Climate Science Denial

Tories Ditched Net Zero Commitment While Receiving £250,000 from Oil Investors and Climate Deniers

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Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

The Conservatives received a hefty sum from oil and gas investors and those with roles at anti-climate campaign groups during the period when the party rolled back a key climate commitment.

New records released today reveal that Kemi Badenoch’s party accepted £50,000 in January from Neil Record, the chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s foremost climate science denial group.

In March, Badenoch announced that the Conservatives would no longer be advocating for the UK to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 – the goal currently pursued by the government. In a speech hosted by an advertising group that works for the oil giant Shell, Badenoch suggested that we are “bankrupting ourselves” in the pursuit of the 2050 target.

While the UK’s oil and gas reserves are dwindling, the country’s green economy grew by 10 percent in 2024.

Badenoch said that the country should still seek to reduce its climate impact, but shouldn’t set a date for achieving net zero.

Record – who is also lifetime president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a pressure group that received funding from BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018 – has claimed that achieving net zero emissions by 2050 “will restrict our freedom, and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive”. Record has donated to both the IEA and GWPF.

The GWPF regularly contradicts basic climate science, suggesting that CO2 emissions are “not pollution”.

A month before her net zero announcement, Record paid for Badenoch, her family, and members of her shadow cabinet to have a week-long retreat in Gloucestershire. The Net Zero Watch chair is close to the Tory leader, having provided funding and office space to her 2024 leadership campaign.

Over the past two decades, the Conservative Party has accepted £7.2 million from senior figures at the GWPF, while Badenoch’s campaign also received funding from a director at the fossil fuel major Chevron.

The party accepted a further £117,600 in the first quarter of this year from Alasdair Locke, a longstanding Tory donor who made his fortune in the oil industry. Locke is currently the chair of the UK’s largest independent petrol station operator Motor Fuel Group, and the non-executive chair of Well-Safe solutions, a firm that decommissions oil and gas wells. He is the founder of Abbot Group, a major oil and gas services company in the North Sea.

Badenoch’s party also received £75,000 in March from IPGL, a family investment firm belonging to Tory peer Lord Michael Spencer. A billionaire financier and former Tory treasurer, Spencer has investments worth at least £100,000 in each of the oil and gas companies Deltic Energy and Pantheon Resources.

“Is it any wonder that Kemi Badenoch’s Tories are so vehemently against net zero? No sooner do they get a quarter of a million from fossil fuel companies, do they decide to ditch the net zero commitments that they were so evangelical about just a few years ago,” said Harmit Kambo, campaigns manager at Good Law Project. “Given the existential climate threats we face, the Tories’ capitulation to climate change deniers perhaps sets a new low for their policy-making integrity.”

The Conservatives, Neil Record, Alasdair Locke, and Michael Spencer were approached for comment.

Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingTories Ditched Net Zero Commitment While Receiving £250,000 from Oil Investors and Climate Deniers

Rosebank oilfield: why more UK oil means more global emissions

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Frode Koppang / shutterstock

Fergus Green, UCL

The UK government will soon face a momentous decision over whether to approve production in the Rosebank oilfield off the coast of Shetland.

Rosebank is the UK’s biggest undeveloped field. Its proponents – the largest of which is Norwegian state-owned petroleum company, Equinor – estimate that it will produce the equivalent of up to 500 million barrels of oil between 2026 and 2051. When burned, this oil will generate up to 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is more than the combined annual emissions of 28 low-income countries.

Thanks to recent court cases, the climate effects of those “combustion emissions” will need to be taken into account by the government when it decides whether to approve production at Rosebank. In a new report, two colleagues and I reviewed the evidence concerning the implications of new oil and gas fields in the UK.

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There is a rapidly dwindling global carbon budget for holding temperature increases to below 1.5°C of warming (the more conservative end of the Paris agreement’s temperature goal).

Globally, the emissions from burning the fossil fuels in oil and gas fields and coalmines that are already operating or under development far exceed that budget. In this context, Rosebank’s combustion emissions are highly significant, as they add considerably to that excess.

We also found that the projected production from existing fields is sufficient to meet or exceed global oil and gas demand in modelled economic scenarios in which climate warming is restrained to within 1.5°C. This is further evidence that new fields are not consistent with achieving globally agreed temperature goals.

However, it is often asserted by supporters of new fields that keeping UK oil in the ground won’t reduce global emissions, because another producer will supply the demand and reap the benefits. This is a gross and dangerous oversimplification which, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, “defies basic economics of supply and demand”.

Allowing a new field like Rosebank would increase the supply of oil globally, resulting in a fall in its price which, though small, would cause more oil to be consumed. As UK government advisers at the Climate Change Committee have acknowledged, new petroleum projects “support a larger global market overall” for petroleum. Stopping Rosebank would have the opposite effect, and lead to less oil consumed.

Puffin looks at cliffs
Rosebank is found about 80 miles west of Shetland and its puffins. Philippe Clement / shutterstock

The oil industry likes to trumpet the UK’s relatively low upstream emissions – that is, from the process of extracting oil – compared with those of competitors overseas. But this is a distraction from the bigger issue: the additional greenhouse gases emitted from consuming the extra oil that new fields produce.

A recent peer-reviewed study by economists and experts in the emissions-intensity of oil and gas production concluded that limiting oil supply will almost always lead to lower overall emissions, regardless of the intensity of upstream emissions from different fields. It is highly likely that leaving Rosebank’s oil in the ground will result in lower global greenhouse gases than would occur if the field were developed.

However, this focus on Rosebank’s aggregate emissions ignores two further reasons the field’s development consent should be refused on climate grounds.

A litmus test of climate leadership

First, exploiting new sources of oil supply like Rosebank locks in future oil and gas production, ultimately making it economically, politically and legally harder to wind the industry down.

Second, as the Climate Change Committee also stated, decisions by the UK government concerning petroleum production have an important “signalling effect” internationally and at home.

Internationally, the UK government has rightly acknowledged that climate action “must be accelerated drastically” to keep the average global temperature rise “below 1.5°C”.

The UK has a proud reputation for climate leadership. It was the first country to enact a legally binding framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it rapidly phased out coal-fired power generation, and in 2019 it became the first country to adopt a net zero emissions target.

Building on this legacy, the foreign secretary David Lammy has vowed to “push for the ambition needed to keep 1.5 degrees alive”. But approving Rosebank would signal to the world that the UK government is not sincere about keeping the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C goal “alive”, after all.

Some might think that aspirations to climate leadership are futile given the Trump administration’s “drill, baby, drill” approach to fossil fuels. But Trump’s recklessness at a critical time for global climate efforts makes UK climate leadership more important than ever.

The UK already chairs a suite of international energy transition alliances focused on the international phase-out of coal-fired power, the scale-up of renewables, and the financing of these transitions. It could plug a gap in its influence by rejecting Rosebank and joining the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance, a “club” of (currently) 25 national and sub-national governments that are working to phase-out oil and gas production and persuade other countries to follow suit.

And it could deepen cooperation with the EU to drive down oil and gas demand and scale up clean energy throughout the region, yielding benefits that will outlive the Trump administration.

Domestically, rejecting Rosebank would send a powerful signal to investors about the sincerity of the government’s commitment to achieve economic growth by becoming a “clean energy superpower”, as the governing Labour party pledged to do at the last election.

But the benefits of clean prosperity must extend to the people and communities caught up in the transition, too. The UK’s North Sea oil and gas reserves, along with the jobs their production supports, are in terminal decline.

Oil and gas workers and the communities in which they are based already face a volatile future. New fields like Rosebank would create some additional jobs in this declining industry. But they cannot arrest its long-term decline.

The government recognises that this transition is already taking place and will continue. With targeted regional and industrial investment, support for workers and their families, and careful planning that meaningfully involves affected communities, the UK has an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how to achieve a just transition away from oil and gas.

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Fergus Green, Associate Professor in Political Theory and Public Policy, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingRosebank oilfield: why more UK oil means more global emissions

Carbon Capture ‘Not Going to Happen,’ Top Fossil Fuel Advocate Predicts

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Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

Canada Energy Minister Tim Hodgson (left) and climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg (right). Credit: Dan Lofton (CC BY-NC 2.0) and CPAC / YouTube

In audio obtained by DeSmog, Bjorn Lomborg told a Fraser Institute event in Vancouver that the technology is way too expensive to be viable.

Bjorn Lomborg has for years promoted the idea that fossil fuels are crucial for humankind through syndicated newspaper columns, best-selling books and appearances on TV shows including HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

He’s been called a “friend” by Trump administration energy secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright and helps advise an anti-net zero organization known as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) created by the Canadian conservative podcaster Jordan Peterson.

Yet the Danish political scientist — who acknowledges that climate change is real but denies that it’s a serious crisis — has a dim view of the oil and gas industry’s preferred solution to climate change: carbon capture and storage.

That technology is favored by Alberta premier Danielle Smith and Liberal energy minister Tim Hodgson, both of whom recently floated the idea of a “grand bargain” where Canada’s oil and gas industry gets approval for new pipelines in exchange for moving forward with a $16.5 billion carbon capture project.

It might seem that a prominent fossil fuel advocate like Lomborg would support technology loudly touted by major oil and gas producers and their political allies. But speaking at a private event last week in Vancouver, exclusive audio of which was obtained by DeSmog, Lomborg argued that “carbon capture will always be a net cost” to oil and gas producers and the taxpayers that subsidize it.

“In realistic terms, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen,” he added, referring to the prospect of prices for the technology coming down low enough that it can be rapidly and cost-efficiently deployed worldwide.

On that point Lomborg might actually be in agreement with climate policy experts who are also critical of carbon capture. “There’s a lot of federal money and provincial money that could be thrown at this thing,” Dave Sawyer, principal economist at the Canadian Climate Institute, recently told DeSmog. “We’ve been looking at this option for almost 20 years and it hasn’t happened.”

Speaking at the Fraser Institute

Lomborg was in the west coast Canadian city to speak at a private luncheon hosted by the Fraser Institute, a free-market organization with a long history of disputing the scientific reality of climate change that has received funding from the likes of Exxon and the charitable foundation of oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch.

It’s a leading member of Atlas Network, an influential coalition of more than 500 groups worldwide that promote free-market policies and whose partners in Canada have developed political strategies for fossil fuel expansion. 

“Yes, global warming is real. It’s man-made, but it’s often also vastly exaggerated,” Lomborg claimed at the Fraser Institute luncheon, the same day that the United Nations warned that global temperatures were likely to breach the crucial warming threshold of 1.5 degrees within the next five years. 

During the event he was asked for this thoughts about carbon capture, a technology that Canada’s largest oil and gas companies have for years argued is crucial for achieving “net zero” emissions in their operations.

Those companies, via an industry group called Pathways Alliance, are currently in talks with the federal and Alberta governments to build a multi-billion dollar carbon capture project in the heart of the Canadian oil sands which could be subsidized heavily by taxpayers.

“The problem is you need to store it underground,” Lomborg said, referring to the carbon dioxide captured by the technology. And to do that on a meaningful scale worldwide, he argued, “you have to build at least an infrastructure equivalent to the infrastructure that we built in the last hundred years for oil and gas. And remember back then, we did it because it was incredibly profitable. This time we would just have to pay for it.”

Current costs in Canada could be as high as $150 per tonne of CO2. Lomborg noted that for direct air capture projects — which Pathways Alliance is also proposing and involve sucking carbon emissions from the atmosphere — the costs could be as high as $600 per tonne. At those price points, widespread deployment is “not going to happen,” he said.

Growing rightwing backlash to CCS

Climate experts such as University of Pennsylvania scientist Michael Mann have for years argued that carbon capture and storage is a false solution to the climate crisis that allows oil and gas companies to suck up huge amounts of public money while continuing to pump fossil fuels. “It’s not a meaningful climate solution and it displaces meaningful climate solutions like clean energy, renewable energy,” he told a U.S. House panel in 2022.

But recently there has been growing backlash to the technology from conservatives and fossil fuel advocates, some of whom see it as an egregious government waste.

“We might as well take tax money at gunpoint and burn it,” Peterson, the conservative podcaster, wrote last year on X in response to a CCS project in Wyoming.

At Peterson’s ARC conference in London this February, the climate crisis denier Robert Bryce told DeSmog that carbon capture “will never work at scale.” He added, “Once you get that CO2 super-compressed and you’re pushing it down underground, there are very few places where you can actually sequester it. So it’s a lot of money wasted.”

That skepticism is now translating into federal U.S. policy, with Wright’s Department of Energy recently canceling $3.7 billion in decarbonization awards for carbon capture projects from Exxon and other fossil fuel producers. 

Canada is still pushing ahead, however. Recently appointed Liberal energy minister Hodgson, a previous board member of oil and producer MEG Energy, said during a speech in Calgary in May that “All of us, governments and industry, need to get the Pathways [carbon capture] project done.”

During his Vancouver talk, Lomborg argued that the main reason oil and gas companies are pursuing such prohibitively expensive climate projects is so they can be generously supported by governments.

“What you can do is you can get a lot of subsidies,” he said.

Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Continue ReadingCarbon Capture ‘Not Going to Happen,’ Top Fossil Fuel Advocate Predicts

Oil giant funds computer game that promotes fossil fuels to schoolchildren

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Original article by Josephine Moulds republished from TBIJ  under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The online game is targeted at pupils as young as seven

Equinor, the company looking to develop the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea, has funded a computer game aimed at UK school children, promoting the idea that fossil fuels are part of a green energy mix.

In an unusually frank admission of lobbying children, a web page promoting the game stated that it “aligns with our work to build future talent pipelines and secure permission to operate at a time of sensitivity around fossil fuels, particularly in light of . . . the Rosebank development”. The story was first revealed by the Norwegian news publication E24.

Rosebank – the UK’s largest untapped oilfield – was greenlit by the Conservative government in 2023, prompting condemnation from climate campaigners. That decision was ruled unlawful by the courts in January this year because it had not taken into account the carbon emissions created by burning any oil and gas produced. Equinor, Norway’s state energy company, continues preparation work on the site under its joint venture with Shell. [*1]

The game lets players choose between renewable energy or fossil fuels to power their city.

Marketing agency We Are Futures, which describes itself as “the go-to partner for building advocacy for brands amongst young people”, developed Equinor’s schools-based, curriculum-linked education programme, Wonderverse. It also received support from the Association for Science Education (ASE), a UK membership organisation for science teachers and technicians.

Read more: £4bn in UK public pensions funding North Sea oil giants drilling new wellsBP has been rowing back on renewables for years. So why was it helped by ‘net zero’ banks?Allianz’s board says it’s time to save the planet. They can start with their own investments

The game was promoted on ASE’s School Science website, which also stated: “With over two-thirds of teens believing the oil and gas industry causes more problems than it solves, Wonderverse helps lay misconceptions to rest by exploring some of the challenges involved in a just energy transition.”

The ASE web page, which has been taken down since the story first broke, said the programme, aimed at 7–14 year olds, is “designed to spark wonder for science and the future of energy”. It includes a game, in which players attempt to build a city that survives until the year 2050, and in-school education materials to “showcase how modern cities use energy resources and the ways the energy transition can be managed”.

While players are encouraged to invest in research into renewable energy, TBIJ successfully ran a city powered by oil and some renewables until 2050. Meanwhile, scientists say there must be huge declines in the use of coal, oil and gas to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and avoid further catastrophic climate change.

Screenshot from Game Over screen of Energy Town

Charlotte Howell, who leads the climate campaign group Parents for Future, was shocked that Equinor was behind an energy-themed game aimed at UK schoolchildren. She told E24: “We want to know how this can be allowed. I’m horrified that Equinor, as a partly state-owned company, is working against UK ambitions on climate. They are lobbying directly against our children.”

Tessa Khan, executive director at climate campaign group Uplift, said it was “morally indefensible” to pretend that the UK needed Rosebank for energy security when in reality it would accelerate the climate crisis.

Khan told TBIJ: “It’s one thing for Equinor to mislead the public about the benefits of new oil fields like Rosebank, but it is quite another to target children with blatant fossil fuel propaganda disguised as ‘education’. This so-called ‘computer game’ is not about learning – it’s about teaching the next generation to see oil and gas as inevitable, when the climate science could not be clearer that we need to leave new fossil fuels in the ground.”

Equinor told TBIJ it was not aware of the promotional material associated with the game until notified by media, and denied that rolling out the school game is part of a lobbying campaign to promote developing Rosebank.

A spokesperson said: “The overall intention and aim for Wonderverse and Energy Town is to provide schools and teachers with a suite of high-quality resources to help students learn more about where energy comes from, whilst building … the employability skills needed to successfully enter employment. The learning resources have been awarded a green tick by the Association for Science Education, assuring the programme’s quality for use in schools.” They also said the game was developed using data from the International Energy Agency.

ASE’s School Science website provides free online science resources for teachers and students. The site was sponsored by partners including ExxonMobil, which ASE describes as “the world’s leading nongovernmental energy company aiming to meet world energy demand in an economically, environmentally and socially responsible manner”. ExxonMobil is the world’s third most polluting company, according to Carbon Majors, a database of historical fossil fuel production data.

A spokesperson for ASE said the promotional text was provided via briefing materials from We Are Futures. They said the School Science website was no longer actively maintained and will be decommissioned, and that ExxonMobil is no longer a partner of ASE.

We Are Futures, which also works for the UK government and BP, did not respond to a request for comment.

After the court ruling in January, Equinor is set to reapply to the UK government for approval to develop Rosebank. This time it must include information about the emissions that will be produced by burning the oil extracted from Rosebank. According to Uplift, those emissions could be more than the combined annual CO2 emissions of all 28 lowest-income countries in the world, including Uganda, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. Equinor is reportedly “confident” that the project will go ahead and expects it to start up in 2026 or 2027.

Khan said: “If Equinor is serious about supporting the next generation, it should start by walking away from Rosebank and using its power and influence to focus solely on renewable energy. That’s the only way to really protect our children’s future.”

Reporter: Josephine Moulds
Environment editor: Rob Soutar
Deputy editor: Chrissie Giles
Editor: Franz Wild
Fact checker: Frankie Goodway
Production editor: Sasha Baker

TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.

Original article by Josephine Moulds republished from TBIJ  under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

*1 by dizzy. Equinor is attempting to develop the Rosebank oil field in partnership with Ithaca Energy, not Shell.

Campaigners take part in a Stop Rosebank emergency protest outside the U.K. Government building in Edinburgh, after the controversial Equinor Rosebank North Sea oil field was given the go-ahead Wednesday, September 27, 2023. (Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)
Campaigners take part in a Stop Rosebank emergency protest outside the U.K. Government building in Edinburgh, after the controversial Equinor Rosebank North Sea oil field was given the go-ahead Wednesday, September 27, 2023. (Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)

Continue ReadingOil giant funds computer game that promotes fossil fuels to schoolchildren

Actuaries and Scientists Warn Climate Shocks Risk ‘Planetary Insolvency’

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Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Published Jan 16, 2025

Gas company employees work in Malibu, California, after the Palisades Fire destroyed beach homes on January 12, 2025. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

A new report “shows a 50% GDP contraction between 2070 and 2090 unless an alternative course is chartered,” said the lead author.

U.K. actuaries and University of Exeter climate scientists on Thursday warned that “the risk of planetary insolvency looms unless we act decisively” and urged policymakers to “implement realistic and effective approaches to global risk management.”

Actuaries have developed techniques that “underpin the functioning of the global pension market with $55 trillion of assets, and the global insurance market, collecting $8 trillion of premiums annually, to help us manage risk,” Tim Lenton, University of Exeter’s climate change and Earth system science chair, noted in the foreword of a report released Thursday.

Planetary Solvency—Finding Our Balance With Nature is the fourth report for which the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) has collaborated with climate scientists. In financial terms, solvency is the ability of people or companies to pay their long-term debts. Co-authors of one of the previous publications coined the phrase planetary solvency, “setting out the idea that financial risk management techniques could be adapted to help society manage climate change and other risks.”

Three IFoA leaders—Kalpana Shah, Paul Sweeting, and Kartina Tahir Thomson—explained in their introduction to the latest report how “planetary solvency applies these techniques to the Earth system,” writing:

The essentials that support our society and economy all flow from the Earth system, commodities such as food, water, energy, and raw materials. The Earth system regulates the climate and provides a breathable atmosphere, it is the foundation that underpins our society and economy. Planetary solvency assesses the Earth system’s ability to continue supporting us, informed by planetary boundaries, tipping points in the Earth system, and other scientific discoveries to assess risks to this foundation—and thus to our society and the economy.

Our illustrative assessment of planetary solvency in this report shows a more fundamental, policy-led change of direction is required. Our current market-led approach to mitigating climate and nature risks is not delivering. There is an increasing risk of severe societal disruption (planetary insolvency), as our economic system drives further global warming and nature degradation.

“Impacts are already severe with unprecedented fires, floods, heatwaves, storms, and droughts,” the document points out, emphasizing that human activity—particularly burning fossil fuels—drives climate change and biodiversity loss. “If unchecked they could become catastrophic, including loss of capacity to grow major staple crops, multimeter sea-level rise, altered climate patterns, and a further acceleration of global warming.”

The report was released as wildfires ravage California and shortly after scientific bodies around the world concluded that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first in which the average global temperature exceeded a key goal of the Paris agreement: 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. In the United States, experts identified 27 disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion.

“We risk triggering tipping points such as Greenland ice sheet melt, coral reef loss, Amazon forest dieback, and major ocean current disruption,” the new publication warns, adding that “tipping points can trigger each other,” and if multiple are triggered, “there may be a point of no return, after which it may be impossible to stabilize the climate.”

Food system shocks and more frequent and devastating disasters increase the risk of mass mortality for humanity—including due to hunger and infectious diseases—along with mass migration and conflict, the report highlights.

“Climate change risk assessment methodologies understate economic impact, as they often exclude many of the most severe risks that are expected and do not recognize there is a risk of ruin,” the document stresses. “They are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right.”

Specifically, lead author and IFoA council member Sandy Trust said in a statement, “widely used but deeply flawed assessments of the economic impact of climate change show a negligible impact” on gross domestic product (GDP).

However, Trust continued, “the risk-led methodology, set out in the report, shows a 50% GDP contraction between 2070 and 2090 unless an alternative course is chartered.”

To mitigate the risk of planetary insolvency, the co-authors called on policymakers around the world to implement independent, annual assessments; set limits and thresholds that respect the planet’s boundaries; enhance governance structures to support planetary solvency; and “enhance policymaker understanding of ecological interdependencies, tipping points, and systemic risks so they understand why these changes are needed.”

They also underscored the need to limit global warming and avoid triggering tipping points with actions such as accelerating decarbonization, removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, restoring damaged ecosystems, and building resilience.

“You can’t have an economy without a society, and a society needs somewhere to live,” said Trust. “Nature is our foundation… Threats to the stability of this foundation are risks to future human prosperity which we must take action to avoid.”

Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes' concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country's economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.

Continue ReadingActuaries and Scientists Warn Climate Shocks Risk ‘Planetary Insolvency’