Turnbull Government's Dysfunctional Politics: Foolish And Deadly For Climate

Independent Australia - Peter Boyer

The latest Climate Change Authority report highlights the pressing challenge of global warming. A strong leader would recognise this and bring all forces to bear on it — Turnbull's inaction, is beyond foolish, writes Peter Boyer.

(Image via worldwarming.info)

 THE FINAL REPORT of the Climate Change Authority's (CCA) two-year review of national climate policy ('Towards a climate policy toolkit: Special review on Australia's climate goals and policies') tries to retrieve something of value out of a political mess.
But the report is compromised from the start by the implacably opposed forces it wants to reconcile: a scientific establishment increasingly anxious about climate change and a political establishment determined to treat it as a second-order issue.
The CCA under former Reserve Bank governor Bernie Fraser did what its legislation demanded: give evidence-based advice independent of government —  but it's had to endure a hostile Coalition Government determined to eradicate all trace of Julia Gillard's carbon price scheme.
After a defiant Senate blocked its bill to abolish the CCA, Tony Abbott's Government sought to marginalise it by keeping it at arm's length and ignoring its advice.
The Coalition got the scalp it wanted last year with the resignation of Fraser, who found he couldn't do the bidding of the government while abiding by the CCA's charter.
The new-look board under ecologist, company director and administrator Wendy Craik has kept a distance between itself and government, noting that Australia's emissions will have to improve markedly in the near future. But it's clearly more politically sensitive than its predecessor.

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 While the "old" CCA found that Australia should set its 2030 reduction target somewhere between 45 and 65 per cent below 2005 levels – way above the Coalition's 26-28 per cent – Craik's board has avoided making any recommendation on targets.
Instead it proposes a "policy toolkit" building on current policies, with new measures aimed, Craik says, at

' ... a long term durable solution to Australia's climate challenge.' (p88)

This toolkit, she said, would 'take account of Australia's climate policy history', be suited to the needs of individual sectors, and be capable of being

' ... scaled up in the future to meet the emission reduction challenges in the Paris Agreement.' (p9)

That sounds a lot like carbon pricing.
Aware of Coalition paranoia about anything that looks like a tax, the CCA report proposes an 'emissions intensity scheme', using a market mechanism to control emissions from electricity generation, along with an 'enhanced safeguard mechanism' (p66) to control industrial and resource emissions.
Wendy Craik and her board are stuck between a rock – a cabal of conservative politicians zealously blocking any effective climate policy – and a hard place, what Australia has to do to meet its international commitments. They deserve some sympathy.
But only some. As two disaffected CCA members pointed out last week, the CCA's charter clearly dictates that it must focus on the implications of those commitments.

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 Atmospheric scientist David Karoly and economist Clive Hamilton argue that the CCA report fails to address Australia's 2013-50 carbon budget — the total amount that the CCA has previously said we can release if we're to contribute our fair share to holding warming below 2C.
Karoly and Hamilton point out that if we stick to the Turnbull Government's current target, by 2030 we'll have used up over 90 per cent of that budget of 10.1 billion tonnes. The trajectory of emissions would then have to drop precipitously to reach net zero within five years — an impossible task.
If 2C is looking impossible for us, where does that leave Paris's more ambitious "aspirational" target? Swedish research published last week calculates that Australia has just six more years at current emission rates before it has entirely used up its budget to hold warming below 1.5C.
When we first learned of global warming a quarter-century ago, crunch time was decades away and postponing strong action could be presented as a plausible option. Now, with time available counted not in decades but a handful of years, it's beyond foolish.
A confident leader with competent deputies in a fully functional political system will acknowledge an unprecedented and pressing challenge and bring all forces to bear on it. Lesser ones will maintain the party divide, divert attention and pretend they have control. Sounds sadly familiar.
People are optimistic by nature – we have to be or we wouldn't get up in the morning – and I'm painfully aware that repeated warnings come at the cost of diminished impact. We all have to get on with our lives. But like Karoly and Hamilton, I don't know what else to do.

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Links

• Climate Change Authority
• Carbon pricing in Australia
• Climate Change Authority chair Bernie Fraser resigns
• The Climate Change Authority report: a dissenting view
• Trading Off Global Fuel Supply, CO2 Emissions and Sustainable Development

“I Climbed Mt Everest And I’m Scared”

Internews - Willie Shubert

A series of stories funded by Internews' Earth Journalism Network shows that climate change is increasing the chances of melting glaciers, landslides and deadly floods in Nepal

Apa Sherpa — who has climbed Everest a record 21 times — is not afraid of heights or blizzards.

"The most worrying issue is that the mountains are holding less and less snow and I can feel it when I climb Mount Everest. It's not a normal phenomenon," he says.

Glacial lake in the Himalayas. Credit: Nabin Baral

These mountains are the source of water for millions of people living downstream, who depend on them for their lives and livelihoods. Apa Sherpa wants to galvanize the global community to save them. In 2012 he trekked with a team about 1,600 kilometers through the mountains of Nepal for about three months, to show the world the impacts of climate change on the ground.
Apa Sherpa was interviewed recently by Ramesh Bhushal, Nepal editor for thethirdpole.net, a reporting initiative of Internews' Earth Journalism Network (EJN). Bhushal and photographer Nabin Baral travelled along the tributaries of the Koshi River from near Tibet to the Indian border to report on the challenges faced by people living in the region. The Koshi River drains a large part of east-central Himalayas and eventually flows to the Bay of Bengal.

The impacts of climate change along the Koshi River
As glaciers melt due to rising temperatures, the region is experiencing more floods and landslides leading to loss of life, homes and farm land.
Conversely, villages in the south-eastern parts of Nepal are suffering a severe water crisis. Trapped between the lofty mountains and roaring rivers, most of the villages in this part of the Koshi basin have very limited water available for drinking or for irrigation.

There are now water shortages where there used to be plenty of water for farming. Credit: Nabin Baral

"A couple of decades ago we used to have winter paddy cultivation because there was adequate water in April. Now we don't have water to grow maize," Ramesh was told by Bhakta Bahadur Shrestha from Bhimeshwor village in Sindhuli district. Taps in the village were dry, fields were cracked and maize plants were desperately waiting for water.
Because of the water shortages, many families have had to migrate out of the area and those that remain rely on small springs that are often far from where they live. The poverty caused by the lack of water means that some children earn money hauling water instead of attending school.

Children often miss school to fetch water far from where they live. Credit: Nabin Baral

The government has focused its resources on developing dams and hydropower, which they believe they can sell, instead of addressing water conservation for drinking and agriculture.

Work is yet to resume at the Upper Tamakoshi dam site after the road was destroyed by last year's earthquake. Image from Dolakha, Nepal. Credit: Nabin Baral

Impact of Timely Reporting
In a follow-up report on the series — Timely Reporting Matters: Surfacing Impacts of Data Journalism in the Himalayas — Ramesh documented the impacts that his series had on government officials and the community.
For example, the first story in the series pointed out the possibilities of floods in a region around the Nepal-Tibet border and that an early warning system that had been installed was not maintained and was in poor condition. A flood did occur and the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology fixed the problems very quickly.
"I was following your story, as you pointed out, the early warning system wasn't functioning during that time due to some technical problem," Binod Parajuli, a hydrologist at the department, told Ramesh. "It's working now and we are regularly sending warnings."

"Often stories are reported by the mainstream media only after the disasters," said Nepal's former environment minister Ganesh Shah in the follow-up story, applauding the Koshi series. "…but I think media has a role to bring issues beforehand so that timely decisions could be made by the policymakers."

Shah shared every story in the series through his Facebook page.
Because the headwaters of the river basin are across the Chinese border in Tibet, it was difficult for Nepal to get information about what was going on upstream with regard to glaciers and landslides that may cause flooding. The series emphasized the need for better cooperation between governments to ease the lives of the people living in the river basin. According to a newspaper report, after the series was published, experts in Nepal were able to obtain information confirming that a flood had been caused by water pushing aside a landslide that had blocked the river between Khasa and Nyalum in Tibet.
Journalists in the region also suffer from the lack of information and data sharing. The Koshi basin series provided a lot of data that helped other reporters to understand issues in detail. Ramesh says that Abdullah Miya, senior reporter at Kantipur Daily  — Nepal's largest selling vernacular newspaper — sought his help as he struggled to report on a flood. Ramesh provided him with contacts and a recent scientific paper.
"It was extremely helpful as it is very tough to get information on the Tibet side and reporting this kind of news involves trans-boundary information," Miya said later.
Two reports supported through this series — Is the mighty Ganga drying up? and Ticking time bombs in Uttarakhand — appeared in one of India's largest newspapers, The Hindu. Although it is impossible to draw a direct causal link, after they appeared, the Union Ministry of Water Resources filed an affidavit to the Indian Supreme Court, opposing the building of any more dams in Uttarakhand. This was the first time any central ministry in India had officially taken such a step.


Links

• The Koshi River: a journey down the lifeline of Nepal
• Timely Reporting Matters: Surfacing Impacts of Data Journalism in the Himalayas
• Loss and damage, here and now

Turnbull Marks 1st Anniversary With Act Of Clean Energy Vandalism

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

Today is the anniversary of Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrow of Tony Abbott as leader of the Liberal Party, and his ascension as prime minister of Australia. To punctuate 12 months of false expectations, the occasion has been marked with another act of vandalism against Australia’s climate and clean energy policies.
It had been hoped that Turnbull would represent a turnaround in the debate about Australia’s role in the global efforts to control global warming, and whether Australia would be moved to seize its huge opportunity to become a renewable energy powerhouse and a leader in the inevitable clean energy transition.
But rather than taking us to the promised land – “I will not lead a party that does not take climate change as seriously as I do” – things have only got worse. Turnbull has persisted with Abbott’s deluded and deceitful Direct Action policy, and has sought to neuter two important institutions – the Climate Change Authority and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency – that had managed to escape the wrath of Abbott’s “climate change is crap” demagoguery.
The CCA – which survived Abbott courtesy of a bizarre deal with Clive Palmer and Al Gore that led to the death of the carbon price – has, since Turnbull’s coronation, been stacked with ex-Coalition MPs and sympathisers and the original architects of Direct Action, who now praise a policy that was ridiculed by the once fiercely independent authority, and described as a “con” and a “fig leaf” by Turnbull himself.
ARENA, which also managed to dodge Abbott’s toe-cutters, has instead been knee-capped by the Turnbull administration, stripped of $500 million of funding to slow down its ability to provide new competitors to the incumbent fossil fuel industry.

Coalition at work: Announcing cuts to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (above – tweeted by Mathias Cormann) and celebrating the repeal of the carbon price (below).

Turnbull’s facade was removed from the day he admitted he had agreed, at the behest of the party’s Far Right, to extend Abbott’s climate policies, and then told the world in Paris that coal is good for humanity. Labor’s veneer as self-appointed climate champions has also been severely dented by the cynicism of its factional leaders.
The story around ARENA – and Labor’s attempts to blame the content of a few NGO press releases – highlights that point and the toxic nature of climate change and clean policies in this country.
Let’s go back to March 23 and Turnbull’s announcement of his “innovation agenda” and his announcement of a Clean Energy Innovation Fund, which would appropriate $1 billion of funding already allocated to the Clean Energy Finance Corp, and drip it out over 10 years.
As RenewEconomy pointed out at the time, this was nothing more than a sleight of hand, rebadging funding to conform with Turnbull’s new innovation sloganeering, while proposing to strip ARENA of all its remaining $1.3 billion in funds, a result that would have sent hundreds of research projects, thousands of jobs and billion dollars of projects overseas, and slowed down Australia’s uptake of critical new technologies and energy business models. It would have effectively stopped innovation in it tracks.
Most NGOs didn’t seem to notice and were effusive in their support of Turnbull’s rhetoric. “Finally,” they swooned. RenewEconomy asked if they had actually read the whole press release. Some clearly hadn’t, or had not absorbed its implications, and hurried out amendments. But the damage was done.
The way Labor climate change spokesman Mark Butler puts it, the NGOs’ embrace of the Turnbull package put him in a difficult decision just as Labor was setting out is budget numbers to take to the election. How, he told RenewEconomy, could he defend the ARENA budget when all the environmental NGOs supported the move.
By urging Labor to stand up for its principals and defend the remnants of its fine Clean Energy Future package would be one suggestion.
But whether it was the cause or a pretext, Labor’s numbers people wouldn’t have a bar of it, and the party committed to stripping ARENA of $1 billion, an election policy the Coalition was only too happy to seize upon when it was returned to power.
As the Greens and everyone else point out, Labor could have saved ARENA’s entire budget. But it chose not to.
Meanwhile, Australia faces another two years of a Turnbull government dominated by its hard-right faction. How deeply the conservatives anti-renewables, do-little-or-nothing-on-climate change philosophy seeps through the Coalition ranks is made clear by Coalition positions in state elections, and the enthusiasm of Cormann and Hunt to flag cuts to the CEIF to make up for the compromise it made with Labor on ARENA. They had to row back on those comments, but the threat is clear.
And that is the problem with the toxic nature of Australia’s climate and clean energy policies. Many talk of a spirit of bi-partisanship, but so far all this has achieved is a weakening of an already inadequate policy suite – the renewable energy target has been slashed, the ARENA budget has been sliced, and the same compromise is likely to happen with emission reduction targets and mechanisms.
Bipartisanship needs to be more than reaching for the lowest common dominator, with Labor filling in cracks as the Coalition takes a wrecking ball to climate policies.
Turnbull is not the messiah. He’s just a naughty boy beholden to a conservative rump he dare not cross. And as long as that is the case, the best Australia can hope for is compromise and complacency, when leadership and vision is what is so desperately needed.

Links

• Climate Change Authority’s gamble on political pragmatism
• Climate Change Authority cops out – just when we need it most
• Hunt stacks Climate Change Authority with Coalition advisors and ex MPs
• Coalition says it will seek more cuts to clean energy programs
• Coalition, Labor agree to slash $500m from ARENA budget
• Innovative energy future on the chopping block

August Ties With July As Hottest Month On Record

The Guardian - Andrea Thompson

August continued the remarkable streak of record hot months in 2016, equalling July as the hottest month on record

How temperatures across the globe compared to normal during August 2016. Photograph: NASA

 In what has become a common refrain this year, last month ranked as the hottest August on record, according to NASA data released Monday. Not only that, but the month tied July as the hottest month the world has seen in the last 136 years.
August came in at 1.76˚F (0.98˚C) above the average from 1951-1980, 0.16C above August 2014, the previous record holder. The record keeps 2016 on track to be the hottest year in the books by a fair margin.
That August continued the streak of record hot months this year and tied July as the hottest month was somewhat unexpected. The seasonal temperature cycle generally reaches a peak in July, as it did this year. But August was so anomalously warm — more so even than July — that it tied that month's overall temperature.
It was also thought that July would likely be the last record hot month of the year, given the dissipation of El Niño.
In NASA's dataset, August marks the 11th record-setting month in a row. That streak goes back 15 months through July in data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Each agency handles the global temperature data slightly differently and uses a different period of comparison, leading to slight differences in the monthly and yearly temperature numbers. Overall, though, both datasets show clear agreement in the overall warming trend.
That trend is what Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and other climate scientists emphasize. It is that excess heat that has accumulated over decades thanks to rising levels of greenhouse gases that accounts for the bulk of this year's record warmth, with El Niño providing only a small boost.
"Monthly rankings, which vary by only a few hundredths of a degree, are inherently fragile," Schmidt said in a statement. "We stress that the long-term trends are the most important for understanding the ongoing changes that are affecting our planet."

How temperatures in 2016 have charted against previous years, including the tied record hot months of July and August Photograph: NASA

International negotiators hope to curtail that long-term trend by limiting warming to less than 2˚C (3.6˚F) over pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. There have even been discussions to aim for an even more stringent target of 1.5˚C.
To show how close the world already is to surpassing that goal, Climate Central has been averaging the NASA and NOAA temperature data each month and comparing that number to the average from 1881-1910, closer to preindustrial times.
Through July, the global temperature for the year was 1.31˚C (2.36˚F) above the average from that period. A new average will be calculated through August when NOAA releases its temperature data on Sept. 20.
Whether September will continue the record streak is uncertain, but regardless of where it falls, there is already a greater than 99 percent chance that 2016 will take the title of hottest year, Schmidt has said.

Links

• July 2016 was world's hottest month since records began, says NASA
• NASA: Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years'
• World's Hottest Month Shows Challenges Global Warming Will Bring
• Arctic sea ice will miss record low despite major melt, experts say