Lethal Heating: 03/11/17

11/03/2017

'It's A Tragedy,' Clive Hamilton Says Of Turnbull's Climate Transformation

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

Former Climate Change Authority member reveals what went on before he quit and offers a withering assessment of the PM

Professor David Karoly, left, and Professor Clive Hamilton during happier times at the Climate Change Authority in 2012. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP

Clive Hamilton has been at the pointy end of public discourse on climate change for more than 20 years.
Among lots of other things, he's written challenging books on the science, founded a progressive thinktank and had a failed crack at being an MP for the Greens.
He got his Order of Australia medal for his contributions on climate and sustainability almost eight years ago. His book Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change is now a decade old.
In 2012, Hamilton was appointed to the Australian government's Climate Change Authority (CCA) – a body charged with making recommendations to government on climate policy in line with the science.
But last month, Hamilton quit the CCA after hearing a chorus of government ministers, led by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, touting the oxymoron of "clean coal".
Now Hamilton has spelled out his antipathy towards Turnbull – a politician who only six years ago was a climate change hawk, who advocated for a massive shift to renewable energy, and who was utterly sceptical of "clean coal".
In an interview for my podcast, Positive Feedback, Hamilton gives a withering personal assessment of the prime minister and reveals what was going on inside the CCA before his resignation.
"I wasn't disappointed, or upset," says Hamilton on Turnbull's recent advocacy for building more coal plants, "I was disgusted."
"For Turnbull to be using that outrageous term [clean coal] to describe coal-fired power stations – I was disgusted."

It's a tragedy to watch a man like Malcolm Turnbull shrink into the kind of shell of a person that he has become.
Clive Hamilton

"It's a tragedy to watch a man like Malcolm Turnbull to shrink into the kind of shell of a person that he has become. I don't understand why a man like that does not say 'look, I have some fundamental principles and I might lose the leadership but at least I will be able to look at myself in the mirror for the rest of my life.'"
Hamilton points out that a decade ago Turnbull was pledging he would "not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am."
"The truth is that he now does lead a Liberal party that has the same views as he does on climate change," says Hamilton.

"The Liberal party has undergone a transformation in the last 10 years and it's now dominated federally by troglodytes from the hard right – the anti-science brigade, some of whom probably cheered when Pauline Hanson attacked vaccinations the other day. These are the anti-science, anti-expertise crowd — the kind of people who now advise Donald Trump."
Trump's election, believes Hamilton, has galvanised climate science deniers around the world, including those in Turnbull's party.
"I think that [climate science] deniers now are more inclined to believe they were right and history is on their side and this whole thing will be shown to be a hoax and a scandal – that does embolden them and undoubtedly that's a factor in Turnbull's partyroom."
Hamilton publicly resigned from the CCA last month, citing as a final straw the government's advocacy for coal. That's public knowledge.
But in the interview, Hamilton tells me the problems seemed to start in October 2015 when the new Turnbull government made fresh appointments to the authority.
"The whole character of the authority changed," Hamilton says. After that point, the CCA was "dominated by people who want action, but not too much action."
In a story from inside the CCA, Hamilton says: "There was this talk of a secret plan … to develop a tricky policy, the emissions intensity scheme in the electricity sector, which [the authority] would recommend in a report and this would be used by Malcolm Turnbull to justify what he wanted to do."
This, Hamilton says, was touted by some members of the authority as a tool for Turnbull to use against a backbench reluctant to do anything on climate change.
Hamilton was told to "pull his head in" and get in line with the plan that he was told represented the best chance of progress.
He was initially "half persuaded" by the idea but as time wore on, he says he realised the "secret plan" wasn't plausible and that Turnbull was drifting further away from any meaningful action on climate change.
In late 2016, the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, said an emissions intensity scheme, or something like it, could be part of a government review into climate policy. That position lasted only a few hours before Frydenberg backtracked and Turnbull dismissed the idea.
"Pathetic," says Hamilton.
In August 2016, the cracks in the authority went on public display.
The CCA had published a report recommending cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in line with the government's current target – a reduction of 26% to 28% by 2030. The CCA had previously recommended that target should be at least 40%.
Hamilton and his CCA colleague Professor David Karoly, a climate scientist, refused to sign the report and instead issued their own, leading calls for them to resign.
So now the professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University is out of the authority and readying himself to launch a third book in a climate change trilogy, Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the anthropocene.
He thinks readers will feel "reflective… but you won't feel hopeful."
He says: "If you look at what the scientists are saying and you're not despairing then you are not really listening to what they are saying."

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So Long, Climate Institute – Too Sensible For The Current Policy Soap Opera

The Conversation - Marc Hudson

Climate Institute chief executive John Connor launching the Pollute-o-Meter in 2013. AAP Image/Alan Porritt

The Climate Institute, which was among the first Australian NGOs to focus solely on climate change, is to shut down at the end of June after 12 years.
It was born into an era when politicians and voters were finally waking up to the importance of climate policy. But now, its self-described “centrist, pragmatic advocacy” has run out of financial backing.

Early years
It’s easy to forget, given the political theatrics we’ve witnessed over the past decade, just how little attention was being paid to climate policy before the explosion of concern in late 2006. Life was bleak for environmental groups under the four Howard governments from 1996 to 2007, with the partial and controversial exception of WWF.
Climate change was simply not an issue that had traction with the federal government, and the business community had fought itself to a standstill on the topic of whether Australia should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which John Howard resisted to the end.
Bob Carr, the then premier of New South Wales, had been trying to get carbon trading onto state and federal agendas with limited success.
By 2004 attitudes were shifting, not least because of the ongoing Millennium Drought. In a 2015 interview Clive Hamilton, a climate policy academic and inaugural board chair of the Climate Institute, noted:

In the early 2000s when the environment groups started to get serious about climate change, they adopted their standard tactics, which had run out of steam. The problem for environmentalism in Australia, as well as internationally, is that they had this glorious period of the 1980s and ‘90s, and then they became institutionalised; their tactics became stale. It wasn’t their fault – it’s just the world changed.

Hamilton explained that in 2005, Mark Wootton, director of the Poola Foundation, approached him saying that he had A$5 million and wanted to spend it on something that would “cut through” the stagnant climate change debate. Hamilton thought about it and proposed the Climate Institute, which he put together over the ensuing months. After chairing the board for its first year Hamilton returned to his duties at the Australia Institute.
Launching a tour of rural Australia the following year, Wootton told journalists:

People have to see there is a solution, that there is a way out… It’s about people moving on and not feeling that sense of despair, which I’ve genuinely felt, and that’s why we set this up.

The institute opened its doors in October 2005 and was soon in the headlines. Howard attacked Carr, declaring himself “amazed a former Labor premier should advocate that we should sign up to something that would export the jobs of Australian workers”.
A month later, the Climate Institute returned fire with an attack on the Howard government’s Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, widely interpreted as a way for polluting nations to dodge Kyoto.
This pattern of well-timed reports and timely rebuttals has continued over the past 12 years. During this time the Climate Institute has challenged successive governments to do more, to create stronger policy and a more predictable investment environment – something that is sorely lacking to this day.
The institute’s critics will claim it never escaped the neoliberal paradigm – the idea that the market can and will deliver as long as the right policy levers are pulled at the right time. In fairness, though, it never pledged to transcend free-market economics anyway, although it also tried along the way to expand the argument to include moral (and religious) values.

Main achievements
In the reporting on the institute’s demise, its main claims to fame are listed as helping to expand the renewable energy target in 2008, saving the Climate Change Authority from Tony Abbott’s axe in 2014, and building bipartisan support for Australia to ratify the Paris climate agreement in 2016.
But there was much else that the Climate Institute worked on, which is in danger of being forgotten.
It toured rural Australia to listen to farmers’ concerns.
It tried to signal to politicians that voters cared. For example, before the “first climate change election” in November 2007, it commissioned a poll of 877 voters in nine key marginal electorates. It found that 73% of voters thought climate change would have either a strong or a very strong influence on their vote at the election, an increase from 62% in August.
It also played a part in stitching together what political scientists call “advocacy coalitions”. One notable example was its help in producing the Common belief: Australia’s faith communities on climate change report, released in December 2006 with input from 16 Australian communities including Aboriginal Australians, Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other denominations.

Why it died and what next?
The institute’s outgoing chief executive, John Connor, told Reneweconomy that the decision ultimately comes down to funding:

We haven’t been able to plug the [funding] gap. Centrist, pragmatic advocacy is not sexy for many people who want to fund the fighters or pour funds into new technology.

As such, the Climate Institute is another victim of the policy paralysis that has exasperated and bewildered commentators.
It is indeed hard to justify the funding of calm, measured policy advice when the mere mention of the most economically tame of notions – an emissions intensity scheme – causes panic and retreat in the federal government.
Climatologist and Climate Council member Will Steffen, interviewed on the ABC, suggested that over the past two or three years many organisations have begun to take climate change on board, and so the institute’s unique role was lessened.
But one piece of the furniture that urgently needs saving is the institute’s Climate of the Nation, the longest trend survey of the attitudes of Australians to climate change and its solutions. Hopefully another organisation (I’m looking at you, Australian Conservation Foundation) will pick this up.
The staff of the Climate Institute will hopefully find new roles within the now smaller ecosystem of environmental policy advice. With the impacts that the institute and others were warning about in 2005 arriving with depressing predictability, Australia desperately needs three things.
It needs community energy programs. It needs effective opposition to plans for yet more fossil fuel extraction. And most relevantly here, it needs a cacophony of well-informed and relentless voices advocating for the most useful policies to get the carbon out of our economy.
There’s a fourth thing, actually: luck. From here on we are going to need an enormous (and undeserved) amount of luck if the lost years of ignoring sensible climate policy advice are not to come back and haunt us.

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Great Barrier Reef Just The Tip Of The Climate Change Iceberg

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Australia and other nations must be held to account for obligations they have made to protect World Heritage sites such as the Great Barrier Reef, legal groups say.
US-based Earthjustice and Environmental Justice Australia on Thursday unveiled legal analysis in Paris that they said demonstrates Australia was failing to fulfil responsibilities to protect and conserve the reef.

Bleaching near Port Douglas last month as sea temperatures exceed coral thresholds. Photo: Brett Monroe Garner, via Greenpeace

They also called on the World Heritage Committee to finally give priority to climate change following widespread coral bleaching in 2016 that resulted in the death of about one-fifth of the Great Barrier Reef's corals alone.
The demand comes as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch pointed to many reefs facing the threat of renewed bleaching in 2017, including the Great Barrier Reef. (See chart below)
"Over the past three years, almost all of the world's reefs have experienced summertime heat stress, with more than 40 per cent of reef locations accumulating stress to a level where we expect coral bleaching", said Dr Scott Heron of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch from Townsville.
"At present, many southern hemisphere reefs are at or near bleaching levels, including in the Great Barrier Reef and the South Pacific - and some of those for the second time in the three-year period."

'More dire'
"Corals around the world are bleaching and dying because of ocean warming and acidification caused by out-of-control greenhouse gas emissions," Noni Austin, an Earthjustice lawyer and report author, said. "The plight of these corals – and of the World Heritage sites on which they depend – is growing more dire every year."

Great Barrier Reef's bleached coral up close
Parts of the Great Barrier Reef are enduring sustained periods of heat stress worse than at the same time during last year's record-breaking coral bleaching event, raising fears the natural wonder may suffer another hammering.Vision supplied: Biopixel.

"It's ambitious and it sets out in law and science, what [nations] could and should do," said Ariane Wilkinson, lawyer at not-for-profit law firm Environmental Justice Australia, another of the authors.
"It's very clear that by mid-century, many coral places will not survive," Ms Wilkinson said, adding that the necessary action had to include halts to major new fossil-fuel projects such as those planned in Queensland.

Another coral bleaching event is unfolding over parts of the Great Barrier Reef for the second year in a row. Photo: Brett Monroe Garner, via Greenpeace

The report's release comes as lobbying of the World Heritage Committee's 21 members intensifies ahead of a meeting in Krakow, Poland, in July. The groups want the committee to finally give priority to climate change.
"The committee can't squirm out of it any more.They've got to focus on it," said Jon Day, formerly a director of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and an ex-Australian government official who attended 11 committee meetings between 1998 and 2013. "It isn't just about the [Great Barrier] reef – it's affecting many, many of their world heritage sites."

Coral bleaching near Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef during 2016. Photo: EarthJustice, EJA

Dr Day said he had recently been in France showing World Heritage delegates photographs of the reef's bleaching. "Committee members were pretty shocked to see what corals looked like after bleaching," he said.

'In-danger watch list'
The Abbott government managed to have the Great Barrier Reef removed from the in-danger watch list, prior to last year's big bleaching event and further bleaching in 2017.
Dr Day said that the committee may consider putting the reef back on the watch list. While such a move would place the reef back in the global spotlight – and the government's policies – it would not remove the threat.
"The thing that's going to fix the problem is when the government and the world start to address climate change ... which is what the papers [such as the legal groups] are trying to do," he said.
Josh Frydenberg, the environment and energy minister, said the federal and Queensland governments would spend $2 billion over the next decade to support the reef's health, including to improve water quality, remove the crown of thorns starfish and bolster scientific knowledge.
"In the first 18 months of the 35-year [Reef 2050] Plan significant progress has been made including a ban on the disposal of dredge material in the World Heritage Area," he said, adding that "global efforts to tackle climate change are critical to the long-term outlook for coral reefs around the world, including the Great Barrier Reef".

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