“The situation in 2070 — roughly 50 years away — is a calamity. Sea levels will have risen nearly half a meter (20 inches, or 1.6 feet) since 2000. Flooding of coastal cities will be costing the world more than $1 trillion a year.”
Australian firms told to catch up on climate change risk checks | The Guardian
Majority of U.K.'s largest pension funds engage on climate change risk | Pensions and Investments
The majority U.K.'s 25 largest pension funds are engaged when it comes to climate change risk to their portfolios, but a minority are "worryingly complacent”.
The new rules of competition in energy storage | McKinsey&Company
The costs of energy-storage systems are dropping too fast for inefficient players to hide. The winners in this market will be those that aggressively pursue and achieve operational improvements.
Carbon bubble' could spark global financial crisis, study warns | The Guardian
“Crucially, the findings suggest that a rapid decline in fossil fuel demand is no longer dependent on stronger policies and actions from governments around the world. “
What investors need to know about technology and climate change: the race of our lives | Jeremy Grantham
Jeremy Grantham talks about the challenges we face from climate change. His deep insight is an eye opener!
"Very few investors realise how rapidly the environment is being wounded, not just by climate change but also by overuse and by chemical waste. We may have created a world that is simply hostile to most living creatures including us.
Contrastingly, very few realise how favourably and dramatically fast the relevant science is progressing and the cost of necessary technologies declining. These opposite forces will determine whether we can even retain a world with as stable a global society as we have today, a modest definition of success. The results will certainly transform the entire world of energy, resources and food in a few decades with unprecedented financial consequences."
Mr. Grantham co-founded GMO in 1977 and is a member of GMO’s Asset Allocation team, serving as the firm’s chief investment strategist. He is a member of the GMO Board of Directors and has also served on the investment boards of several non-profit organizations. Prior to GMO’s founding, Mr. Grantham was co-founder of Batterymarch Financial Management in 1969 where he recommended commercial indexing in 1971, one of several claims to being first. He began his investment career as an economist with Royal Dutch Shell. Mr. Grantham earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Sheffield (U.K.) and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds a CBE from the UK and is a recipient of the Carnegie Medal for Philanthropy.
View the presentation slides from this lecture here.
World has three years left to stop dangerous climate change, warn experts | The Guardian
Avoiding dangerous levels of climate change is still just about possible, but will require unprecedented effort and coordination from governments, businesses, citizens and scientists in the next three years, a group of prominent experts has warned.
Warnings over global warming have picked up pace in recent months, even as the political environment has grown chilly with Donald Trump’s formal announcement of the US’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. This year’s weather has beaten high temperature records in some regions, and 2014, 2015 and 2016 were the hottest years on record.
But while temperatures have risen, global carbon dioxide emissions have stayed broadly flat for the past three years. This gives hope that the worst effects of climate change – devastating droughts, floods, heatwaves and irreversible sea level rises – may be avoided, according to a letter published in the journal Nature this week.
Macron meets Schwarzenegger and vows to stop oil and gas licences | The Guardian
The new French government has sought to further burnish its green credentials with the announcement it is to stop granting licences for new oil and gas exploration.
In his first major intervention since Emmanuel Macron’s election victory, the ecological transition minister, Nicolas Hulot, told the broadcaster BFMTVthere would be “no new exploration licences for hydrocarbons”.
Hulot said the government would extend Macron’s promised moratorium on fracking projects to cover all oil and gas exploration. He also hinted that the government would increase taxes on diesel and look to streamline decision-making on environmental issues so they could be made “faster”.
Great Barrier Reef valued at A$56bn as report warns it's 'too big to fail' | The Guardian
“The reef is critical to supporting economic activity and jobs in Australia,” says the report, prepared for the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. “The livelihoods and businesses it supports across Australia far exceeds the numbers supported by many industries we would consider too big to fail.”
Of the 64,000 jobs linked to the reef, 39,000 are direct jobs – making the reef a bigger “employer” than the likes of Telstra, the Qantas Group, National Australia Bank and the oil and gas extraction industry.
Disaster Alley, Climate Change Disaster and Risk | Ian Dunlop and David Spratt
The first responsibility of a government is to safeguard the people and their future well-being. The ability to do this is threatened by climate change, whose accelerating impacts will also drive political instability and conflict, posing large negative consequences to human society which may never be undone. This report looks at climate change and conflict issues through the lens of sensible risk-management to draw new conclusions about the challenge we now face.
AGL Energy's Andy Vesey says coal investment doesn't add up |AFR
AGL energy chief executive Andy Vesey and other power bosses said the economics of investing in new coal plants don't add up compared with wind and solar power.
Speaking a day after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the federal government could invest in new coal plants to shore up supply, Mr Vesey said he had examined the numbers and could not commit AGL's capital to coal plant.
He believed the energy security plan outlined by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel was "comprehensive" and should be backed, and joked that as soon as you think you're up to date with energy policy "a flash on your phone" changed everything again.
Shareholders described as more savvy on climate proposals | IR Magazine
Professionals say changes in wording of proposals can influence voting
One of the trends to emerge from this year’s proxy season has been the growing success of climate change-based shareholder resolutions – and speakers on a KPMG webinar this week attributed that success in part to more effective phrasing.
Environmentally conscious shareholders are learning how to catch the attention of large institutional investors by adapting the words used in the resolutions they file for AGMs, according to professionals. Specifically, they say, requesting that public companies report on the risks and business impact of climate change is helping concerned shareholders gain traction.
‘The reason we’ve seen a massive jump in support [for these proposals] is that the shareholder community putting them forward has become much more intelligent and sophisticated about the wording it uses,’ says Brendan Sheehan, managing director of Rivel Research Group.
'Ocean Elders' urge Malcolm Turnbull to reject Adani coalmine | The Guardian
The letter from the group Ocean Elders, which includes the renowned marine biologist Dr Sylvia Earle, argues that if it goes ahead the coalmine will damage international efforts to mitigate climate change by increasing global carbon emissions.
The Unesco world heritage committee has released a draft report saying that 75% of the world’s 29 listed coral reefs have been exposed to conditions that cause coral bleaching in the past three years, largely due to climate change.
‘We are in a runaway situation with respect to a warming planet, changing [the] chemistry of the ocean,” Earle said in an interview recorded for RN Breakfast. “We know what to do, it’s a matter of being smart enough, courageous enough, bold enough, sensible enough, to go in this better pathway.”
Australia warned it has radically underestimated climate change security threat | The Guardian
Disaster Alley, written by the Breakthrough Centre for Climate Restoration, forecasts climate change could potentially displace tens of millions from swamped cities, drive fragile states to failure, cause intractable political instability, and spark military conflict.
Report co-author Ian Dunlop argues Australia’s political and corporate leaders, by refusing to accept the need for urgent climate action now, are “putting the Australian community in extreme danger”.
The Dutch Have Solutions to Rising Seas. The World Is Watching. | The New York Times
"To the Dutch, what’s truly incomprehensible, he (Mr. van Wingerden) added, is New York after Hurricane Sandy, where too little has been done to prepare for the next disaster. People in the Netherlands believe that the places with the most people and the most to lose economically should get the most protection.
The idea that a global economic hub like Lower Manhattan flooded during Hurricane Sandy, costing the public billions of dollars, yet still has so few protections, leaves climate experts here dumbfounded."
The IEA Says We're Off Track To Meet Climate Goals | Forbes
The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that clean energy technologies are not decarbonizing global energy systems fast enough to stay on track to meet Paris Agreement goals (limiting warming to a 2°C-compatible trajectory in 2025), but the world can still decarbonize in time – if governments maintain strong policy signals.
IEA’s annual Tracking Clean Energy Progress report highlights technologies that are on track for meeting the 2° goals, those that are improving but need more effort, and those that are wholly off-track. Their assessment covers both technology development with policy for deployment: In practice, it is more useful to separate these two, as expensive or unproven technologies cannot be deployed, and thus require serious R&D, while many technologies that are already cost-effective are instead hitting institutional obstacles. Still, the gist is clear.
Because time is of the essence in abating climate change, and starting as soon as possible makes subsequent action cheaper and easier, it is important to take technologies that are ready for, or in, prime time, and really accelerate them. So IEA’s technological roadmap can help show where governments should double down on the technologies that can help secure a safe climate future at the least cost.
Global stocktake shows the 43 greenhouse gases driving global warming | The Conversation
The most comprehensive collection of atmospheric greenhouse gas measurements, published today, confirms the relentless rise in some of the most important greenhouse gases.
The data show that today’s aggregate warming effect of carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) is higher than at any time over the past 800,000 years, according to ice core records.
Building on half a century of atmospheric measurements by the international research community, we compiled and analysed the data as part of a group of international scientists, led by Malte Meinshausen from the University of Melbourne in collaboration with CSIRO.
Together, the data provide the most compelling evidence of the unprecedented perturbation of Earth’s atmosphere. They clearly show that the growth of greenhouse gases began with the onset of the industrial era around 1750, took a sharp turn upwards in the 1950s, and still continues today.