24 February 2016, Science Daily, Consumers have huge environmental impact. We like to blame the government or industries for the Earth’s problems, but what we buy makes a big difference. The world’s workshop — China — surpassed the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth in 2007. But if you consider that nearly all of the products that China produces, from iPhones to tee-shirts, are exported to the rest of the world, the picture looks very different. “If you look at China’s per capita consumption-based (environmental) footprint, it is small,” says Diana Ivanova, a PhD candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Industrial Ecology Programme. “They produce a lot of products but they export them. It’s different if you put the responsibility for those impacts on the consumer, as opposed to the producer.” That’s exactly what Ivanova and her colleagues did when they looked at the environmental impact from a consumer perspective in 43 different countries and 5 rest-of-the-world regions. Their analysis, recently published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, showed that consumers are responsible for more than 60 per cent of the globe’s greenhouse gas emissions, and up to 80 per cent of the world’s water use. “We all like to put the blame on someone else, the government, or businesses,” Ivanova says. “But between 60-80 per cent of the impacts on the planet come from household consumption. If we change our consumption habits, this would have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well.” The analysis allowed Ivanova and her colleagues to see that consumers are directly responsible for 20 per cent of all carbon impacts, which result from when people drive their cars and heat their homes. But even more surprising is that four-fifths of the impacts that can be attributed to consumers are not direct impacts, like the fuel we burn when we drive our cars, but are what are called secondary impacts, or the environmental effects from actually producing the goods and products that we buy. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
22 February 2016, Renew Economy, Failure to include health risks grossly distorts true costs of climate change. Climate change is above all a question of public health. Although spared from famine and civil disruption that will afflict other countries, Australians increasingly will be exposed to the effects of extreme weather patterns consequent to our heating climate, and they will as a result suffer more ill health requiring attention from GPs and hospitals. Heat waves lead to heat stroke, increase heart attacks, cause dehydration and threaten those with renal impairment; fires threaten life in so many ways; floods and wild storms can cause drownings and other injuries; and all these events lead to distress and affect long-term mental well-being. Children especially, but also adults, can suffer from sleep disturbances, aggressive behaviour, sadness, substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Children are also vulnerable to extreme weather events because such events interrupt their safety, their sense of security and their access to the outside world. Hotter days will bring more asthma, and, in some localities, more exposure to local mosquito-born infectious diseases. This cannot be what we want for our children. Disturbingly, our health system infrastructure and resources can also be affected by more severe and frequent extreme weather events, thus potentially limiting their ability to provide care when it is needed most. For example, in the heat wave before the Black Saturday bushfires, 25 per cent of all hospitals had problems with their air-conditioning or cooling systems. Political leaders, by ignoring the impacts of global warming on health, have hindered public discourse and concerted action on climate change despite the urgency to act. The failure to include health costs distorts the costs to families and communities, as well as the bottom line on already-stretched health budgets. What is already well known by economists, for example, is that the health costs of coal and fossil fuel burning increase societal costs of electricity (double or more by some estimates) – surely an incentive to escape from the fossil fuel addiction. The Morwell coalmine fire in Victoria would be another route by which society is damaged by use of fossil fuels. As a medical organisation, Doctors for the Environment Australia is frustrated by the dismal failure of governments and our senior leaders to include the health risks and costs in the numerous discussions on climate change. Read More here
17 February 2016, The Guardian, The key to halting climate change: admit we can’t save everything. Climate change, and human resistance to making the changes needed to halt it, both continue apace: 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history, we may be on the brink of a major species extinction event in the ocean, and yet political will is woefully lacking to tackle this solvable problem. Given these dire ecological trends, limited public funding and legislative gridlock, the time is ripe for a budget-neutral, executive-branch approach for managing our natural resources: triage. A science-based triage approach should be used to classify areas and species into one of three categories: not at immediate risk, in need of immediate attention or beyond help. Refusing to apply triage implicitly assumes that we can save everything and prevent change, which we cannot. Prioritization will occur regardless, just ad hoc and shrouded. This triage system would replace the status quo of inadequately managing our full portfolio of over 1m square miles of public land and 1,589 threatened and endangered species. For areas or species not at immediate risk, we can delay action while monitoring to detect changes in that status. For example, increased temperatures and prolonged periods of drought may increase both wildfires and populations of tree-killing beetles in forests of the Pacific north-west. Knowing this, we can track these variables and explore management options that minimize risk without prematurely devoting disproportionate resources. For areas needing immediate help, we must act now. For the coral reefs of the Florida Keys and US Virgin Islands, all anthropogenic impacts (such as overfishing, pollution and coastal development) must be dramatically reduced. Otherwise, because the health of these coral reefs is currently so compromised, they are unlikely to survive the sea level rise, rising ocean temperatures and increasing acidification resulting from climate change. For species protections, it would be wise to focus on keystone species such as oysters (water filterers), parrotfish (algae eaters on overgrown coral reefs), bees (pollinators) and wolves (key predators). For areas we can no longer maintain, we must make the most difficult of choices – give up, and accept that change is not always preventable. In Alaska, it may be too late to prevent the climate change-induced shift from coniferous-dominated to deciduous-dominated stands, with unfortunate impacts on forest-dwelling species and the logging industry. In the ocean, entire fisheries can be lost from an area when species shift due to warming waters. Read More here
11 February 2016, Renew Economy, Victorian climate review calls for 1.5°C long-term emissions target. An independent review into the Victoria’s Climate Change Act has found the current legislation to be “inadequate” in its response to the threat of global warming, and has made 33 recommendations on how it can be strengthened. The most striking recommendation for the state that hosts Australia’s fleet of highly polluting brown coal-fired power generators is the introduction of a long-term state emissions reduction target based on restricting global warming to 1.5°C, as well as five-yearly interim targets. The proposed target is in keeping with the landmark pact made at the Paris COP21 to keep global temperature increase “well below” 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. It is also in line with the current climate science, that argues 2°C could be “inadequate” as a safe limit. But the target could prove ambitious for a state that hosts some of the world’s dirtiest coal-fried power stations, and a fossil fuel dominated grid. Indeed, some – like Australian climate activist David Spratt – have questioned the target’s ability to be achieved in Victoria – even in the long term. He suggests that the “carbon budget” for the state is already used up for a 1.5C target. #Springst #Climate Change Act Review delusion: calls for long-term emissions target for 1.5C, but carbon budget for 1.5C already used up! Undertaken in 2015 and tabled in the Victorian parliament on Thursday, the review’s main goal, according to the government, was to “undo the damage” the previous Coalition government had done to the 2010 legislation, and to help restore Victoria as a leader in climate change action. …. Among its recommendations, the Committee proposes an increase in the powers of the state Environment Protection Authority (EPA) in regulating emissions reduction, and the development of a comprehensive climate change strategy every five years. It also recommends the state consider “the suite of options available to reduce emissions at their source;” and that the Act introduces a requirement for each lead department to develop an Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction Action Plan (ADDRAP). Read more here