The Cockatoo Chronicles
The Great Disruption Has Begun
We’re living through a virtual tsunami of terrifying climate news. Extreme fire, flood and heat events are smashing records across the globe. Simultaneously, monitoring of various natural processes that regulate our climate indicates unprecedented system changes are underway.
As a result, I argue here we have hit a multi-system tipping point – the “crash” that I have long argued would trigger “the great disruption”. We can now expect a destabilisation of the global climate system at a scale that is so chaotic, unpredictable and costly, it will trigger cascading disruptive change in the global economy, national politics, investment markets and geopolitical security. The implications are profound.
Will the Food and Livestock Industry Follow Fossil Fuels Over the Market Cliff?
The climate emergency is now a methane emergency - because only rapid methane reduction will slow the rate of warming at the required speed (< decade). The most effective response is to cut livestock emissions – reduce consumption of beef and dairy and lower methane emissions in production. This means the food and livestock industry, particular beef and dairy, face a truly existential risk. Their future will be decided this decade. If they don’t embrace change and recognise its disruptive nature, they will go down the same path as fossil fuels. Denial, resistance, avoidance and delay followed by their collapse.
Shifting our Focus from the ‘Level of Emissions’ to the ‘Rate of Warming’.
Every fraction of a degree of warming brings us closer to climate tipping points that if breached, could lead to a runaway process we cannot control. We are teetering on that edge.
We need to reset the debate to have a laser focus on the immediate rate of warming and everything that influences it.
Why The Climate Emergency is now The Methane Emergency
We are about to go through the most profound shift in the climate debate in 20 years. The result will be the end of the gas industry’s hope of being a transition fuel, a brutal market disruption to the agriculture and livestock industries and the arrival of the climate emergency into public consciousness. This will all be driven by the acceptance of methane as the critical response to the climate emergency.
It Will Get Darker Before The Dawn
COVID 19 is not a ‘black swan’ – a singular, unexpected event. It is the first in a series of what NYT’s Tom Friedman referred to as a ‘herd of stampeding black elephants’ – multiple, predictable and economically catastrophic events. Events that everyone knows are coming but our political and business leaders have consciously chosen not to deal with.
Choices have consequences….
COVID-19 And The Death of Market Fundamentalism
On top of the countless human tragedies, there will be many long-lasting social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps none will be more profound though, than the death of free market fundamentalism and the return of the State…
COVID-19 presents a blindingly powerful economic case for change. It shows that an ideological, quasi-religious approach to regulating markets, sometimes called neo-liberalism and, until the virus, the dominant political approach in the west, is fatally flawed. It creates a weak and unstable economy, which magnifies risks and is unable to manage shocks1. It threatens itself.
Our Collapsing House of Cards
It was always going to come to this. Whether it was a pandemic triggering a shutdown, a climate emergency bursting the carbon bubble, a populist backlash against inequality, wars over water or countless other possible triggers, this moment has long been inevitable.
COVID-19 is just like a match thrown on a tinder dry forest floor on a hot windy day and starting a wildfire. The match isn’t the key – it’s where it lands.
Climate Contagion 2020-2025: So It Begins…
You can pretty much hear it now. It’s like being in a forest and hearing the leaves rustling in the tops of trees, just before the storm hits. Then it comes with a roar, everything shakes, and we look around wondering what will fall – and will it fall on us.
This is how I see the global economy and climate change. Everything is ready, everyone knows it’s coming, we’re just waiting for the storm to hit.
When it does, it will be the climate emergency meets financial contagion. When the global market flips to FOMO – from fear of acting too early, to fear of being left behind as everyone races for the exits.
Choosing Extinction
I called this column ‘choosing extinction’ because that is the path we are on today. There is considerable debate whether that extinction applies to us humans, or ‘just’ to millions of other species. But either way a mass extinction event is on the way, unless we choose to stop it.
Will 1.5 Degrees Trigger a Death Spiral for Oil and Gas?
It has always been clear that fixing climate change would require a massive industrial and technological transformation, with widespread social and economic consequences. The recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5 degrees however deeply challenges dominant assumptions about the speed and scale involved. This has profound implications for many industries and policy makers, but perhaps most dramatically for the future of the multi-trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry…