Punk Rocker Patti Smith Says We've 'Raped And Pillaged' The Planet Ahead Of Climate Change Benefit Concert

New York Daily News - Spencer Dukoff

Patti Smith doesn't know what she'd say to President Trump about climate change because she has doubts that he has "a core." (Jason Davis/Getty Images for NAMM) 

Rocker Patti Smith was just a kid when she first became aware that humans were wreaking havoc on the environment.
"I'd go to play by a stream near my house when I was young and it would be all filled with weird oil and dead minnows," Smith told the Daily News. "I would ask my father what happened, and he'd say, 'I don't know, something is seeping through the ground. Somebody is dumping something.'"

In addition to being a punk legend and celebrated author, Patti Smith is a lifelong activist. (Michael Buckner/Getty Images for BFCA)

Smith rattles off memory after memory of factors that contributed to the punk legend's rising consciousness as a climate change activist.
"In my lifetime, I've seen how our world is changing," she says. "The beautiful glaciers that I saw, and friends of mine took photographs of 25 years ago in Greenland, are now 60% melted away. They look just like tortured skeletons instead of these beautiful, magnificent floating sculptures."
Smith, 70, was born in Chicago, but later lived in Philadelphia and different parts of New Jersey as a child, where she had another disturbing experience.
"I saw my first really horrendous dump site when I was about 10," Smith says. "I lived in rural South Jersey and there was a lot of illegal dumping. I saw how beautiful areas were being destroyed by all this dumping."
"We're given the Earth and it's beautiful, and we've just raped and pillaged it," she added.

On Sunday, Smith will join other artists like R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, Joan Baez and Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as environmentalists like Bill McKibben at Carnegie Hall for Pathway to Paris: Concert to Fight Climate Change.

The effects of climate change around the world. VIEW GALLERY

Pathway to Paris, a group of artists, activists, academics, musicians and politicians who "fight for climate justice," was founded by musicians Rebecca Foon and Jesse Paris Smith, who also happens to be Smith's daughter.
Foon believes that addressing climate change is a matter of life or death.
"Can we do it fast enough so we can be able to survive? And if we can, that means we’ve gotten to the crux of this issue and are a more enlightened species," Foon told the Daily News.
While Smith has participated in previous Pathway to Paris events, she feels a greater sense of urgency with this year's concert given the Trump administration's embrace of climate change skepticism and the President's June announcement that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
"It goes right up to the top in America," Smith said. "We have a terrible person in the EPA. We have an administration that seems to have a completely deaf ear to any environmental concerns."
When asked what she would say to President Trump about climate change if given the chance, Smith isn't sure she — or anyone — could be persuasive with him.

Smith points to melting glaciers as evidence that climate change is a dire issue for the planet. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) 

"Despite all the detestable things, the embarrassing things, does he actually have a core?" Smith wondered. "And what frightens me is I don't believe he actually has one. So it's hard for me to answer when I feel in my heart that I wouldn't be talking to a real person."
But regardless of Trump's personal beliefs and policies, Smith asserts that progress starts with individual citizens, and that it's her responsibility as an artist to use her platform for advocacy.
"When my husband and I wrote, 'People Have the Power,' it's what we meant," Smith said, referencing her late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and their 1988 single. "The people vote, the people protest, the people en masse have to make a change."
Pathway to Paris first started in 2014 as a small concert at (Le) Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village, but has since grown to a global initiative that partners with the United Nations Development Program and international environmental group 350.org to help turn the Paris Agreement into action.

Patti Smith performs at Pathway to Paris at Le Trianon, Paris, in 2015. (MARTIN BUREAU/AFP/Getty Images) 

Sunday's event will feature the unveiling of a new Pathway to Paris campaign, 1000 Cities, which seeks to get 1000 cities worldwide to pledge to transition off fossil fuels and move to 100% renewable energy by 2040.

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Fossil Fuel Companies Undermining Paris Agreement Negotiations – Report

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Exclusive: report says outcomes of climate negotiations have been skewed to favour biggest corporate polluters

The report questions the role of the world’s biggest polluters sponsoring the negotiation meetings. Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images

 Global negotiations seeking to implement the Paris agreement have been captured by corporate interests and are being undermined by powerful forces that benefit from exacerbating climate change, according to a report released ahead of the second meeting of parties to the Paris agreement – COP23 – next week.
The report, co-authored by Corporate Accountability, uncovers a litany of ways in which fossil fuel companies have gained high-level access to negotiations and manipulated outcomes.
It highlights a string of examples, including that of a negotiator for Panama who is also on the board of a corporate peak body that represents carbon traders such as banks, polluters and brokers.
It also questions the role of the world’s biggest polluters in sponsoring the meetings in return for access to high-level events.
The report argues that as a result of the corporate influence, outcomes of negotiations so far have been skewed to favour the interests of the world’s biggest corporate polluters over those of the majority of the world’s population that live in the developing world. It finds that influence has skewed outcomes on finance, agriculture and technology.

We have the wrong people at the table and we’re looking to the wrong people for advice.
Corporate Accountability's Jesse Bragg

It comes as the 2018 deadline approaches for member countries to finalise the rule book that guides the implementation of the Paris Agreement. That rule book will determine things such as how compliance will be monitored and enforced and how the developing world will receive finance and support.
“We’ve been at many crossroads on climate change but this is perhaps one of the last of those that we have left,” said Jesse Bragg from Corporate Accountability. “If parties don’t arrive at a set of guidelines that actually facilitates the transition we’ve been talking about and keeps us under 1.5C, we may never have another shot at this.”
“We’re doing this wrong right now. We have the wrong people at the table and we’re looking to the wrong people for advice. If we don’t course-correct at COP 23 and the next inter-sessional in Bonn, we’re in real trouble. And you can look at what’s happened so far to see the evidence of that.”
Examples of the infiltration of polluters into the official negotiations include:

• The UNFCCC’s Climate Technology Network, which advises on how to develop and transfer green technology to the developing world, includes a member of the World Coal Association, and its board has included managers at Shell and EDF – one of the world’s biggest electricity producers.
• A negotiator for Panama is currently a board member of the International Emissions Trading Association (Ieta), and was previously its president for several years. Ieta was set up by the fossil fuel companies including BP and Rio Tinto in order to make sure climate action caused “minimal economic harm”. Today its members include Chevron, BHP, Dow, Duke Energy, Repsol, Xcel Energy, Veolia and Statoil.
• Sponsorship of the COP21 meeting in Paris gave fossil fuel companies access to the “communications and networking area” inside the rooms where the negotiations were taking place.
• Big agricultural corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Yara have been lobbying heavily at UNFCCC meetings, with Monsanto even co-charing the World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s Climate-Smart Agriculture working group.

The report argues this access has influenced outcomes at the UNFCCC, undermining the Paris agreement in the following ways:

• Market-based solutions to climate change have become dogma at UNFCCC meetings, despite many developing world countries urging alternative mechanisms such as direct regulation, and despite studies suggesting they can allow big polluters to continue polluting, according to Corporate Accountability.
• The US and Canada have adopted agricultural corporations’ approach to “climate-smart agriculture”, and argued against regulation of non-CO2 emissions from agriculture.
• Most of the funds from the Green Climate Fund have so far been allocated to private sector projects.

The report argues that if the UNFCCC process results in a rulebook being developed in line with what the world’s biggest polluters want, then the Paris agreement is doomed to failure.
“If those rules are written in a way to give weight to the provisions that industry is in favour of, and ignores those things that the industry is against, then you’re almost renegotiating the Paris agreement,” Bragg said. “What you’re doing is cherry-picking out of the Paris agreement the things that they want, and leaving behind the things that the global south [developing] countries need.
“It’s where you lose any nod to incorporate non-market mechanisms into article 6. It’s where ‘climate smart agriculture’ becomes the only focus of agricultural negotiations, and so big ag is dominating negotiations there and petrochemicals are the solution. And the fossil fuel industry dominates the conversation around technology so we’re just hoping for a successful large-scale carbon capture and storage to get us out of this mess. It’s those things that are at risk in the rulebook negotiations.”
Momentum has been building over the past couple of years to have an official conflict-of-interest policy agreed on at the UNFCCC.
In Marrakech in 2016 moves instigated by a group representing the majority of the world’s population – the Like Minded Group of Developing Countries – were thwarted by the US, EU and Australia.
Australia’s delegation has argued that “there is no clear understanding of what a conflict of interest is and it means different things to different people” and that fossil fuel companies were “the providers of the biggest and best solutions”.
But in May this year in Bonn, the group succeeded in getting the UNFCCC to agree to improve “transparency”, and discussions will continue in May 2018.
The World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control successfully implemented a conflict of interest policy that has widely been acknowledged as a key ingredient in its success.
Corporate Accountability says a similar policy is needed for the UNFCCC.

Links

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Australia Has A Climate Change Lesson For The World

New York Times - Waleed Aly*

A steel mill in the industrial town of Port Kembla, south of Sydney, Australia. Credit Tim Wimborne/Reuters 

MELBOURNE, Australia — No issue has been such a political graveyard in Australia as climate change. At least three prime ministers from the last decade have had their tenure buried there: John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard all lost their jobs, at least in part, for trying and failing to deliver polices to combat climate change.
To this list, you could add Malcolm Turnbull’s stint as opposition leader, which ended when Tony Abbott challenged him as party leader over his acceptance of the emissions cap-and-trade plan of the prime minister at the time, Mr. Rudd.
Today, of course, Mr. Turnbull is prime minister (a role he seized, in turn, from Mr. Abbott). And he is the latest to run this gantlet, having just announced a new energy policy that he describes as a “game changer” in Australia’s never-ending climate wars.
He might even be right. But it’s hard to tell because what he has offered is not so much a policy as a framework for what might become a policy.
Years of political conflict over the environment have left Australia with no effective climate-change strategy. Political realities have imposed unworkable limitations on policy options. In particular, a series of scare campaigns and political backflips has meant no form of carbon pricing has taken hold, and even emissions intensity schemes and clean energy targets have been rejected. As a result, Australia’s power grid is stretched thin, consumer energy prices are exorbitant and carbon emissions are rising.
Our experiences provide the rest of the world a lesson on climate change: You can ignore it if you wish, but you cannot outrun it. Eventually the science and economics will catch up with you.
Any form of carbon pricing has become taboo in Australia — particularly in Mr. Turnbull’s conservative Liberal Party — even though such a market-based approach is the most efficient, cheapest way of reducing emissions. Last week, a report from Australia’s Productivity Commission reiterated this point, declaring Australia must “adopt a proper vehicle for reducing carbon emissions that puts a single effective price on carbon.”
Instead, Australians have contorted ourselves to look like we’re responding to climate change without really doing so. We’ve paid some companies taxpayer dollars to reduce their emissions, while imposing no penalties on those who don’t. We’ve legislated a “renewable energy target,” then announced it was under review, then finally reduced it. While we reviewed, we watched investments in large-scale renewables drop an astonishing 90 percent in a year.
As a target was settled, investment recovered. But, even then, because there was no carbon price — charges for those who emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — to make investments in renewable energy more commercially attractive, energy retailers weren’t giving investors the long-term contracts they needed to get bank loans. This naturally makes investment a shorter-term affair, limiting its scope and ambition. It also means that investments in renewable energy weren’t being directly connected to the retail market.
With the lost years and disconnections between investors and retailers, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that whatever renewables investment Australia now has, it should have had more. Meanwhile, Australia hasn’t even enjoyed the short-term financial benefits of repealing the carbon tax, which was demonized for making electricity unaffordable. As a result, Australia now has the most expensive energy prices in the world, and a power supply so unreliable that summer blackouts are now a real possibility.
There are many reasons for this, including an underdeveloped renewable energy grid and coal-fired power stations on which Australia has for so long relied that are nearing the end of their operating lives.
Enter the Turnbull government’s National Energy Guarantee. Perhaps its most fundamental change is that it addresses energy retailers, rather than generators. It’s a useful idea, ensuring that energy investments have a home in the consumer market.
The policy plan makes two fundamental requirements of the retail companies that sell energy to consumers. First, retailers have to meet a quota for reliable energy — “dispatchable” energy that can be made available immediately. This seeks to minimize the chance of blackouts, which the government has argued are at least partly a function of how renewable energies like solar and wind can fluctuate with weather unless effectively stored. This may be read as a way of giving an advantage to coal, though that seems less likely as storage of renewables increases.
Second, there is a limit on the amount of emissions intensity that will require retailers to purchase “clean energy” from energy generators. It’s a proposal that manages to obey the current laws of Australian politics. There’s no carbon price, no taxes and no explicit focus on renewable energy. The reliable energy quota is deliberately agnostic on the sources of energy, thereby making it a blank political canvas. If you really believe coal is the future, the quota can accommodate that. Same if you think renewables are becoming cheaper and more reliable every year. The policy plan holds at least the potential for broad support, which is something Australia has never achieved.
But that’s only possible because, for the moment, it’s largely content-free. Just about everything depends on what the relevant reliable energy quotas will be, but no one yet knows. Will they be set low and then increased? If so, how quickly? What relationship will they bear to Australia’s commitments under the Paris climate accord? Will they shift the emissions burden to the electricity sector, or will they require other sectors to make disproportionate reductions? And precisely how severe will the penalties be for retailers that fail to meet these targets?
These are not mere policy details. They are the essence of the political differences that remain on climate change.
That this is the best we can do — indeed that this is a relative triumph for Mr. Turnbull — illustrates just how tangled Australia’s climate politics have become. The country has taken a long, hard look at every warning about the costs of delayed climate action and ignored them all. And, subsequently, it has paid for those costs through high energy prices and curtailed investment.
At last, having long understood that a carbon price would be the most efficient solution, we’ve opted for what is a fairly blunt form of regulation. It’s where nobody would have recommended we be a decade ago, and it is not ideal. But it is something. And if we can find a way to work with it, perhaps the next decade will be better than the one before.

*Waleed Aly is a columnist and broadcaster and a politics lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne.

Links

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