Climate Predictions from the United States, Brazil, and South America: Implications for Climate Agreement and Loss-and-Damage Negotiations
Consider the consequences of a federal election in Australia and a Conservative Party leadership contest in Britain and the repercussions of a presidential election in Brazil and the US Senate elections in November.
All these countries matter hugely in climate terms. The United States, Britain and Australia are responsible for most of the pollution in history. There is vast amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide stored in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
There have been some bright colors. The new government in Australia decided to cut their planned cut to 43 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. A handful of other countries, including Chile, which is working to enshrine the rights of nature into its constitution, have already promised more cuts or say they will soon. But most of those updates are from smaller polluters, or from those, like Australia, that are playing catch-up after previously submitting goals that were egregiously lacking in detail or ambition. “A lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked,” Jansen says.
John D. Sutter is aCNN contributor, climate journalist and independent filmmaker who has won a number of awards. He recently was appointed the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. The opinions that are expressed in this commentary are of his own. CNN has more opinion.
There’s also growing outrage this year about the lack of support for communities that have already suffered irreparable damage from climate disasters. Entire populations of small island nations have been forced to leave the islands. They have had to pay the costs due to the pollution causing climate change.
At the time, Vanuatu – on behalf of an alliance of small-island states – argued quite reasonably that polluters should pay for the costs of their pollution.
The failure to rein in fossil-fuel interests could also undermine the success of loss-and-damage negotiations, says Joab Okanda, senior Africa adviser for the advocacy organization Christian Aid, based in Nairobi. Fossil fuels cause more loss and damage.
It is time for high-polluting countries like the United States to start asking this question seriously. It’s clear that polluters should be held accountable for these losses to territory, culture, life and property.
Those efforts should be supported, but the fair and proactive thing is for rich countries to impose taxes on fossil fuel profits. It can happen as part of the UN climate negotiations.
The consequences of not putting carbon into the atmosphere are more serious than the consequences of putting it into the climate system.
International Courts of First Principles and Second Laws: A case study of a Peruvian farmer’s lawsuit against a fossil fuel company over a melting glacier
Over the years, many arguments against action have been made. This was a problem for the future rather than the present, and that is laughable in retrospect.
The report states that climate change is threatening human well-being and planetary health. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
That may feel like a new phenomenon, but it’s been decades in the making. A deadly 2003 heat wave is thought to have been caused by human-caused warming. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.
“The fossil fuel industry is feasting on hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and windfall profits while household budgets shrink and our planet burns,” António Guterres said.
A lack of international funds to cover a loss-and-damage process have led to individuals and countries turning to the courts. A Peruvian farmer, for example, is suing a German fossil fuel company over a melting glacier that threatens his home and farm. According to the news reports, the suit was filed in 2015 and claims that the German company, RWE, should be responsible for its share of the damages in line with the proportion of global fossil fuel pollution it has created. (RWE is contesting the lawsuit and says it should not be held responsible for the damage.)
And in 2021, Tuvalu and other countries formed the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law. The aim is to find out if there are claims in international courts.
“Litigation is the only way we will be taken seriously while the leaders of big countries are dillydallying,” Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said last year, according to The New York Times. They want to be forced into a court of law.
What’s going on at the Climate Talks conference? The case of Thunberg, the United States, and the United Kingdom. A year after COP27
Every year, the conference is billed as an opportunity for the world to come together to tackle the climate crisis. World leaders sometimes make new commitments to curb their country’s greenhouse gas emissions, or sign agreements to transition to clean energy in order to funnel money towards a more resilient world. More often, advocates walk away disappointed with meager progress made. The Verge put together a guide to this year’s Climate Talks, which have a lot of hype.
This is a raging debate, even within the conference. “As it is, The COPs are not really working,” youth climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was a media sensation at last year’s conference, said during an event in London this week after announcing that she will not attend COP27 this year. The COPs are used by leaders and people in power to get attention using a variety of different greenwashing methods.
The planet is on track to warm more than five degrees by the end of the century, and is almost two degrees warmer than it was in the late 1800s.
New and improved infrastructure may help keep people safe in a warming world. That might look like cities designed to be better at beating the heat or communities that are less likely to be wiped out in a wildfire. Or it could mean expanded early warning systems that can warn people about a flood or storm headed their way. There’s a push this year to secure even more funding for these kinds of adaptation projects, particularly since adaptation costs in developing countries have been projected to reach upwards of $300 billion a year by the end of the decade. Advocates are also pushing for more locally led solutions since what it means to live with climate change looks different from place to place and the people most affected by climate disasters haven’t always been included at planning tables.
I criticized politicians for not taking climate action a year ago. Recovering from pandemic lockdowns, the United States could have juiced the green economy to reduce emissions and prepare the country for the ravages of climate change. The Democrats were in control of the federal government. The winter of early 2022 was followed by the spring. The July legislative miracle included a surprise deal on the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the nation’s largest ever investment in climate change.
Fransen is one of the people in the business of keeping track of all those emissions plans and whether countries are sticking to them. Taking stock is difficult. It means measuring how much carbon nations emit. It’s also important to show the effects of the emissions on the climate in 20 or 100 years.
Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to determine how much CO2 humanity is producing—or to prove that nations are holding to their pledges. That’s because the gas is all over the atmosphere, muddying the origin of each signal. Natural processes also release carbon, like decaying vegetation and thawing permafrost, further complicating matters. A water leak in a swimming pool is similar to a water leak in a swimming pool. If you look at CO2 from space, it may not be from the nearest humans, but from other sources outside the Earth. “That’s why we need more sophisticated methods.” Climate trace can use steam from power plants as a proxy for emissions, if it’s used correctly. Other scientists are using weather stations to track emissions.
No silver bullet for Anopheles stephensi: The case of Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, a country with the most deadly mosquitoes
If the vaccine were shared more equally with poorer countries in 2021, one million lives would have been saved. The emergence of the SARS-coV-2 variant might have slowed due to vaccine distribution and a drop in infections.
Evaluation, assessment and accountability will be the focus. We cannot just move on to new commitments until we know whether the current commitments are being carried out, says climate-policy analyst David Waskow.
Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes have made their way from Asia to Africa, threatening progress there towards eradicating malaria. Anopheles stephensi accounted for almost all adult mosquitos found near the homes of people with the disease in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. The notorious species can breed in urban environments and persist through dry seasons. It could infect more than 100 million people in Africa if they are not protected by vaccines and other control measures. Fitsum Tadesse has said that there is no silver bullet for this fast-spreading vector.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03572-0
Do not be a hero, but do you know how to make a better world by putting more CO2 out of the ground: Lessons learned from Oliver Müller
The US military puts out more CO2 per capita than any other country. The militaries are spared from emissions reporting. Eight researchers outline how to hold militaries to account in the global carbon reckoning.
“Imagine making a data-driven plan for the world, but leaving out more than one billion people in Africa,” writes energy researcher Rose M. Mutiso. “That’s the troubling truth behind net-zero emissions proposals.” She argues that the idea of net zero at COP 27 can’t be meaningfully engaged with without African data, models and expertise.
After a stint at Google, astronomer Oliver Müller is back in academia — and he has learnt some valuable lessons. It is important to do not be a hero. “If a task can be finished only through putting your mental health and even physical health at risk, you are effectively hiding flaws in the system.”
The Rise of Coal and Natural Gas Emissions in Europe During the Clean Energy Transition and after the COVID-19 Pandemic
The emissions increase comes as the world grapples with an energy crisis spurred by the war in Ukraine, while also continuing to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists believe that a spike in coal consumption is part of the reason for the loss of Russian natural-gas shipments. Air travel has increased due to the lifting of restrictions. Although substantially lower than the 3% annual increases in total fossil CO2 emissions experienced during the early 2000s, this year’s projected 1% increase is more than double the average growth rate of the past decade.
Early signs of the clean energy transition are emerging. In particular, the power sector is becoming cleaner because of an expansion in affordable wind and solar resources and a shift from coal to natural gas. The rise of emissions from coal in Europe this year is likely to be “a short-term blip”, Newell says. “Over the long-term, the energy crisis has accelerated the transition toward clean energy.”
China and India, the two largest emitting countries, are planning to increase emissions. They’ve argued that their growing economies need the support of fossil fuels, as other wealthier countries have historically done.
But limiting emissions could avoid some of the most extreme impacts, like much more deadly heat waves, more flooding in coastal cities due to sea level rise and the loss of almost all coral reefs.
They think wealthier nations should pay for cultural losses that happen when a town or village has to relocate. wealthier countries agreed to keep talking but haven’t pledged to provide new funding
Huge investments are going to be required. There’s no way to get around it. There is a lot of money to be made eliminating emissions from the global economy. Experts say the cost of not dealing with this problem could be ruinous.
A 4% annual reduction in carbon emissions is required to meet the goal laid out in the Paris agreement, according to analysis by the Global Carbon Project. That is similar to the emissions reductions witnessed in 2020, when governments around the world locked down in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Le Quéré says. This shows the scale of the actions needed to tackle climate change.
Experts say making good on that promise is crucial to keep poorer nations on board with efforts to cut emissions. But they also say that $100 billion is just a fraction of the money the developing world is going to need.
The international climate negotiations got underway with pleas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a plan for a new global weather early warning system.
“We’re racing forward to do our part to avert the climate hell that the U.N. secretary general so passionately warned about earlier this week,” he said.
The global population is expected to hit 8 billion people during this climate meeting. “How will we answer when baby 8-billion is old enough to ask ‘What did you do for our world, and for our planet, when you had the chance?’” Guterres asked a room full of world leaders.
Extreme storms and floods are climate related and the UN is trying to warn people about them. It’s called Early Warning for All.
The new plan calls for $3.1 billion to set up early-warning systems over the next five years in places that don’t already have them, beginning with the poorest and most vulnerable countries and regions. There will be more money needed to maintain the warning systems.
Climate Justice: A U.N. Prime Minister’s Call for Solidarity and Action to End Climate Change in Barbados, During the 26th United Nations Climate Conference
The Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, went one step further in her opening speech to fellow leaders. She pointed out corporations that profit from fossil fuels, like oil and gas companies.
She believes that corporations should help cover the costs associated with sea level rise and hurricanes, in places like her country that do not have the money to protect themselves from climate change, and all around the world.
The U.S. government is working with AT&T, a telecommunications company, to provide free access to data about the country’s future climate risks. The idea is to help community leaders better understand and prepare for local dangers from more extreme weather.
The Climate Risk and Resilience Portal will initially provide information about weather. Additional risks such as wildfire and flooding will be added in the coming months.
More than two dozen countries say they’ll work together to stop and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030 in order to fight climate change.
In addition to the United States, the European Union is included in the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership, which accounts for 32% of the world’s forests.
More than 140 countries agreed to conserve their forests at the 26th Congress of the United Nations. However, the U.N. said on Monday that not enough money is being spent to preserve forests, which capture and store carbon.
One urgent goal, then, is transparency in climate-emission figures. Distribution of climate budgets across countries of the world is a priority, says Thunberg. Without climate justice, policies are unlikely to succeed. The subsection “We are not all in the same boat” makes for an effective point.
Fatima Denton is a U.N. official and member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. There will be a larger issue of solidarity as the crisis grows. Support for that idea is needed now.”
Mr. Biden explained that it was pointless for everyone to be safe from the threat of a warming Earth and that collective action would be the only way to take care of it. He called on other countries to follow the lead of America in making drastic cuts to pollution that is driving climate change.
He reiterated a 2021 pledge to provide $11.4 billion annually by 2024 to help developing countries transition to wind, solar and other renewable energy. That money, which is different from a loss and damage fund, was promised by wealthy nations under the 2015 Paris agreement. Last year, Mr. Biden secured just $1 billion toward that goal from Congress.
Summary of the IPCC Conference ‘The Future of Climate Action and Advocacy’ by U.S. Energy Policy Advisor, G. E. Biden
The U.S. government will require domestic oil and gas producers to detect methane leaks in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions, announced Mr. Biden. The fossil fuel industry is the biggest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States; the colorless, odorless gas leaks from pipelines and is often intentionally vented by gas producers. Stopping methane from escaping into the atmosphere is critical to slowing global warming, scientists say.
The silver lining was that delegates from low- and middle-income countries came away with an agreement on a fund to help cover the costs of climate change impacts.
The final 10-page summary document, which was agreed on 20 November, says that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels requires “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” by 2030.
Some delegates struggle to find reason to be cheerful about the slow pace of decarbonization even though calls to stop using fossil fuels were blocked by oil producing states. Many blamed the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the lack of progress on fossil fuels.
Although there is value in bringing people together to share ideas and build momentum, she fears that the core purpose of the meeting — to push world leaders to commit to stronger action and hold them accountable — has been lost. “I have never seen anything like this. She says that they have reduced the whole thing to a spectacle.
Researchers and activists attending the talks for the first time described disbelief as government negotiators spent days going back and forth over single words in the document.
The way the IPCC is set up means that if governments want its advice, they must make a formal request. That request has been due for a long time. The Centre for Climate Change Action and Advocacy’s co- founder says that he was surprised by how long negotiations lasted in Sharm El-Sheikh, and how little evidence they had before they made their decisions. Research must start getting match fit now, before the next round in Dubai.
COP27 saw little by way of new dedicated funding for food systems from governments. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington has pledged to spend over a billion dollars over the next several years to help farmers address the effects of climate change. The solutions become more complex and costly when action is delayed, the chief executive of the foundation said in a statement.
John Kerry said at the conference that existing funds could be used to pay for climate-related losses and damages. US negotiators also opposed the suggestion that high greenhouse-gas emitters should accept liability for their historical emissions, fearing this could lead to claims running potentially into trillions of dollars.
The European Union was also sceptical initially, but eventually changed its position, which put pressure on the United States to follow. This year the fine print for how much will go into the fund will have to be discussed at next year’s conference.
In a first for a climate COP, the final document also backs reform of giant lenders such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which are lynchpins of the global economy. Only a fraction of the $1 trillion in loans available from the International Monetary Fund is for climate finance. Sarah Colenbrander, who is a research associate at the Overseas Development Institute in London, says that this endorsement of reform is significant. That’s because it comes from countries that are also shareholders in these institutions, and can make change happen.
The European rush for natural gas overshadowed the negotiations, even though wealthy countries agreed at the G20 summit in Indonesia to give $20 billion to assist Indonesia’s efforts to wean itself off coal.
Germany has signed a deal with Egypt to advance green hydrogen as well as exports of liquified natural gas, and other governments and companies are courting projects in countries such as Senegal, Tanzania and Algeria.
European leaders insist that these measures are short-term fixes that won’t detract from their long-term commitments, but the optics are very bad, says Narain. She says high-income countries used to claim that lower-income countries would not get funding for fossil-fuel projects. Everybody is asking for more supply.
The negotiations at COP 27 were impacted by these tensions. New wording was added to the final text that would allow for accelerated development of low- emission energy systems which many fear will be used to justify further natural-gas development.
Mohamed Salem Nashwan, who studies construction engineering at the Arab Academy of Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Cairo, is not confident that there will be much progress on fossil fuels at COP28, which is due to be held in Dubai next year. He says the host is heavily linked to the fossil-fuel industries.
Absent from the text is any reference to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s estimate that food systems are responsible for between 21% and 37% of global emissions. “The opportunities for ‘carbon farming’ and land-use change to make a contribution to [climate] mitigation are ignored,” says von Braun.
According to Louise Sadoff, executive director of a global network of agricultural research centre, the new additions are welcome but she does not agree with the text on the food crisis.
Arguments over money are raised at every COP. They will come back atCOP 28, which is expected to be held in the United Arab Emirates in a year’s time. We don’t know how much the loss-and-damage fund will be or which countries will benefit.
The questions about climate finance will not go away. Many are clearly political, and need to be decided at a COP by government negotiators. Those negotiators would benefit enormously if the research community could set out options to inform their positions, and provide a sense of the balance of agreement and disagreement around those options.
The donor countries count money that has been promised for investing in flood defences or wind energy. But low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) would prefer to count only money that has actually been received by projects on the ground, often a much smaller amount. LMICs would like to count grants or other funds that don’t have to be repaid as climate finance Donors also count loans which account for the majority of climate finance. Then there’s the question of scope. If a new housing development in an area of high temperatures is fitted with special cool roofs, say, some would like to count the whole development as climate finance, whereas others would say just the roof part qualifies.
The Dark Arts of Denial and Disinformation: The Carrot as a Model for Climate Action in the US, and Implications for Social Policy
Agnotologists will investigate and teach the dark arts of denial and disinformation—how big data, graphs and figures, and digital communication technologies can all be used to challenge independent scientific research findings. Students will learn how various tools (such as academic experts, public relations firms, and lawyers) and arguments (such as “the problem is too complex” or “there are bigger contributors to the problem”) are used across industries (including by pharmaceutical, tobacco, and fossil fuel companies) and understand how to recognize common patterns of denial. When students see pro-genetic modification groups, they may remember that the pesticide and herbicide manufacturers have paid public relations firms to create these groups, and that the world’s most popular climate activist is probably not a grassroots group.
Students of agnotology will also explore the pros and cons of government secrecy, such as the US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that designates all knowledge about nuclear fission as classified (still in effect). They are looking at the history of the church opposing evolution being taught in schools. They will dissect current examples of disinformation, including the claim that spread in China and France that smoking could prevent Covid-19, and how the meat and dairy industry downplays the contributions of cows to climate change—including the new Dairy Farmers of America advertisement featuring a man in a white lab coat, labeled as a “scientist,” claiming consumers can actually help fight climate change by buying milk and cheese.
We need to understand ignorance in order to save the planet and ourselves, as the powerful don’t want us to know.
If the missed opportunity was 2022, it would be a major change. The executive director of the Project Drawdown, which advocates for climate action, is now more concerned about climate change than he has been before. “We’re a lot less screwed than we would have been. And I’ll take that as kind of encouragement—a little more wind in the sails. Things are really starting to pivot, Hey, wait a minute.
My fellow Americans, meet the new approach to climate action in the US: the carrot. The Inflation Reduction Act is a way to give taxpayers incentives to make green choices. People can get $400 billion in tax breaks to buy electric cars, solar panels, heat pumps, or better insulation, if they choose to. “If you electrify your life, you can save $1,800 a year on your energy bills,” says Stokes. There is a promise to get people onto clean, efficient, and affordable electric machines.
(If you’re not sure exactly what this entails in terms of home upgrades, updating insulation typically requires plugging leaks that let in outdoor air, then spraying either an expanding foam or pulverized newspaper into walls and attic surfaces. A heat pump extracts heat from outdoor air to warm a home, then reverses in the summer to act like an air conditioner. The appliance runs on electricity, not gas, so it can be powered with renewable energy like rooftop solar. They are so efficient that even if you had to run them on energy generated with fossil fuels, you’d still be way better off emissions-wise than with a traditional furnace.)
What does she learn from her activism about climate change in Sweden? An investigation into a climate policy crisis in Sweden, with an application to Thunberg
Four and a half years ago she began striking outside Swedish parliament, a single teenager with a single sign. She was in her 15s. She made a mark at the United Nations climate conference in Poland, by telling the assembled diplomats and negotiators that they were not mature enough to tell it like it is.
A lot of reading is required to understand The Climate Book, but the cumulative impact on my understanding of the crisis became fascinating.
What does Anderson mean by “make-believe”? In her chapter, the journalist describes her investigation into Swedish climate policy, specifically its net zero target for 2045. The official number of greenhouse gases emitted each year is 50 million tons but the real figure is 150 million tons. That lower, official figure leaves out “emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass,” which means the target is way off, she writes. The world would see a catastrophic increase in temperature if all countries were off by that much.
What does that mean, emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass? John Barrett, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Leeds, and Alice Garvey, sustainability researcher at the same university, explain that “emissions from consumption” means emissions are allocated to the country of the consumer, not the producer. Because industrial production is often outsourced to developing economies, in a world where climate justice were front and center, the consumer country (in this example, Sweden) would take the burden of lessening the emissions from consumption.
Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester, adds “a highly significant complication” to this disturbing picture: international aviation and shipping aren’t typically accounted for in national emission targets, policies, and carbon budgets, either.
Poor people and people in developing countries are disproportionately affected by climate change according to the report.
Globally, then, what to do? To hold the interests accountable and push back against their messages, we need to change the way we think about carbon emissions.
Beyond this, it’s not enough “to become vegetarian for one day a week, offset our holiday trips to Thailand or switch our diesel SUV for an electric car,” as Thunberg puts it. It is a great example of greenwashing, but participating in recycling may lead to feel-good moments. After a couple of cycles, even 9% of plastic ends up being dumped or burned.
Thunberg herself has given up flying. Frequent flying is the most damaging activity you can engage in, she writes in the book. Though she writes that lowering her personal carbon footprint isn’t her specific goal in sailing (instead of flying) across the Atlantic — she hopes to convey the need for urgent, collective behavioral change. She wrote that if anyone else behaved as if we were in a crisis, most of them wouldn’t understand.
Social norms can change in a big way. We need to keep climate justice front and center at every step to keep that source of hope.
Eating Smarter: Importance of Minimizing the U.N’s Impact on Climate Change and the Impact on Extremely Vulnerable Populations
Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & Mary. She has seven books about Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity. Find her on Twitter @bjkingape
Simple, immediate solutions such as quickly adopting renewable sources of electricity and putting a stop to new oil and gas exploration are included in the choices. Investing in research that can allow technology to kill carbon dioxide in the air is one of the more aspirational ones.
That kind of extreme warming would lead to irreversible sea level rise and mass extinction of plants and animals, as well as spell disaster for billions of people.
Over the last two years, hundreds of scientists working for the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have published 3 sprawling reports that highlighted the disproportionate effects of climate change on poor people, the need to cut emissions rapidly and the policy options available for doing so. Each of those documents ran hundreds of pages long.
The hope is that the new report will serve as a shared scientific foundation for those negotiations, as well as a menu of solutions available to world leaders.
“Investments in reducing emissions are investments in improving people’s health and education and economic opportunities, and protecting the people we care about,” he explains.
For example, “between 2010 and 2020, human mortality from floods, droughts and storms was 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions, compared to regions with very low vulnerability,” the authors write.
The most vulnerable communities include people who live in low-income countries, low-lying areas and island nations, and Indigenous groups around the world, according to the report.
The Alaskan Fire: Why the World isn’t Just A Single-Spin System, but It’s Been Done Already
Alaska isn’t supposed to be an inferno but it’s now so warm it’s almost inevitable. In June of last year, lightning set the land ablaze, winds whipped up flames and long curtains of fire ripped through the untouched landscape, causing thick smoke to billow into the atmosphere. Firefighters were powerless to contain the blazes. More than 1.7 million acres were burned in a single month.
Now, less than a year later, US president Joe Biden has just approved a massive, 600-million-barrel oil-drilling project in the north of the state, which will further heat the world and deepen Alaska’s descent into an age of fire. Emissions will be equal to 66 coal-fired power plants if fuels are taken from the north slope of Alaska.
Frank Jotzo, a member of the writing team for the synthesis report and a professor of climate change economics at the Australian National University, says that the issue is that the world isn’t acting as one. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a global good, according to Jotzo. “But from any individual nation’s perspective, there is a free-rider incentive to let others go ahead and hang back.”
Australia showed off this behavior last month. After an election in which concerns about climate change were the driving force, the federal government gave permission for a mining company to sink up to 116 new gas wells. This is despite Australia’s east coast experiencing two record-breaking floods last year that proved to be the most expensive in Australian history, costing insurers around AU$3.35 billion (US$2.24 billion). The deluges were almost undoubtedly climate-change-related.