the organisation briefed the UN Security Council on the imperative of expanding the green–blue approach to the entire Middle East region.
‘It is truly a breakthrough agreement,’ says Bromberg. ‘For the first time, countries are saying that they are willing at least partially to be dependent on their neighbour in a neighbourhood where countries have seen each other as an enemy.’
The inspiration behind the green–blue concept came from the lessons of post–World War II Europe, particularly the coal and steel agreement that aimed to stop the historical antagonists from going to war again by combining their national resource advantages to the benefit of both counties. ‘The Middle East equivalent is in harnessing the respective advantages of the sun and the sea,’ explains Bromberg.
But, he says, this breakthrough could occur because for the first time there’s a real alignment of security, political, and economic interests across the three countries.
Apart from the growing alarm about climate change in a region that will suffer some of the most devastating effects, a new government in Israel allowed a reset of relations with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, whose consort Queen Rania has been a long-time advocate of building a green and sustainable economy in the Middle East.
Another critical factor is that the economics now make sense. ‘The deal does not require donor assistance. And that helped move the deal forward very quickly,’ Bromberg says. And while the governments are still working out the fine details ‘there is a strong economic and geopolitical engine moving this forward’.
Countries in the Middle East are realising that in a heating world, they will no longer be able to guarantee sufficient water supplies for agriculture and human consumption without creating what Bromberg calls ‘healthy interdependencies’.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who has written extensively about the work of EcoPeace, argued recently that the existential climate realities in the Middle East will completely reshape the geopolitical fundamentals of the region.
If, in the past, countries have organised their security around resistance to an external enemy, the climate crisis means that legitimacy on national security will depend on governments being able to achieve climate-change resilience.
And since no one country can get to sustainable climate resilience on their own, traditional enmities may need to fall away if nations are to survive.
This understanding may be animating reported Saudi attempts to unravel the incipient deal by offering to replace Israel as a source of desalinated water. Bromberg is inclined to take an optimistic view that this represents healthy competition for climate leadership in the Middle East.
The Saudis have worked hard to push back against phasing out fossil fuels. But now there are signals, like the new ‘Saudi green initiative’, that the kingdom’s rulers realise that it must at least appear to be participating in inevitable global transition to cleaner, cheaper energy.
Unfortunately, the plan seems to involve greening Saudi Arabia’s own energy consumption while continuing to develop and export oil and gas for decades to come. In a world moving away from fossil fuels, Saudi Arabia is betting that Russian and US supplies will collapse in the next 20 years, allowing Saudi Aramco to fill the gap.
But any delays in phasing out fossil fuels will mean endangering the imperative of limiting global heating to 1.5°C. And mitigation failure will hit countries in the Arabian peninsula hard, and may make many cities there uninhabitable. Warming on the peninsula is much higher than the global average.
Saudi Arabia has no permanent water sources, and groundwater is dwindling to dangerously low levels, threatening agricultural production. At the same time, demographic trends will drive increasing water demand in the next two decades. Experiments have been underway to replace groundwater with desalinated water in agriculture, but they haven’t yet proven cost-effective.
This is one of the reasons Bromberg argued for a regional green–blue deal that encompasses the Euphrates, Tigris and Nile regions at the UN Security Council in January.
But Bromberg also pressed the Security Council to take a firmer leadership role in the climate crisis.
‘There is a very urgent need for the Security Council to recognise that the climate crisis is a threat to peace,’ he says.
‘That cannot be more clearly highlighted than in the case of the Middle East, where water insecurity is an underlying issue for so many of the conflicts in our region, including Israel and Palestine, Syria and Ethiopia but also Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Ethiopia.’
He wants the Security Council to declare the climate crisis as a threat to global security under Article 39, making climate part of the security mandate of the body.
In addition, he says the Security Council should be repurposing some UN instruments such as the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum to facilitate the regional clean energy and climate resilience deals that he believes will underpin the region’s future security.
‘The forum was built on the concept of moving natural gas found in the eastern Mediterranean to markets in Europe, but the climate crisis means we need to turn the forum into one for renewable energy and climate security.
‘It includes interesting countries like Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Israel, Cyprus and Greece and has special status to the EU, US and UAE. So it can be the institution that can help advance these issues.’
But can green–blue water-for-energy approaches be used beyond the Middle East? Bromberg says yes, though it remains unexplored territory.
‘There is a little bit of work which I am familiar with in Africa and in the Caucasus. But there need to be more resources invested in understanding the relationship between climate and peace so that we can draw the lessons that we’ve been able to develop from the Middle East to other parts of the world.’
Out of the cave: climate change in an election year
On the politics of climate change, Australia crawls slowly from the cave.
To mix the cave metaphor, we’ve passed peak troglodyte.
Light has pierced the dark. Troglodytes still growl and glower, but those who ignore or deny the science have declining power.
Sceptical language still shapes the politics of climate. Yet the troglodyte effect has less impact in this election year than it has had for 15 years.
The crawl from the cave reflects shifts on the political spectrum. Render this spectrum as running from denial and scepticism towards the central position of acceptance of the science. Going beyond acceptance, the spectrum reaches belief and action.
Denialists think global warming isn’t happening or simply ignore it, while the sceptics always want more convincing evidence.
The denialist–sceptic forces have pushed Australia into the policy cave with versions of former prime minister Tony Abbott’s 2009 line that climate change is ‘absolute crap’. Warming might be good for us, Abbott wrote in Battlelines, and there’s no point imposing ‘certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future’.
Note that the formal position of Australia’s political parties all along has been to accept the science on the warming of the planet. In politics, though, accepting a policy position doesn’t confer priority or action.
Our problem has been the step beyond the tick and nod of acceptance to the belief stage. Reaching belief means that understanding becomes a truth that defines reality. In politics, belief rearranges priorities, shifts policy and demands cash: action happens.
Action hurts because this is a wicked problem, compounded by the push of the mining industry and the noise of the Murdoch media empire.
We have been stuck in the ignore-deny cave because Australia is an emissions superpower, standing with Russia and Saudi Arabia among the greatest exporters of fossil fuels.
The resource blessing can be a ‘coal curse’. The cave is comfortable because the fossil fuel industry seeks a ‘grip on Australian hearts and minds’. Mining has muscle to match its riches—throwing its weight against Kevin Rudd and his mining tax in 2010 and killing the Hawke government’s land-rights legislation in the 1980s.
The miners, our most powerful industry, seldom have to make an overt entry into the political ring; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia is there every day.
News Corp’s defining voice is the national broadsheet, The Australian, while the capital city tabloids do the yapping and Sky News does the TV ranting. The empire has reach, setting up an echo chamber that touches the ears of every politician. The rest of Australia can take or leave The Australian, but for Canberra it’s a constant read in the same way the ABC is a constant soundtrack.
The Australian editorialises that it accepts the science of global warming. As Murdoch has long maintained, ‘The planet deserves the benefit of the doubt.’
Just as consistently, what it publishes amounts to a scepticism that treats scientists and environmentalists as the enemy. The tag ‘covert denialism’ was pinned on The Australian by Robert Manne back in 2011 and still fits the facts.
The Weekend Australian of 15–16 January shows how covert denialism works. On page 8, an AFP piece by a Washington correspondent states that the nine years spanning 2013–2021 rank among the 10 hottest on record:
The impacts have been increasingly felt in recent years—including record-shattering wildfires across Australia and Siberia, a once-in-1,000-years heatwave in North America and extreme rainfall that caused massive flooding in Asia, Africa, the US and Europe.
Hefty evidence, indeed, but the paper knows how to turn the temperature. Turn to the op-eds published in the ‘Inquirer’ section for the tonal change.
On the first page, environment editor Graham Lloyd has the lead item on how Australia is weathering the climate storm: ‘Australia has benefited from the effects of two La Nina years, much to the chagrin of climate catastrophists’. Those catastrophists, Lloyd argues in his first paragraph, faced ‘an inconvenient set of realities’ because weather systems plunged Australia’s average temperatures in 2021 to the lowest levels in a decade.
By the third paragraph, things get lyrical: ‘[N]ature is not broken, the natural cycles continue to operate and that resilience persists on land and at sea.’
Deeper into the item, Lloyd quotes from the US study that made the news pages, noting the finding that global average temperatures last year were 1.1°C warmer than the late 19th century average, at the start of the industrial revolution.
Such science gets a cold shower when you turn the page to find a headline about ‘50 years of climate panic’, by Bjorn Lomborg, whose latest book is False alarm: how climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.
Lomborg, too, starts by scorning those who fear ‘climate catastrophe’, deriding ‘panic and poor policies’ that are fuelled by ‘overblown predictions and emotional forecasts’ about the planet’s ‘last chance’. His first paragraph puts quotation marks around ‘climate catastrophe’ and ‘catastrophic’, but they don’t indicate irony or sarcasm so much as define the target to be hit. Classic stuff from The Australian’s favourite ‘skeptical environmentalist’, who has been penning variations on the same column for two decades: don’t worry, get smart, spend on adaptation and innovation.
Australia is emerging from the cave for many reasons. Even News Corp did an editorial campaign last year about reaching zero emissions. Murdoch’s top editor called it an ‘evolution’ of policy but it had a mea culpa tinge.
The Murdoch empire is catching up with the rest of Australia, as tracked by Lowy Institute polls showing increasing climate concern. Expect the covert denialism to dial down. Perhaps.
After 15 years of argy-bargy, our main parties of government—Liberal and Labor—are closer on climate policy than they have been since the 2007 election, when they agreed on the need for an emissions trading scheme. (A counterfactual is that if John Howard had held his seat and held government in 2007, we’d have got the ETS and not gone as deeply into the cave.)
Scott Morrison got the coalition to agree to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Governments receive little credit for what doesn’t happen (especially internal government disasters), so the prime minister doesn’t get much cachet for edging the Libs and Nationals out of the cave. More than a political pirouette, ScoMo did bomb disposal while zooming down the mountain on one ski.
Morrison said the policy got through the Nats party room by only two votes. So only two votes away from blowing apart the coalition. ‘I did have to put it on the line,’ the prime minister notes, ‘and it was very close.’ The National Party is roiled but roughly reconciled, especially by promises of cash rewards for the bush.
Australia is about to cram two political years into one.
The first ‘year’ will be bookended by the budget on 29 March and the federal election in May. Morrison needs every day he can get, so I’m sticking with the prediction that the election will be held on 21 May, the last day possible for a half-Senate and House of Representatives poll.
The Liberals can’t wedge Labor on climate policy as they did in the 2019 election. The two parties are standing too close together.
Labor has long suffered the agony of having its vote eaten from the left by the Greens. Now the Libs face a similar test in nominally safe seats, attacked by independents. The government says the independents are coming from the left, but on climate they reflect the centre of public opinion.
Whether Scott Morrison or Anthony Albanese, Labor or Liberal, the government that gets to work in June will have to do more than accept the science—it will have to believe and act.
Vietnam turns back to giant gas field after net-zero pledge
At last month’s COP26 climate summit, Vietnam made its own pledge to cut emissions and reach net zero by 2050. The COP events are not new for the country; it signed the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 and has known since the middle of last decade just how devastating rising sea levels could be for a low-lying nation with a huge coastline and agriculture dependent on a river delta rice basket.
At the same time, Vietnam’s industrial ambition has been huge, to both modernise and attract industry from China and elsewhere so it can engage in manufacturing at a higher level than just the garment trade. To this end it has attracted a suite of high-end foreign companies, many American, in recent years and now has its own home-built cars, both combustion and electric.
In 2009, World Vision released a report that suggested that if sea levels rose by a metre in the next century, Vietnam could be one of the worst-hit nations, with 5% of the land and 11% of the population affected. Then, greenhouse-gas emissions were around 1 tonne per capita but still rising.
As an environmental journalist based there in 2008, I wrote: ‘Vietnam may need to think about more than long-term transitions. The recent World Bank city profile of Hanoi mentions that though Vietnam’s climate change legislation is increasingly comprehensive and sound, implementation can lag behind.
‘Sea level rise is a long-term problem and one which optimists in Vietnam hope will be stabilised by around 2050.’
Vietnam had been to the prior COP summits arguing, politely and with a multilateral focus as it likes to do, that more work was needed. Like other rapidly industrialising nations, it didn’t want to curb its own relatively small emissions at the expense of its economy.
Now it has a net-zero ambition and has also signed on to the global pledge to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Its most methane-heavy industry is actually rice. Australia won’t sign the pledge, for largely agricultural reasons.
Vietnam needs power. Its growing population (97 million and counting), industrialisation, increasing middle class and large numbers of people moving to the city—if you ignore the post-lockdown exodus from Ho Chi Minh City recently—is driving rapidly expanding demand for electricity and some baseload power.
To capitalise on that demand, ExxonMobil is also looking again to develop the Blue Whale gas field just 88 kilometres from Vietnam’s coast. The proposed development sits easily within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, but less helpfully also within China’s ‘nine-dash line’, which claims as marine territory a huge swathe of sea. This area holds both oil and gas and fish stocks, as well as being of incredible strategic significance.
In 2019, it looked as though the US energy giant was walking away from the project, frustrated by an inability to secure gas agreements with the government, which matter in many jurisdictions when foreign players enter. As one example, the company’s inability to secure a deal for the expansion of its LNG project in Papua New Guinea has seen an entire integrated three train—the facility that processes gas to a liquid chilled to -160°C—expansion plan revised. Now only France’s TotalEnergies Papua LNG will be enlarged.
Two years ago, PNG was one of five core focuses, and somewhere like Vietnam with a tricky government, a belligerent China that had even gone after Russian gas, and the CO2 content of the field (an astronomical 30%) was essentially seen by analysts as ‘already in the sell-off tray’.
No one wanted it, and companies that could afford it and the inherent risk were Chinese and therefore a huge domestic political sovereign risk given sentiment towards China in Vietnam.
China, for its part, wants to see every oil and gas project in its Hague-discredited nine-dash line developed bilaterally with a Chinese national oil company. The implications of that are clear to everyone, though some nations take what they can get; Brunei, for example, agreed to joint exploration in late 2018.
However, now that ExxonMobil has confirmed that it is indeed headed back to project design after entering front-end engineering design, or FEED, in early 2019. FEED is one of the critical steps before a final investment decision is taken.
‘ExxonMobil continues to progress preparatory work [for] Ca Voi Xanh. We completed front-end engineering and design for the project in May 2020, and are working on the final development plan,’ a company spokesperson told S&P Global Platts early this month.
Blue Whale could address 10% of Vietnam’s electricity demand via four separate gas-to-power plants across a couple of poorer provinces far from the southern commerce hub or northern capital of Hanoi.
Vietnam has coal-fired power stations and hydroelectric dams, but both are on the wane and new versions of the former are unfinanceable. It has renewables meeting around 10% of electricity demand thanks to fantastic tariffs offered on long-term contracts by the government that were and are a near licence to print money for project proponents.
Until recently, its LNG import terminal plans were huge; in early February, the government said it planned to increase power-generation capacity from 54 gigawatts now to 125–130 gigawatts by 2030. Some 41 gigawatts would be supplied via LNG-to-power plants in the same timeframe, but that has now been revised down to a more manageable 22.4 gigawatts.
Financing for these projects has suddenly become harder under US President Joe Biden. Fewer US export banks are lining up, and the pressure exerted to rectify what Donald Trump saw as unfair terms of trade is gone. Even 22.4 gigawatts is a huge undertaking, given that the estimate for Blue Whale is 5,300 megawatts once the initial four power plants are expanded.
The new frontier for energy is offshore wind. Vietnam’s long coastline and relatively shallow littoral waters could see these farms supplying up to 500 gigawatts, according to a World Bank estimate.
The main issue is the vastly more complex technical hurdles to offshore wind over its onshore component. Vietnam has multiple wind farms. Several companies have signed initial non-binding agreements with local governments for offshore wind farms. This is a necessary step along with approvals from the central government to get onto the power development plan, the first official stop for power projects. Inclusion doesn’t guarantee that a project will be built, but omission ensures it won’t.
All this is a long time away.
And so is Blue Whale, although first gas was planned in 2023. Assuming timeline slippage of two to three years, it could still be supplying power in the second half of the decade. The issue for Vietnam will be to find a way to deal with the large carbon footprint from burning gas and somehow dealing with the many tonnes of CO2 from the reservoir.
How this will fit into a net-zero emissions future isn’t clear yet, but Vietnam isn’t the only country that lacks a clearly defined path to that outcome.