BIG GREENIE ROUNDUP TODAY

Four current articles below

More pressure on banks over global warming

There is an amusing perversity here.  Warmists are trying to  convince banks that lending money to coal and oil companies is risky -- on the grounds that coal and oil are old hat and will soon be replaced by windmills and solar power.  The fact that even the hi-tech "Ivanpah" project in the California desert actually depends for much of the time on "fossil" fuels is not acknowledged.  So the chance that demand for coal and oil will vanish is vanishingly small.

On the other hand, the ever-tightening net of Greenie restrictions is a real hazard to the oil and gas industry.  It bumps up their costs and hence the prices for their product -- leading to a fall in demand and a probable winnowing out of the less efficient producers.  So lending to conventional energy producers does have some risk but not because of global warming or "sustainable" energy.  It is risky because Greenies attack businesses in that field

One of the country's biggest investors, Australian Super, has asked the chairmen of the nation's biggest banks how they are responding to carbon exposure risk, as lenders face growing pressure over their response to climate change.

Australian Super's investment manager for governance, Andrew Gray, said banks needed to give investors comfort that they were "assessing and managing" the risks appropriately.

"We've actually engaged with the boards of the banks and have been asking them about this issue themselves," he said.

Mr Gray said the discussion had occurred over the past year or so and had been "constructive".

"Companies that actually have fossil fuel assets – they would have direct exposure – but banks as financiers of those companies therefore also potentially have exposure," he said.

"We would say it's a plausible issue to be examining for the banks, and so we are certainly doing that."

Former Coalition opposition leader John Hewson, who chairs the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, said that carbon didn't rate a single mention in the financial system inquiry by David Murray, who had previously doubted the severity of climate change.

"I was fascinated that the Murray Review, which is focused heavily on bank capital and the need to increase bank capital, doesn't focus on the climate risk," Dr Hewson said.

Until recently, views such as Dr Hewson's were on the fringe in the finance community, even though environmental groups have been airing them for years.

But noise is being made everywhere. In December, the Bank of England reportedly launched an inquiry into a potential "carbon bubble" in the world economy.

Earlier in the year, former United States secretary to the Treasury and Goldman Sachs chief Hank Paulson likened the growing financial risks created by climate change to the US housing credit bubble that was allowed to inflate until 2008.

Domestically, while there has been investor debate about carbon risk, it has focused on large emitters, such as coalminers, manufacturers, or airlines.

Now the spotlight is on the big four banks - Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB and ANZ.

ANZ and CBA shareholders this year faced resolutions from the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility that would have required banks to disclose their "financed emissions".

Even though these were firmly rejected by shareholders, Mr Gray said it would be wrong to assume this means the issue was being ignored by long-term investors such as super funds.

"Irrespective of the ACCR resolution, that's a conversation that we were having anyway from the perspective of saying, 'Well we're a big investor in the banks, we want to understand what the risk of that looks like and how banks are managing any potential risks from this as an investment theme'," Mr Gray said.

All of the major banks now disclose more information about their lending to big carbon emitters, which is partly a response to the investor and activist pressure.

Company chairmen also told investors they consider risks such as these in detail before extending credit to customers. They say these checks are built into banks' environmental, social and governance policies, which are applied to all of big corporate clients.

ANZ chairman David Gonski faced repeated questions on carbon at its AGM in December, and argued the bank carefully considered any extra risks that big carbon emitters would face.

"We will continue to look to balance things, so that we can see that we are assisting the world in its living standards, but also at the same time moving towards renewables in a positive way," Mr Gonski said.

Despite assurances such as these, research by Tim Buckley from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis - a group pushing for action on climate change by investors - paints a less comforting picture about lenders' response to carbon risks.

Mr Buckley, a former head of equity research at Citi and fund manager, said the big four banks may have already funded "stranded assets" that were already feeling financial pain due to their carbon exposure.

He described the $3 billion Wiggins Island coal export facility as "potentially one of the first stranded assets in Australia" for banks and the associated coalmining company investors.

ANZ arranged the syndicate of local and global banks lending to the project, which has since been hit by a plunge in coal prices. Mr Buckley said this plunge in the coal price was partly the result of carbon risks materialising.

The banks' loans to the Wiggins Island project are protected in this case by take-or-pay contract rules that will in effect mean coalminers guarantee the port's cash flow.

Nonetheless, lending behaviour such as this undermines bank claims about carefully considering carbon risks – though Mr Buckley said this was now starting to change quite quickly.

He said three years ago if you were to ask senior finance executives if they understood the magnitude of their carbon risk in their loan books, infrastructure funds or equity portfolios, they would admit they had "no idea".

Now this is changing, after a collapse in coal company share prices linked to the coal price.

"I think they do have an idea today," he said. "Would they have known a year ago? No."

It had changed significantly in the past six months, he said, in part due to pressure from shareholders and signs that countries including the United States, China, Japan and Germany are acting to address their carbon emissions.

"Through the board election campaign of Ian Dunlop with BHP, the banks have gone through a bit of a baptism of fire and in the last six months," he said. "They are thinking about the associated financial risks a lot more. It wasn't even on their radar a year ago."

Despite these changes, many still remain sceptical that banks are taking carbon risk seriously.

Dr Hewson said: "I doubt if they've had serious board consideration of these sort of issues and gone through their portfolio loan by loan… whether they've actually done that sort of work, and if they have, why wouldn't they be prepared to tell the market what sort of risks they're running?"

The Asset Owners Disclosure Project, which Dr Hewson chairs, is considering "naming and shaming" how the world's 1000 biggest banks are responding to carbon risk, something it already does for pension funds.

He said the issue was not whether banks should avoiding fossil fuels, but that investors needed to be aware of the risks.

Similarly, Mr Buckley prefers to describe the risks in the language of finance, rather than environmentalism or politics.

"I actually never talk about climate change, I talk about the financial risk of stranded assets," he said.

Whatever happens to the politics of climate change, the issue is now clearly on the table as a financial risk. And as Australian Super's Mr Gray said, it was likely to remain there, especially as big super funds become more active in raising this and other social or environmental issues with boards.

SOURCE






Greenie misconceptions about the Great Barrier Reef

VISITORS to north Queensland who come to see the reef and rainforest are often perplexed to gaze from their hotel balconies out on to a wind-ruffled, muddy grey to brown-coloured sea.

What happened to the sparkling blue waters, they ponder. Fuelled by dim memories of media misreports, they usually jump to the conclusion that human pollution must be the cause.

Those who live along the Queensland coast, as opposed to those who preach about it from the concrete and glass metropolitan jungle, know that muddy coastal water is an intrinsic part of the natural tropical system, generated by the resuspension of seabed mud by constantly blowing southeast trade winds.

Indeed, special types of coral reef — turbid-water reefs — have evolved to live happily in just these muddy near-shore waters. The Great Barrier Reef itself — growing luxuriantly in pellucid blue, oceanic waters far offshore — is recognised in textbooks as one part of a larger mixed carbonate-terrigenous complex of both muddy (inshore) and bluewater (offshore) reefs with a long, robust geological history.

Along the Queensland coast, the shoreline is made up of sandy beaches and adjacent sandy-mud coastal lagoons and estuaries, punctuated by spaced rocky headlands. The nearby inner shelf seabed is almost flat and covered by a blanket of sandy mud and mud up to several metres thick that has accumulated during the past few thousand years.

This coastal-inner shelf system has been built, and is still nurtured, by sand and mud delivered to the coast from the Queensland hinterland at times of riverine flood — mostly after cyclones.

Dilute muddy water from even the greatest cyclonic floods only reaches from the coast to the offshore bluewater reefs about once every 10 years. It persists there just briefly before being dispersed by waves and currents, and in being dispersed introduces rare nutrients into a nutrient-starved locale.

The coastal wetlands are important ecosystems for mangrove growth and provide a nurturing environment for fish and invertebrate larvae. Also, shallow embayments with sandy low tide and subtidal beach flats provide the conditions for seagrass growth — an essential habitat for dugongs.

Prior to European settlement, this system existed in precarious but dynamic “balance”, with major cyclones causing immediate coastline erosion, followed months to years later by fairweather shoreline accretion and restoration, fed by sediment contributed by the same and earlier cyclones. It is possible that historical tree-clearing and grazing inland has increased the amount of sand and mud delivered to the coast in post-European time, with one computer model estimate of a two to four -fold increase.

If true, such sediment enhancement is no bad thing. First, the pre-European shoreline was, and remains, deficient of enough sediment to maintain its position without continuing sand nourishment, especially at locations away from river mouths. Second, more sediment nurtures not just the shoreline beaches but feeds nutrient into the ecologically vital coastal wetlands.

Ports and their access channels have been dredged along the Queensland coast since the late 19th century, and the spoil dumped at sea. Over a period of months to years, this spoil is redistributed across a wide area and merges insensibly into the sandy mud, inner shelf substrate.

The briefly enhanced turbidity caused by dredging and dumping activity represents but a small, localised disturbance within a dynamic oceanographic background that sees constantly varying rates of mud resuspension caused by wind, and by the regular interchange of shelf waters within a few days to weeks by tidal and other marine currents.

Not surprisingly, therefore, despite expensive nutrient and water quality analysis in the past 30 years, no measured evidence exists for changes in water quality on the near-shore GBR shelf in post-European time.

Furthermore, the historical dredging and spoil dumping on the shelf has had no other known significantly adverse effects either, especially not on the bluewater reefs in the distant offshore.

Spoil has sometimes been dumped at the shoreline to reclaim areas for port development — the Brisbane and Townsville ports are prime examples. Given the value of the land created, this is an entirely sensible procedure when undertaken (as it has been) as an environmentally efficacious and cost-effective commercial venture.

It is simply fallacious for conservationists to trumpet that the GBR is threatened by near-shore dredging, and it is risible and disgraceful that an international agency (UNESCO) is involved in unscientific grandstanding on the matter as well.

Caving in to activists, the federal government has rejected the two best environmental options for the spoil — either seabed dispersal or land reclamation. Instead, Environment Minister Greg Hunt has opted for the worst and possibly the most expensive environmental option — that spoil dredged from near Abbot Point will be dumped on land.

A more perfect combination of scientific ignorance and environmental stupidity would be hard to find.

SOURCE






Australian City Takes Moderate Approach to Sea-Level Rise

Councilors of the Australian coastal city of Shoalhaven have taken a moderate approach to planning for sea level rise. Shoalhaven’s future planning decisions and real estate notices will be made in anticipation of sea levels rising by nine inches by 2050. Nine inches was a mid-range estimate, more than an inch below the level recommended by consultants Shoalhaven hired to help develop its planning response to rising sea levels.

In addition, Shoalhaven’s planning levels were the first public rejection of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) recommendation to plan for up to 31 inches of sea level rise. CISRO is the Australian national science agency. Other coastal towns planning for rising sea levels have adopted CSIRO’s recommendations.

Evidence, Not Models

The councilors noted research shows sea-level projections are very imprecise, and the further out you go, the less precise they become. In addition, the higher the level of sea level rise planned for, the more properties affected and higher the costs for property owners trying to insure or sell their coastal properties.

The councilors also built a relief valve into their coastal impact planning, something other councils had not done. Every seven years the town will compare projected sea levels to the actual measurements. If sea level rise has slowed or risen, adjustments can be made to coastal impact plans.

In response to Shoalhaven’s planning decision, Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, said, "The rate of change of average global sea level is immaterial to coastal planning. It is only the rate of local change that matters to cities, towns, and other settlements. It is very perceptive of Shoalhaven city planners to actually measure local sea level rise on a periodic basis and make their future plans based on what they actually observe.”

SOURCE






The carbon tax figures are in: Australians paid $14b to reduce global emissions by 0.004%!

We can finally assess (sort of) the carbon tax in Australia. It ran for two years from July 2012 to July 2014 and cost Australians nearly $14 billion. The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office released Australian emissions statistics for the June Quarter of 2014. The headlines hitting the press this week are saying we reduced our emissions by 1.4%.

The Greens are excited, but neither the journalists or the Greens have looked at the numbers.  Not only is this reduction pathetically small on a global scale, but it’s smaller than the “noise” in the adjustments. Like most official statistics the emissions data gets adjusted year after year, and often by 1 – 2%. We won’t really know what our emissions were, or what the fall was, for years to come… (if ever).

Spot the effect of the Australian carbon tax in the graph of emissions by sector below.  It operated for the last two years. The falls in electricity emissions started long before the carbon tax (and probably have more to do with the global financial crisis, a government unfriendly to small business, and the wild subsidies offered for solar power).

Did Australian industry “reduce” their emissions a year ahead of the carbon tax? Maybe. In anticipation of the pointless expense and increased sovereign risk, they may have shut down or moved overseas. Should we celebrate?

The cost-benefits of using a tax to change the weather
During the carbon tax period we “saved” something like 17Mt of CO2. That’s how much less we theoretically emitted compared to what we would have been produced if our emissions had stayed at the annual level they were at in June 2012 (subject to adjustment).

Australia’s emissions are 1.5% of total human emissions, which are 4% of global emissions*. Those global emissions from all sources during the two years of the tax were roughly 416 Gt. Thus the carbon tax may have reduced global CO2 emissions by 0.004% and global temperatures by less.

The carbon tax is often framed as “revenue” or money raised, as if the government created some wealth. It should always be called a cost. And it’s not money from “polluters” — it’s money from Australians.

The carbon tax cost Australians $6.6 billion in 2012-2013  and cost $7.2 billion (projected) in 2013-14. Over the two year period, that’s $13.8b for an average reduction of 0.004%. The carbon tax was projected to cost $7.6 billion in 2014-15 if it had not been repealed.

The story of shifting data

Despite the headlines of “record falls” in Australian emissions, the data keeps changing, and the fall was about the same size as the adjustments. Each quarter, the numbers may be revised by up to 2%. In four of the last six years the annual emissions were announced and then were later raised. In two years the original estimate was similar to the last.

In other words, any 1% change is mere noise (in so many ways). Some of the time the headlines will have announced a fall in emissions that later vanished with data revision.

According to the most recent Excel data statistics I can find (subject to change), over the two years of the carbon tax our emissions started at 555Mt, fell to 550Mt and fell again to 542 Mt. As you can see by reading across the rows, the emissions may be adjusted for years after the fact. Who knows what Australia’s emissions of 2014 will be listed as 10 years from now.

More HERE  (See the original for links & graphics)