Law Student Tackles NZ Govt On Climate Change

Radio New Zealand

A 24-year old law student plans to take the New Zealand Government to court over its climate change policy, claiming the targets to which it will commit at an upcoming UN climate convention in Paris are too low.

Waikato University law student Sarah Thomson has filed papers in the High Court in Wellington challenging the government's climate change policy. Photo: NZ Geographic

Sarah Thomson, who studies at Waikato University, has filed papers in the High Court in Wellington, requesting a judicial review of aspects of the government's climate change policy.
Listen to Sarah Thomson on Checkpoint ( 3 min 37 sec )
She said its domestic greenhouse gas targets were unreasonable and not in line with the current scientific consensus, and they should have been reviewed following a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year.
"I'm going to be arguing that there actually is a legal obligation to set those reductions along the lines of scientific consensus.
"The Climate Change Response Act actually says in the 'purpose' section that any decision should be made in light of the climate change convention", she told Checkpoint.
"We're challenging the fact that government hasn't reviewed its emissions reductions targets, and that the targets that it has set for the convention in Paris are too low and unreasonable."

More on the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21) in December:

• Groser optimistic about climate change talks
• 'Lack of sunlight' on climate change

New Zealand's current proposed target ahead of the convention is to reduce emissions by 11 percent, based on 1990 levels, by 2030.
But, according to Ms Thomson's case, this target is "unreasonable and irrational".
Her case is that New Zealand's Climate Change Response Act requires the minister to review targets whenever the IPCC releases a new report, to make sure that targets are in line with scientific research and consensus on how to mitigate climate change.
She said there was no evidence any such review had taken place, which would mean the minister had acted unlawfully.
"I am fairly certain [that no review has happened] - all the information goes out onto the government website, and nothing has gone out about a review of that target."
A spokesperson for Minister for Climate Change Issues Tim Groser said the minister was seeking legal advice and was not in a position to comment further.

Possible precedent
In June, a Dutch court found its government had set an inadequate climate change policy, ordering it to adopt greater greenhouse gas reduction targets on behalf of its citizens.
Ms Thomson said the media attention around that case would have brought the issue to many people's attention but someone still needed to do something tangible.
"It's just a case of acting. And I and the lawyers have done that."

A spokesperson for Minister for Climate Change Issues Tim Groser said the minister was seeking legal advice over Ms Thomson's challenge. Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson

A column published on Wellington-based legal analysis website Deconstructing Paris in October said the New Zealand case was not quite the same as its Dutch predecessor.
The legal systems of the two countries differed, it said, with the Dutch system including a requirement for the government to perform its duty of care towards its citizens.
It also has a concept called "hazardous negligence", referring specifically to the state, which was a key aspect of the case and which not feature in New Zealand law.
Finally, the column said, the Dutch constitution specifically states that the authorities must "keep the country habitable and protect and improve the environment".

'We're in it for the long haul'
Ms Thomson said she had not always been interested in climate change, but following it more over the last few months impressed on her the need to act.
"Just learning more about it has made me realise how important this is, to do something. It's not really just the legal side of it, but also the human rights side and the environmental side of it too."
What Ms Thomson hoped to get out of her legal action depended on how the government responded, she said.
"The best outcome would be that the government is forced to review those targets and to set higher, more ambitious targets. Also, I hope that they're going to have a plan to actually achieve those targets too."
In the meantime, she was happy to play the waiting game.
"We're in it for the long haul - I'm keen to keep on taking it all the way through, and the lawyers are too."

Gates Foundation Would Be $1.9bn Better Off If It Had Divested From Fossil Fuels

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Analysis of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation health charity, and 13 other major funds, reveals moving investments out of coal, oil and gas and into green companies would have generated billions in higher returns

A fossil free index from one of the world’s largest providers of financial indexes, MSCI, has just completed its first year with returns 60% greater than its parent index. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would have had $1.9bn (£1.3bn) more to spend on its lifesaving health projects if it had divested from fossil fuels and instead invested in greener companies, according to a new analysis.
The Canadian research company Corporate Knights examined the stock holdings of 14 funds, worth a combined $1tn, and calculated how they would have performed if they had dumped shares in oil, coal and gas companies three years ago.
Overall, the funds would have been $23bn better off with fossil fuel divestment. The Wellcome Trust, which is the world’s biggest health charity after the Gates Foundation, would have been $353m better off. The huge Dutch pension fund ABP would have had $9bn in higher returns, while Canada’s CPP would have had $7bn more.
“There are billions of dollars potentially being left on the table by these large funds as a result of hanging on to fossil fuel stocks and being underexposed to the $3tn [environmental] sector,” said Toby Heaps, chief executive of Corporate Knights. Separately, a fossil free index from one of the world’s largest providers of financial indexes, MSCI, has just completed its first year with returns 60% greater than its parent index.
The Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust are widely recognised for their important work and have been the focus of a Guardian campaign asking them to divest their large endowments from fossil fuels.
Climate change poses the greatest threat to health in the 21st century, according to doctors, and to avoid catastrophic impacts, most known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground. If the world’s governments keep their word and halt global warming, those reserves could become worthless, meaning there are both financial and moral arguments for divestment. Investors managing over $2.6tn of assets have already committed to divestment, including Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest. The Bank of England has also warned of potentially huge losses.
“The number one complaint about divestment we’ve heard from fund managers is that it would cost them too much money,” said Jamie Henn, communications director at 350.org, the climate campaign that commissioned the new research. “As it turns out, they are dead wrong. The energy industry of the 21st century is going to look nothing like the fossil fuel industry of the 20th. Institutions that don’t change with the times stand to lose big and, as this new analysis shows, they already are.” 350.org are partners on the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign.
The Corporate Knights research examined how 14 large investment funds would have performed if they had divested from fossil fuels in October 2012. The fossil fuel firms excluded were the top 100 coal companies and top 100 oil and gas companies, ranked by the size of their reserves by Fossil Free Indices, plus utilities generating more than 30% of their power by burning coal, as ranked by South Pole Group.
In the analysis, the excluded investments were replaced by increased investments in green companies already held by the funds. Green companies were those getting more than 20% of their revenue from environmental solutions as verified by FTSE Environmental Markets or Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a pool of 1,600 companies with a combined market capitalisation of $3tn.
The analysis found the New York City Employee Retirement scheme would have been $1.6bn better off with divestment, as would Australia’s Future Fund.
“The period of analysis coincides with a tough market for oil and commodities in general,” said Heaps. “Over the next few years, many oil stocks – if not coal utilities – could jump back, but in the long term, I don’t think a lot of prudent market watchers are betting that the carbon intensive sectors are going to outperform the market in general.” A crunch UN climate summit begins in Paris in two weeks, at which governments are expected to agree a deal to significantly cut future carbon emissions.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust does not comment on its investment holdings and decisions. Bill Gates has called fossil fuel divestment a “false solution” and in June announced he would invest $2bn of his own fortune in innovative renewable energy projects over five years.
A spokeswoman for the Wellcome Trust said: “The Trust’s long-term investment strategy has led to a total return of over £9bn since September 2008, while returns over both 10 and 20 years up to September 2014 have averaged above 10% per year in nominal terms.” This would allow charitable spending of £1bn a year for the next five years, she said. The director of the Wellcome Trust, Jeremy Farrar, said on Sunday that the impacts of climate change on health “affect us today, never mind affecting our children or our grandchildren. This is not some abstract threat; it is immediate and it is personal.”
The MSCI fossil fuel free index replicates its broad All Country World Index (ACWI), but without 124 companies identified as having large reserves of coal, oil and gas. In its first year, to October 2015, the fossil free index produced gross returns of 6.5% compared to 4.1% for the ACWI.
The significant outperformance of the fossil free index reflected the troubled year suffered by energy companies, said Tom Kuh, head of ESG indexes for MSCI: “The challenge for investors is to figure out whether what is going on with energy is cyclical or structural.”
Kuh noted the upcoming UN climate summit, the coal industry’s troubles of the last five years and recent legal investigations in the US into ExxonMobil and said: “There seems to be more pressure coming from regulators and policymakers on fossil fuel companies because of the role fossil fuels play in climate change.”
He said demand for fossil free and low carbon indexes was growing and that the fossil fuel divestment campaign had brought the issue to prominence in the last two years. MSCI will also be providing carbon footprints for all 160,000 of its indexes in 2016. “Carbon is increasingly becoming a factor that investors are looking at in understanding risk in their portfolios,” Kuh said.

As Terrorism Unites G-20, Climate Change Exposes Divisions

Fairfax - Raymond Colitt, Onur Ant & Arne Delfs

France pressed for tougher pledges on climate change from the Group of 20 nations ahead of climate talks in Paris that start at the end of this month. AP

After uniting to fight terrorism and narrowing their differences over the future of Syria, one issue remains divisive among world leaders: what should be done to stop the planet from getting hotter.

France pressed for tougher pledges on climate change from the Group of 20 nations ahead of climate talks in Paris that start at the end of this month. The key issue was whether to mention the aim to limit the rise in global warming to 2 degrees, which is what United Nations scientists have said the world needs to do by the end of this century to avoid catastrophic climate changes.

"After long negotiations through the night, we managed to get the two-degree-goal into the agreement," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. "However, we also made clear that a lot of negotiating remains to ensure that we make progress at the Paris climate summit. It has to be a success, and Germany will do anything to assist France."

The section on climate emerged as the foremost sticking point in negotiations over what countries will promise to undertake. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said all leaders reaffirmed their commitment to gather in Paris following the slaughter by Islamic militants in the city, yet he pushed for more ambitious language about tackling rising temperatures. The 2 degree goal wasn't mentioned in an earlier draft, he said.

Officials at the G-20 summit in Turkey worked overnight and into the morning to hammer out the wording of a paragraph in the final communique that was released on Monday.

"We can see the difference between the statement at the outset and the one at the end," Fabius, who represented Francois Hollande at the summit after the president cancelled his trip to stay in Paris, said at a briefing. "The initial draft wasn't satisfactory so I intervened and I received a great deal of support. We had to continue the hard work so the statement was a little more robust."

While emission-reduction pledges submitted by nations so far are not enough to reach that goal, the international deal that envoys aim to reach in Paris may encourage further cuts as long as it includes a mechanism to revise the commitments, the UN Environment Program said earlier this month.

Another bone of contention was that France and allies such as Germany encountered resistance to include a line in the communique to simply say that climate change is a common challenge and needs collective enhanced action, according to an EU official who asked not to be named while the haggling continued over the language. In the end, the world "collective" was included in the final text.

The COP 21 climate summit is due to begin on November 30, when leaders from around the world will meet in Paris to attempt what a 2009 summit in Copenhagen failed to do: reach a global agreement on how to cut fossil-fuel use. Countries have already submitted so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, pledging the scope of emissions cuts.

The divide at the G-20 initially emerged over whether countries will back a more "differentiated" approach, where developed nations carry an extra burden, or "shared" emissions responsibilities, which would require developing nations to make bigger cuts, according to officials who asked not to be named.

A reference to differentiation was removed from an early draft of the communique, though was cited in a separate statement from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the so-called BRICS developing economies.

The BRICS nations called for a greater focus on emissions pledges to be "differentiated" based upon national circumstances, suggesting they favour industrialized nations doing more to limit emissions than developing ones.

Advocacy groups said the final agreement was a compromise that fell short of expectations. There are no guarantees that climate financing will be part of the Paris agreement and even mention of the 2 degrees pledge is not backed up by measures, according to Kiri Hanks, energy policy adviser for Oxfam.

"They've postponed the tough choices," Hanks said in Antalya. "It's a very bland statement. They're basically saying, 'see you in Paris."'

Paris Climate Change Summit 2015 to Address Key Issues of Global Warming and Greenhouse Emissions with a Stronger Resolve Post-Attack

International Business Times - Ritwik Roy

An apple marked with the logo of the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) is seen in this illustration picture at Laquenexy Fruit Gardens, near Metz, eastern France, November 3, 2015. These branded apples will be offered to representatives of each country during the UN Climate Change Conference in Le Bourget, near Paris, from November 30 to December 11. Reuters/Christian Hartmann

Prime Minister Manuel Valls has shown his unflinching resolve by declaring that France will go ahead with the Paris Climate Change Conference 2015 despite the wave of deadly terror attacks that swept the nation last Friday, killing 127 people. Valls has asked world leaders to show their solidarity with France and has also branded the conference as a “meeting for humanity.”
The 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) that will be held from Nov. 30 - Dec. 11 in Le Bourget, France, will see a global deal among world leaders to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions. Around 118 world leaders and 20,000-40,000 delegates are expected to attend the summit. It is also the Conference of the Parties' 11th session, which serves as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 11).
Aside from this, the Global Climate March has also been organised and it will be held from Nov. 28-29 on the eve of the Paris Climate Change Conference. The success of the "People's Climate March" in New York on Sept. 21, 2014, which attracted thousands of people protesting against global warming appears to have inspired the said march.
Apart from the Paris attacks, the recent dramatic glacier melt in northeast Greenland has set alarm bells ringing.  The melt is expected to raise global sea levels by a foot and half or more than 18 inches, according to a study from the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
"A disaster is unfolding in slow motion with important sea level rise implications," Jason Box, professor of Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said in a report from The Sydney Morning Herald.
The glacier has reportedly lost more than 95% of the ice shelf that helped stabilise it.
In another part of the planet, top scientists Dr. Philip Hughes of The University of Manchester, Professor Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University and Dr. David Fink of The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), have joined hands to study the dynamic glacial process that shaped Earth’s alpine landscape which is visible today.
The scientists used cosmic rays in rocks or “cosmogenic exposure dating” and ANSTO’s accelerator mass spectrometry to study the rapid thinning and last retreat of  the Welsh Ice Cap in northern Wales about 19,500 years ago. They believe that the study will be most helpful in predicting future climate variability and providing answers to global warming.
Dr. Fink explained that by measuring the cosmogenic radionuclides concentration, including aluminium-26 and beryllium-10, they can tell how big the glacier was in the past. It’s like the rocks have clocks.
The study is part of BRITICE, a UK university consortium that was commissioned to model the thickness, extent and retreat of British Ice Sheet because of global warming.
Cosmogenic dating and accelerator mass spectrometry make it possible to pinpoint when the climate warmed and exposed the deposits during glacial retreat. Dr. Fink also added that they can date several retreat moraines upvalley. This can help them find out the time and speed of climate warming by determining the glacier retreat rate.
In 2014, Dr. Fink received the first set of samples which showed that the Welsh Ice Cap lost ~350 metres of ice thickness about 1,000 to 1,500 years ago, which resulted in a collapse just when the world was moving out of the Ice Age.
Additional samples were reportedly collected from Moelwyns, Rhinogs and Arenigs mountains in northern Wales. Thankfully, this new data validated the earlier finding.
Dr. Fink, Dr. Philip Hughes and Professor Neil Glasser’s research work will be published by the prominent scientific journal, Quaternary Science Research.
Aside from global warming, greenhouse emissions, melting glaciers and the People's Climate March, the COP21/CMP11 United Nations Conference on Climate Change will also have other events including the Conference of Youth (COY11) from Nov. 26-28, the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting from Nov. 27-29, Paris De L'Avenir from Nov. 30-Dec. 11, the Climate Change Concert / Patti Smith Thom Yorke on Dec. 4 and the Human Rights Day on Dec. 10.

Watch the Three challenges of the COP21 video here:

Watch the Drone #COP21 here: