We’ve come to accept Trump’s ignorance, but it’s often dangerous
Donald Trump has decimated all presidential norms to such a degree
that it’s now difficult to feel alarmed or outraged when he inevitably
breaks another. It was difficult to raise an eyebrow when the story
broke that Trump paid off a porn star
to remain silent about their affair, which happened just after his
third wife had given birth to his fifth child, because it’s Donald Trump
– of course he did.
Likewise, when Trump made a number of grossly ignorant and wrong comments about climate change in an interview with Piers Morgan last week, my first reaction was ‘it’s Donald Trump – of course he did.’
But that’s not okay. Donald Trump is the leader of the country most
culpable for the existential threat that we’ve created by rapidly
changing Earth’s climate. His administration is alone in the world
in declaring that we need not worry about that existential threat. We
need to hold him to account for his ignorance on this critically
important issue and demand better.
Trump’s ignorant climate comments
Trump’s climate comments in the interview were so ridiculously
misinformed that even late night comedians were able to debunk them:
Stephen Colbert mocks Trump’s misinformed climate comments on The Late Show
They’re claims you might expect from a YouTube troll, not the leader
of the country that produces some of the best climate science research
and data in the world. It would be easy to laugh them off as Trump’s
usual buffoonery, but he should be held to a presidential standard. So,
to briefly debunk each of these myths:
Peter Jacobs’ Denial101x lecture on ‘global warming’ vs. ‘climate change’ terminology
Trump is correct on one point: the polar ice caps are at a record level.
Of course, he probably didn’t mean that global sea ice is at record low extent. In fact, Arctic sea ice is in such a rapid long-term decline that climate scientists have described it as a “death spiral.” As climate scientist Michael Mann noted, ice sheets are likewise melting faster than predicted.
Annual average global sea ice extent data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli
In his State of the Union speech
this week, Trump didn’t even mention climate change. His only related
comment was that “we have ended the war on beautiful clean coal.” It’s
another completely nonsensical statement. There was arguably a ‘war on
coal’ (which coal lost), but there’s near-universal support for ‘clean coal’ technologies
(those which reduce and capture coal’s various pollutants, most notably
carbon dioxide). Does Trump understand the difference? It’s Donald
Trump – of course he doesn’t.
Trump’s art of withdrawing from great deals
Trump’s misinformed comments in the Morgan interview extended beyond climate science into the realm of climate policy:
I believe in clean air. I believe in crystal-clear, beautiful … I believe in just having good cleanliness in all. Now, with that being said, if somebody said go back into the Paris accord, it would have to be a completely different deal because we had a horrible deal.
Trump may “believe in” clean air and water, but his EPA has taken countless steps to weaken regulations of air and water pollutants. Regardless of what he believes, his administration’s actions are creating dirtier air and water.
As for the Paris accord, it could not have been a better deal for
America. In the agreement, the US committed to reduce its carbon
pollution at approximately the same rate it was already declining.
To meet that pledge would simply have required following through with
existing American climate policies. Instead, Trump and his EPA
administrator Scott Pruitt decided to take every possible step to undo
those climate policies. Not only did they repeal the Clean Power Plan –
America’s most robust effort to tackle climate change – but they even
went so far as to erect posters at EPA buildings gloating about it:
IMAGE
However, even if Trump and Pruitt succeed in increasing American
carbon pollution, there would have been no penalties for missing the
Paris targets. The agreement was non-binding.
In short, America could easily have met its pledges had the Trump
administration so desired, but failing to do so carried no concrete
consequences. How can a deal get any better than that?
The answer is that Paris was a great deal, but Trump campaigned on
bluster that every deal entered by the Obama administration was the
worst in world history (also see the Iran deal),
and thus essentially forced himself to withdraw from those deals.
Trump’s claims that he may re-enter the Paris agreement if America gets
‘a better deal’ are nonsensical.
This is not okay
While this is all behavior that we’ve come to expect from Donald Trump, that doesn’t make it okay. He may be America’s worst-ever president,
but he’s still the leader of one of the world’s most powerful
countries, with some of the world’s best scientific resources at his
disposal. That his science advisor is effectively Fox News, as Andrew Freedman put it, is unacceptable and dangerous.
Americans clearly made a terrible mistake in electing him president (though 61% of voters did realize Trump is unqualified for the job),
but it’s a mistake they won’t be able to remedy until 2020. Congress
could act as a co-equal branch and pass climate legislation, but
Americans put Republicans in charge of that institution as well, and
with the exception of the party’s 34 Climate Solutions Caucus
members, they’re also content to ignore the existential threat of
climate change. However, Americans will have the opportunity to remedy
that mistake this November.
Australia's climate policies are "a decade behind" other rich
nations, according to a United Nations investment official, leaving the
country exposed to risks of a so-called "green paradox" when carbon
emissions will have to make a precipitous retreat.
A phasing out
of coal and other fossil fuels is the centrepiece of four recommended
investor goals to be unveiled by the UN's Principles for Responsible
Investment unit in New York on Thursday morning, eastern Australian
time.
The sun must set for coal, but what happens before the carbon curtain falls?
Fiona Reynolds, UNPRI's managing director, said investors needed to
take the lead in forcing companies to reveal their exposure to fossil
fuels and to step up pressure on governments to meet their Paris climate
commitments.
"Investors have a huge, huge role to play on climate
change," Ms Reynolds told Fairfax Media, citing their ability to
influence the companies they own, including steering them away from
fossil fuels to renewable energy. "This a really urgent issue."
While countries in Europe of all political persuasions were tackling
the need to switch to a low-carbon future, the debate in Australia 10
years behind, she said.
"Australia
keeps battling about the downsides and not the opportunities that could
be available to the country in this transition," Ms Reynolds said.
Carbon price
The Abbott government's scrapping of a carbon price in 2014 - and the
kryptonite reaction to another policy since - went against the global
trend.
Some 40 nations had introduced some form of carbon pricing and major
international investors were generally supportive, Ms Reynolds said.
Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg addresses students about the benefits of renewable energy. Photo: Janie Barrett
"They say, 'As investors, we work in market-based systems. We need carbon pricing,'" she said. "It's a high priority."
Josh
Frydenberg, the environment and energy minister, said the Turnbull
government won't support a carbon price: "The last time Australia had a
price on carbon it was Labor's $15.4 billion carbon tax which was a
disaster that sent electricity prices up and made us less competitive."
Pricing
carbon, though, received support this week from European researchers
who say putting a price on emissions would be a key method to avoid a
"green paradox" that had implications for nations such as Australia.
'Nightmare scenario'
In a paper published in Nature Climate Change,
the researchers looked at the possibility that fossil-fuel owners, in
anticipation of future carbon curbs, would accelerate extraction rates
to maximise profits - contrary to the object of those restrictions.
"Strong
and timely signals" from climate policy-makers are necessary to counter
the incentive to expand output of fossil fuels in the short term, they
said.
Nico Bauer, a modeller from Germany's Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research and the paper's lead author, said Australia
faced the "grass paradox" because of its fossil fuel wealth, including
about 13 per cent of the world's coal reserves.
A "serious carbon price" would affect use of coal in Australia and promote faster take-up of renewable energy, Dr Bauer said.
Australia
faced being "a victim of a blame game" if the Paris goal of a 2-degree
warming limit is exceeded, a prospect that should serve to motivate
climate action, he said, adding "the carbon price would be economically
the most efficient instrument".
A delay also increased the
likelihood of a "carbon bubble" emerging that would end up being popped
rather than deflated if governments resorted to a "climate policy shock"
to get emissions down to the required rate of reduction.
"This,
however, is a kind of a nightmare scenario for financial regulators,
because they figure out a financial crisis scenario and they fear
something like a fossil-fuelled Lehman Brothers event," Dr Bauer said.
The world is getting warmer, the weather is getting worse. Here's
everything you need to know about what humans can do to stop wrecking
the planet.
The world is busted. For decades,
scientists have carefully accumulated data that confirms what we hoped
wasn’t true: The greenhouse gas emissions that have steadily spewed from
cars and planes and factories, the technologies that powered a massive
period of economic growth, came at an enormous cost to the planet’s
health. Today, we know that absent any change in our behavior, the
average global temperature will rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius by the
end of the century. Global sea levels will rise by up to 6 feet. Along
with those shifts will come radical changes in weather patterns around
the globe, leaving coastal communities and equatorial regions forever
changed—and potentially uninhabitable.
Strike that. We are already
seeing the effects of a dramatically changed climate, from extended
wildfire seasons to worsening storm surges. Now, true, any individual
weather anomaly is unlikely to be solely the result of industrial
emissions, and maybe your particular part of the world has been spared
so far. But that’s little solace when the historical trends are so
terrifyingly real. (Oh, and while it used to take mathematicians months
to calculate how the odds of specific extreme weather events were
affected by humans, they’ve knocked that data-crunching time down to
weeks.)
Thankfully, it seems most of the world’s nation-states are beyond quibbling over the if of climate change—they’re moving rapidly onto the what now?
The 2015 Paris climate agreement marked a turning point in the
conversation about planetary pragmatics. Renewable energy in the form of
wind and solar is actually becoming competitive with fossil fuels. And
the world’s biggest cities are driving sustainable policy choices in a
way that rival the contributions of some countries. Scientists and
policymakers are also beginning to explore a whole range of last-ditch
efforts—we’re talking some serious sci-fi stuff here—to deliberately,
directly manipulate the environment. To keep the climate livable, we may
need to prepare for a new era of geoengineering.
How this Global Climate Shift Got Started
If
we want to go all the way back to the beginning, we could take you to
the Industrial Revolution—the point after which climate scientists start
to see a global shift in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide
levels. In the late 1700s, as coal-fired factories started churning out
steel and textiles, the United States and other developed nations began
pumping out its byproducts. Coal is a carbon-rich fuel, so when it
combusts with oxygen, it produces heat along with another byproduct:
carbon dioxide. Other carbon-based fuels, like natural gas, do the same
in different proportions.
When those emissions
entered the atmosphere, they acted like an insulating blanket,
preventing the sun’s heat from escaping into space. Over the course of
history, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have varied—a lot. Models of
ancient climate activity, hundreds of millions of years back, put carbon
dioxide levels as high as several thousand parts per million. In the
past half-million years or so, they’ve fluctuated between about 180 and
300 parts per million. But they haven't fluctuated this fast. Today,
atmospheric CO2 is at 407 ppm—roughly one and half times as
high as it was just two centuries ago. And we know for certain that
extra greenhouse gas is from humans; analysis of the carbon isotopes in
the atmosphere show that the majority of the extra CO2 comes from fossil fuels.
Radiation from the sun hits the Earth’s atmosphere. Some of it travels down to warm the Earth's surface (A), while some of it bounces right back into space (B). Some of the energy, though, is absorbed by molecules of greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, water, methane, and nitrous oxide—that prevent it from escaping (C). Over time, the trapped energy contributes to global warming.
The result: extreme weather. There’s global warming, of course; the
Earth’s average temperature has increased 1.1 degrees Celsius since the
late 19th century. But it goes further. As oceans absorb heat and polar
ice sheets melt, hurricane seasons become more severe as warm water from
the oceans kicks warm, moist air into the atmosphere. Sea levels
rise—about 8 inches in the past century. Critically, the rate of these
changes is increasing.
By the Numbers
1.9 million
The
number of homes in the US that could end up underwater if sea levels
rise 6 feet by 2100, as models suggest. The Miami area would be
particularly devastated: Nearly 33,000 homes would end up underwater, at
a total loss of $16 billion.
13.2 percent
The
decline in arctic sea ice per decade since 1980. Melting sea ice and
land ice sheets causes a warming spiral: On account of being white, ice
bounces light back into space, while exposed, darker land absorbs more
of the sun’s energy.
2,625 feet
The
decrease in thickness of Alaska’s Muir Glacier between 1941 and 2004.
During that same period, the front of the glacier retreated 7 miles.
All of this has led 97 percent of climate scientists
to agree that warming trends are very likely the result of human
activity. And in 1988, that bulk of research led to the founding of the
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has now
issued five assessment reports documenting all the available
scientific, technical, and economic information on climate change. The
fourth report, in 2007, was the first to clearly state that the climate
was unequivocally warming—and that human-created greenhouse gases were
very likely to blame.
Just because the panel came
to a consensus doesn’t mean everyone else did, though. In 2009, climate
scientists had their own WikiLeaks scandal, when climate deniers
released a trove of emails from scientists, including the one behind the
famous 1999 “hockey stick” graph showing a sharp upturn in global
temperature after the Industrial Revolution—one that was clearly sharper
than the many global warmings and coolings the Earth has seen. Excerpts
taken out of context from those emails showed that researcher, Michael
Mann, purportedly conspiring to statistically manipulate his data.
Placed back in context, they clearly didn’t.
How Climate Change Is Already Affecting Earth Though the planet has only warmed by one-degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, climate change's effect on earth has been anything but subtle. Here are some of the most astonishing developments over the past few years.
Political controversy has continued to call into
question scientists’ consensus on data supporting the concept of
human-caused climate change, motivated by the financial incentives of
the fossil fuel industry. But in 2015, the world’s leaders appeared to
transcend those squabbles. On December 12, after two weeks of
deliberations at the 21st United Nations Conference on Climate Change in
Le Bourget, France, 195 countries agreed on the language in what’s
known as the Paris agreement. The goal is to keep average global
temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial
levels, and as close to 1.5 degrees as possible. It does so by having
each country submit a commitment to reduce emissions and collectively
bear the economic burden of a shift from fossil fuels—while
acknowledging that developing nations would be denied a certain amount
of growth if they had to give up cheap energy.
On
November 4, 2016, the Paris agreement officially entered into force,
just four days before Donald Trump would be elected president of the
United States on a campaign promise to pull out of the agreement. And on
June 1, 2017, Trump made good on that promise, saying that “the United
States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but begin
negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or a really entirely new
transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its
businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.” Technically, the
United States remains in the agreement until 2020, which is the earliest
Trump can officially withdraw.
What's Next for Climate Change
The
good news is, the global community is pretty united on the risks of
climate change. The science is getting good enough to link specific
extreme events—anomalous hurricanes, extreme flooding events—directly to
human-caused climate change, and that’s making it easier to build a
case for dramatic action to stem the damage. But what should those
actions be?
The most obvious solution to climate
change woes is a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels and toward
renewable energies: solar, wind, geothermal, and (deep breath) nuclear.
And we’re making solid progress, growing our renewable electricity
generation about 2.8 percent every year worldwide.
But
there’s an increasing understanding that even if every country that
originally signed up for the agreement meets every single one of their
stated goals, the Earth is still set to experience some dramatic
changes. Some even argue that we’ve passed the tipping point; even if we
stopped emitting today, we’d still see dramatic effects. And that means
we need to start preparing for a different kind of climate
future—primarily, in the way we build. The floods will come, forcing us
to make new rules governing building. An ever-lengthening wildfire
season will discourage building along the wildland-urban interface. And
people will stream in from regions made uninhabitable by drought or heat
or flooding, forcing other countries to adapt their immigration
policies to a new class of refugees.
All of those
changes will cost money. That was one of the primary motivators for the
Paris agreement: Switching away from cheap fossil fuels means that
businesses and companies are going to need to take a financial hit to
ensure a profitable, livable future. Which is why many of the solutions
to climate change have nothing to do with climate science, per se: They
have to do with economics.
By the Numbers
407.6 parts per million
The concentration of CO2 in the lowest layer of our planet’s atmosphere. Compare that to 380 ppm just a decade ago.
75 percent
The portion of humanity that could face deadly heat waves by 2100 if major cuts to CO2
emissions are not made. By the middle of this century, the American
South could see a tripling of days per year that hit 95 degrees.
2 degrees Celsius
The
goal for maximum global temperature rise from pre-Industrial levels, as
outlined in the Paris agreement. Unfortunately, a study published last
summer determined that the chance of hitting that goal by 2100 is a mere
5 percent. The reality is, the rise could be as much as 4.9 degrees
Celsius.
1.5 degrees Fahrenheit
The
rise in sea surface temperature between 1901 and 2015. Warming seas are
a particular problem for coral, which release the photosynthetic algae
they use to extract energy from sunlight when they’re stressed and
bleach to death.
Socially conscious investors, for their part, are
making a difference by holding businesses to account for their impacts
on the climate—and the ways in which climate change will impact their
business. Last year, a collective of small-scale pension systems forced
Occidental Petroleum, one of the country’s largest oil companies, to
disclose climate risk in its shareholder prospectus; ExxonMobil caved to
pressure in December 2017. Places with large endowments, like
universities, are facing political pressure to divest from the fossil
fuel industry.
These are all indirect ways of
holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for the financial toll it
takes on the Earth with every gigaton of greenhouse gases emitted. But
there are more direct ways they can pay up, too. After reporting by Inside-Climate News
revealed in 2015 that ExxonMobil has long known about the risks of
climate change, the company is being investigated by attorneys general
in multiple states to determine if it violated consumer or investor
protection statutes. The city of San Francisco is suing the five largest
publicly-held producers of fossil fuels to get them to pay for
infrastructure to protect against rising sea levels. New York City
followed with a similar suit.
Let’s say those
suits succeed, and at-risk cities get some help making the massive
infrastructure updates necessary to protect their coastline investments.
After doing everything we can to reduce further carbon emissions and
protect life and property from the dangers of a changing climate, it
still won’t be enough to keep global temperatures from rising beyond
that 2-degree-Celsius tipping point. So that’s when humanity goes into
proactive mode, potentially unleashing a controversial set of
experimental technologies into the atmosphere. This is geoengineering:
Removing carbon dioxide and reducing heat through, let’s say, experimental means. Like salt-spraying ships, and supersized space mirrors.
One
of the great hopes of the IPCC’s latest report is that we can pull
carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and store it underground
through a process called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. But
that technology doesn’t exist yet. Another strategy attempts to reduce
heat by injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere, reflecting
solar radiation back into space—but that could trigger too much global
cooling. Put mildly, most of the propositions for geoengineering are
underdeveloped. The drive to complete those ideas will depend on the
success of global cutbacks in the decades to come.
Links
The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster When
the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued
its fifth assessment report in 2014, it laid out 116 scenarios for
keeping average global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius. The
tricky thing is, 101 of them rely on a carbon dioxide-sucking technology
that doesn’t exist yet.
Renewables Aren’t Enough. Clean Coal Is the Future
The
world can’t wean itself off of coal in an instant—so before
transitioning to fully renewable fuels, capturing and storing the carbon
emitted from coal plants will be critical to meeting the Paris
agreement goals. In this 2014 feature, Charles C. Mann visits GreenGen, a
billion-dollar Chinese facility that’s one of the most consequential
efforts to realize that technology, extracting CO2 from a coal-fired power plant to store it underground.
Nations Be Damned, the World's Cities Can Take a Big Bite Out of Emissions
At
the C40 Mayors Summit, leaders from around the world meet to discuss
how their cities (more than 40, now) can fight climate change. If every
city with a population over 100,000 stepped up, they could account for
40 percent of the reductions required to hit the Paris climate goals.
The US Flirts With Geoengineering to Stymie Climate Change
Geoengineering
solutions to climate change—doing stuff like spraying sulfate particles
into the atmosphere to keep temperature down—could have catastrophic
side effects. Which is why we need more research before considering
them. One congressman introduced a bill that would set the National
Academies of Science to the task.
The World Needs Drastic Action to Meet Paris Climate GoalsWIRED
science reporter Nick Stockton traveled to Paris at the end of 2015 to
see the negotiations that led to the signing of the global climate
agreement. He came away invigorated but daunted by the challenge of
converting all the industries represented—from agriculture to
transportation to concrete—away from fossil fuels. Here’s what needs to
be done.
Climate Change Causes Extreme Weather—But Not All of It Scientists know that accumulated CO2
means higher temperatures, longer dry spells, and bigger storms. But
ask them whether global warming caused a Midwest heatwave, the
California drought, or a New York hurricane, and they’ll explain ad
nauseam how hard it is to untangle whether any single weather event is
due to natural variation or climate change. Hard, but not impossible.
Defense department says wild weather could endanger 1,700 sites
Findings run counter to White House views on climate
Nearly half of US military
sites are threatened by wild weather linked to climate change,
according to a new Pentagon study whose findings run contrary to White
House views on global warming.
Drought, wind and flooding that occurs due to reasons other than
storms topped the list of natural disasters that endanger 1,700 military
sites worldwide, from large bases to outposts, said the US Department
of Defense (DoD).
“Changes in climate can potentially shape the environment in which we operate and the missions we are required to do,” said the DoD in a report accompanying the survey.
“If extreme weather makes our critical facilities unusable or
necessitates costly or manpower-intensive workarounds, that is an
unacceptable impact.”
The findings put the military at odds with Donald Trump, who has
repeatedly cast doubt on mainstream scientific findings about climate
change, including this week during an interview on British television.
Trump has also pulled the United States out of the global 2015 Paris accord to fight climate change.
The Pentagon survey investigated the effects of “a changing climate”
on all US military installations worldwide, which it said numbered more
than 3,500.
Assets most often damaged include airfields, energy infrastructure
and water systems, according to military personnel at each site, who
responded to the DoD questionnaire.
John Conger, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Climate and
Security in Washington, said the report’s commissioning by Congress
showed a growing interest by lawmakers into the risks that climate
change poses to national security.
The study was published late last week and brought to public attention this week by the Center for Climate and Security.
A growing majority of Australians now oppose the construction of
Adani's huge Carmichael coal mine, while environmental groups are
ramping up pressure on Bill Shorten and federal Labor to rule out
support for the project.
A poll of 3312 people, conducted by
pollsters ReachTEL on January 25 and commissioned by the Stop Adani
Alliance, found 65.1 per cent of Australians opposed or strongly opposed
Indian mining company Adani building the new coal mine in Queensland.
Opponents of the proposed mine dogged candidates in last year's Queensland state election. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
The figure represents a 13.2 per cent rise - from 51.9 per cent - in
opposition to the project compared to March 2017. Significantly, the
latest poll found an outright majority of Nationals (55.3 per cent), One
Nation (52.9 per cent), Labor (75.6 per cent) and Greens (94.2 per
cent) voters all oppose the mine.
More Liberal voters (43.2 per
cent) said they opposed or strongly opposed the project compared to 34.7
per cent who said they supported or strongly supported it.
The
findings come a day after Mr Shorten told the National Press Club the
project had to stack up commercially and environmentally for federal
Labor to support it, and that more needed to be done to protect the
Great Barrier Reef, which environmental groups warn will be negatively
impacted by the project.
"If
it doesn't stack up commercially or if it doesn't stack up
environmentally, it will absolutely not receive our support," Mr Shorten
said.
The comment has been interpreted as a signal the federal opposition is considering formally opposing the project.
Internally,
Labor's shadow cabinet has discussed whether to oppose the project and
Mr Shorten has promised a decision before the next election, which is
due in the next 18 months.
Labor MPs say there is deep unease in the caucus about the project
going ahead, but even those who oppose the project admit it may not be
possible for the federal opposition to stop the mine because
environmental approval has already been granted and it cannot influence
the decision on whether federal assistance through the Northern
Australian Infrastructure Facility will be granted.
Symbolically, however, formal opposition from one of the two major political parties to the project would be a blow.
"We haven’t decided where we land on this, but Bill has heard the deep community concern," a senior MP said.
That
MP played down suggestions Labor was weighing a shift in its position
because of pressure from environmental groups on Victorian MP David
Feeney, who is facing a byelection in his seat and a difficult campaign against the Greens.
The
polling also showed 73.5 per cent support for stopping the expansion of
all coal mining and accelerating the construction of solar power and
storage to reduce the threat of climate change.
Australian
Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said the poll
showed opposition to the coal mine was growing and was a reminder our
to MPs that "they must listen to the will of the people and chart a
course from our dirty coal fuelled present to a clean energy powered
future".
“We are encouraged by the comments of Opposition Leader
Bill Shorten yesterday [Tuesday] that the ALP is scrutinising the merits
of the dirty Adani project. Mr Shorten is right, you can’t have it both
ways on climate change," she said.
"He should reject the mine. A clear rejection of the mine and a pledge to stop it would be Mr Shorten’s Franklin River moment."
If it goes ahead the mine would be Australia's - and one of the world's - largest coal mine. Links
