Prime Minister Scott Morrison is under pressure to acknowledge that
climate change is a major driver of the drought gripping parts of
regional Australia following his declaration that the big dry was his
government’s number one priority.
Hours after his elevation to the
top job on Friday, Mr Morrison cited the record-breaking drought as the
nation’s “most urgent and pressing need right now”.
He
underlined his commitment on Saturday, his first full day as prime
minster, by meeting with national drought coordinator Stephen Day and
Nationals leader Michael McCormack to discuss a national approach to the
problem.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says national drought action is a top priority, and critics say climate action should be a key part of the response. Photo: AAP
“I’m from the
city, I’m not pretending to know one end of a sheep from another but I
do know when people are hurting in our country and they are hurting
terribly,” the Sydney-based Mr Morrison said after the meeting.
Mr Morrison will travel to Queensland early next week to witness first-hand the disastrous impact of the drought on farmers.
The
vast majority of climate scientists say global temperatures are warming
and human activity is the most likely cause. This is leading to extreme
weather events such as drought.
Former prime minister Malcolm
Turnbull, visiting drought-stricken areas in NSW and Queensland in June,
said there was “no doubt that our climate is getting warmer”.
The
contentious National Energy Guarantee, which purported to address
emissions reduction and energy reliability, remains government policy
for now. However the plan was hobbled following a backlash by the
party’s right wing – a move that catalysed the leadership spill - and it
is unclear whether the Morrison government intends to revive it.
As
well as addressing the drought, Mr Morrison must also broker peace
between warring factions within the Liberal Party, including
arch-conservatives who sought to thwart climate change action under Mr
Turnbull. Mr Morrison's office did not respond to questions over whether
the drought response would involve tackling climate change.
Mr Morrison meeting with National leader Michael McCormack and national drought coordinator Major General Stephen Day. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Labor’s agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said if Mr Morrison's
drought pledge was truly serious he would “accept [that] drought cannot
be considered an abnormal event but rather, that our climate is
changing.”
The Morrison government will seek cooperation from the states and territories to implement a drought plan. Photo: Nick Moir
As well as prioritising a change to
farming methods to help farmers become more resilient to climate change,
the government should “embrace a carbon pollution mitigation policy”,
he said.
“That
is the threshold test. If he is not prepared to stand up and say ‘this
is a consequence of climate change and I am going to commit to both
mitigation and adaptation', then he will fail farmers.”
Earlier
this month, the Turnbull government announced that farming families
would receive additional financial support, bringing to more than $576
million the total support to drought-stricken communities.
Mr Morrison has pledged to involve the states and territories in a coordinated national drought response.
NSW
Farmers vice-president Chris Groves said the elevation of the drought
to the top of the government’s to-do list reflected the growing
importance of agriculture to the national economy.
“We’ve
got to start to focus on rebuilding, making sure we can get agriculture
back to full production as quick as we can once the drought breaks," he
said.
Mr Groves said while climate change should not be
dismissed, drought was a recurring phenomenon that had affected farmers
for more than a century and “we’ve got to separate the two”.
“What we need to be looking at is how we get through the natural disaster we are facing at the moment,” he said.
However
University of Melbourne climate policy expert Robyn Eckersley said the
government response to the drought should involve setting "a credible
target" on cutting emissions, adding that the Paris pledge of a 26 per
cent cut by 2030 was "fairly woeful".
The story starts in 1997, when the brand-new Howard
government (sweating through a brief and cock-up-infested first term
during which it lost a series of ministers and most of the margin with
which it had wrested power from Paul Keating) sends its environment
minister, Robert Hill, to Japan for the seminal Kyoto Climate Summit.
At
the summit, Senator Hill negotiates generous terms for his country in
the global deal; Australia emerged with large concessions for its
agricultural activities and is one of only three countries permitted to
increase its emissions under the deal.
Senator Hill is welcomed home as a conquering hero.
However, over the years enthusiasm for the compact is replaced within the government by scepticism.
First casualty
In April 2001, John Howard's Cabinet resolves not to ratify the Kyoto Treaty after all.
In 2004, Malcolm Turnbull enters the Parliament as the federal Member for Wentworth.
He
spends a brisk period on the backbench, annoying treasurer Peter
Costello by drafting ambitious new proposals for tax reform which are
frigidly rejected by the relevant minister.
In January 2007, Mr Howard appoints him environment minister.
A
punishing drought has blanketed the continent with dust. As Australians
watch the climate seemingly change frighteningly around them, public
support grows for climate abatement strategies and Mr Turnbull counsels
Mr Howard to ratify Kyoto.
Second casualty
John Howard loses the 2007 election. The Shergold proposal is consigned to history.
Newly-elected Kevin Rudd, however, has campaigned on a promise to introduce a comprehensive emissions trading scheme.
Describing climate change as "the most urgent moral challenge of our
generation", the new prime minister creates a biblical sense of urgency
with impassioned rhetoric about the fate of polar bears, the Great
Barrier Reef and the likely hordes of climate-driven refugees that would
accompany a failure to grasp the challenge.
He assigns the task
of designing a scheme to his climate minister Penny Wong, who — after
the Greens declare themselves unsatisfied with the direction of the
policy — then works intently on the task of reaching agreement with the
Liberals, now led by climate action enthusiast Mr Turnbull.
In late 2009, she succeeds, closing a deal with Mr Turnbull to legislate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).
Tony
Abbott, a backbencher, pens a newspaper column advocating a vote for
the CPRS just to get the lingering issue out of the way.
Third casualty
Turnbull's shadow cabinet endorses the deal, but in a series of uproarious party meetings his party turns against him.
Senior
shadow ministers quit in protest, and a leadership vote turns into an
unwieldy three-way race between Mr Turnbull, moderate frontbencher Joe
Hockey, and Mr Abbott.
Mr Abbott — running as a climate sceptic
whose reported remark that "climate change is crap" is widely circulated
— wins by a single vote on December 1, 2009. The CPRS loses bipartisan
support.
When put to the Parliament, it is defeated, though Mr Turnbull crosses the floor to support the legislation.
The next global landmark for climate change strategy is the December
2009 UN Copenhagen climate summit, in which Mr Rudd takes a deep
personal interest.
He and Senator Wong attend the summit, engaging
in a frenetic and sleepless attempt to construct a global framework
that will address developed countries as well as emerging and
high-polluting economies like China and India. It fails.
Mr Rudd returns to Australia exhausted and disillusioned.
Fourth casualty
Mr
Rudd and his cabinet privately decide in April 2010 that in view of the
political risk and the hostility of the Parliament, they will not
persist with the legislation to introduce the CPRS.
Newspaper
reports of the reversal — a stunning one given the depth of Mr Rudd's
previous commitment to carbon abatement — are followed by an immediate
crash in Mr Rudd's popularity and within months, he is removed as Labor
leader and prime minister by his own caucus.
New Labor prime minister Julia Gillard insists that the party remains committed to climate change mitigation.
At the 2010 election she proposes a "citizens' assembly" on the matter and maintains support for emissions trading.
When pressed, she promises that there will be "no carbon tax under a government I lead".
The election results in a hung parliament but Ms Gillard retains
power when after weeks of negotiations she secures the support of
conservative independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott.
She
signs a deal with the Greens and commences negotiations on a new "carbon
pricing scheme" which will begin with a fixed carbon price and graduate
to a floating market price.
Ms Gillard acknowledges that this constitutes a temporary "carbon tax".
Opposition leader Mr Abbott's campaign to "axe the tax" is born. The scheme is legislated.
Fifth casualty
Ms
Gillard — despite the significant amount of legislation passed by her
minority Government — is besieged by internal strife, criticism of her
emissions trading scheme and a high rate of refugee boat arrivals.
She
is deposed in June 2013 by Mr Rudd, who leads the party to the 2013
federal election, only to be crushed by Opposition leader Mr Abbott.
As promised, Mr Abbott "axes the tax" and the carbon pricing scheme is largely abolished in July 2014.
To
replace the Gillard scheme, Mr Abbott proposes a policy called "Direct
Action", which involves paying polluters directly to reduce their
emissions.
A $2.5 billion fund called the Emissions Reduction Fund is to be established.
Mr Abbott insists that he believes climate change is real and that humanity contributes to the phenomenon.
At
the Paris summit of 2015, the Abbott government commits Australia to
reducing emissions by at least 26 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.
Mr Turnbull wins the prime ministership. Direct Action is
maintained in principle, but the PM does not much use the phrase and the
Emissions Reduction Fund is not given any funding in the 2018 budget.
Mr Turnbull and his Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, turn their attention to reliability of energy supply.
Mr
Frydenberg creates the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which would
oblige energy suppliers and retailers to guarantee a minimum amount of
power at an average emissions level consistent with Australia's
commitments under the Paris agreement.
A national energy mix between renewables and legacy generators is incorporated.
Mr
Turnbull and Mr Frydenberg insist that the scheme will provide
certainty for providers (who back the scheme) and lower prices for
consumers.
The Coalition party room approves the scheme on August 14, 2018.
The NEG remains unlegislated; Turnbull's future uncertain.
So what does it mean?
A
review of these past two decades reveals not only that there has been a
consistent national desire to establish some sort of regulation over
carbon emissions, but also that there have been ample periods during
which both major parties have wanted to do such a thing,AT THE SAME TIME.
In 2007 and in 2009 and again, now, in 2018, the two major parties are close enough to touch each other.
Between
the four men nominally most influential in the Parliament in this
matter — Malcolm Turnbull, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, Opposition
Leader Bill Shorten and shadow energy minister Mark Butler — there is
not a vast amount of distance.
But in 2018 — as it has done before
— the Australian Parliament has proved itself unable to reach
consensus, even where it exists.
My generation is radically remaking climate activism. Will it be enough?
Grist / Amelia Bates
My generation, the millennials, will never know a time when climate change wasn’t a grave threat.
Back in 1988, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere crossed the 350 parts
per million level when I was still watching Sesame Street and digging up
worms in the backyard. Scientists consider
that mark the maximum threshold compatible with a stable climate and
suitable for human life on Earth. That same year, NASA researcher James
Hansen told the U.S. Senate he was 99 percent confident global warming was already taking place. The public started taking notice, but little was done to address the accelerating crisis.
Earlier this year, scientists in Hawaii and California confirmed that our planet’s level of atmospheric CO2 had surpassed 411 ppm.
It’s at the highest concentration in human history — not just over the
past 100 years or so of modern recordkeeping, or since the Industrial
Revolution, or since the invention of agriculture around 9000 B.C.
There’s more of the planet’s main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere since
before our species evolved from our distant primate cousins millions of
years ago.
The average global temperature is on course to rise 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels
in the coming decades, escalating the risks of irreversible and
widespread sea-level rise and more frequent extreme weather — blistering
heat waves, punishing hurricanes, and ravaging wildfires. So it’s no
exaggeration to say that my generation is up against seemingly
impossible odds.
For years, environmental activists have told us that we could make
progress by tinkering with the status quo, that a big part of halting
warming is buying the right car, clothes, and moisturizer; avoiding the
dirty products; and reforming the way consumer goods are made. And
still, the world’s emissions keep climbing.
Many climate scientists have called for radical action,
writing international consensus statements and pegging paragraphs to
the tail end of their articles in scientific journals intended less for
their peers than to rouse the greater public. In fact, the overall tone
of research has shifted toward themes that confront the inevitability of catastrophe on our current course juxtaposed with a still-possible world in which huge emissions reductions take place immediately.
For scientists, unhedged assertions like these are a protest. They’re
not the only community that is up in arms. A new breed of environmental
activist is risking jail time to stop an existential threat to us all.
And young people are finding their voices and embracing new versions of
old ideas to try to shake the world from its collective stupor.
A livable world achieved through incremental changes may have been
possible in the 1980s, but it’s a fantasy now. Getting people to
understand the scope of this staggering problem requires a balancing
act. Too much doom, and you promote hopelessness. Too rosy, and you risk glossing over the urgency of the situation. The best approach elicits not hope but courage, says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and fellow millennial.
“We are inevitably sending our children to live on an unfamiliar planet,” she wrote in a recent essay for the website of the On Being Project. “Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.”
In the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, Emily Johnston
traveled from her home in Seattle to northern Minnesota. There, she
turned the emergency shut-off valve at the Canadian border on the
Enbridge Energy tar-sands oil pipeline, one of North America’s largest.
After she was arrested, she presented a novel legal defense: Johnston claimed that her turning the valve was a “necessity” in response to a climate emergency.
“I know that there are plenty of people in the world who think that
what we did was crazy,” Johnston tells Grist. “When you risk jail time,
there’s definitely a different way in how people respond to what you’ve
done. It’s harder for people to dismiss what you’re doing.”
Steve Liptay / Climate Direct Action
When pressed, Johnston admits that she doesn’t like being labeled “a
radical.” The way she sees it, her actions are like those of citizens
who enlist in the military when their country is attacked. She sees it
as putting her life on the line
for a cause she believes in. Taking direct action like this might
appear destructive on the surface. But it’s in the service of preventing
a much larger threat.
“We have arrived at that place after thinking about all the other
different things we could do and coming to the conclusion that this is,
flat-out, simply something that has to happen given the urgency of the
climate crisis,” she explains.
That same sense of pent-up urgency, that overwhelming need to act
right now, is what led to the birth of modern, radical environmentalism
nearly 40 years ago.
In 1980, a group of friends at the end of a backpacking trip across the Rockies formed a radical eco-movement known as Earth First! In their first statement of principals, they laid out a straightforward goal: “We do not wish to merely preserve what’s left, we want to re-create wilderness.”
The group caught the public’s attention because it wrecked things.
Earth First! burned billboards advertising new subdivisions, occupied
forests marked for destruction, and sabotaged ski lifts in posh mountain
towns. Their peer and mentor Edward Abbey, the author and essayist,
called these actions “monkeywrenching.” It was all done in the name of restoring nature.
Earth First! began tree sitting to protest the cutting of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. In 1995, members forced the temporary closure of a golf course and ski resort in Colorado. The FBI labeled them terrorists in 2001, and their support waned.
Earth First activists sit around the stump of an ancient tree cut down by a logging company. JOHN MABANGLO / AFP / Getty Images
Diana Liverman, a professor at the University of Arizona whose work
focuses on the human impacts of climate change (and my former advisor),
had a friend who, in the 1980s, inspired by Earth First!, committed acts
of vandalism around Tucson to protest real estate development. She
remains sympathetic for those staking out an extreme position.
“I am glad that the radical environmental activists are around as
they can create change,” she says. By making the rest of us look
moderate, Liverman says that they create space for compromise. “I
occasionally consider more radical action myself, but I’m not sure what I
would do.”
Johnston considers this “paralysis” in the face of such an enormous
crisis one of the main barriers to widespread action. The way to break
people out of it is by shifting the narrative.
“People feel really hopeless,” Johnston says. “One of the most
important things we can possibly do is to offer an alternative narrative
about what’s possible.”
Fed up activists around the world have continued the legacy of direct action, with pipeline protests and blockades. Activists in India delayed the clear-cutting of several forests that were to be turned into housing developments. And America’s tree-sitting movement lives on.
But there’s a budding realization that even these bold protests aren’t nearly up to the task. In the nine years that activists have spent opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, for instance, the oil industry invented an entirely new oil-by-rail transport industry. Meanwhile, the mainstream environmental movement continues to focus on “green” consumerism and incremental change. Got an SUV? Trade it in for an electric car. Don’t use that plastic straw, use this compostable one instead.
At best, those actions delay the widespread transformation we need by
lulling us into a false sense of security. At worst, they continue a
cycle of high-emission consumption. Feel bad about your cross-country
flight to California? Pay to plant some trees.
Incremental change is not going to help on a planet that’s
accelerating toward a carbon-fueled nightmare within our lifetimes. It’s
not about “saving the planet,” as it was in the days of Earth First!
It’s about saving all of us.
In recent years, young people have realized that it’s their future —
and that of the generations after them — at stake. And they’ve adopted
the climate cause in increasingly audacious ways, from suing the federal government to planning mass nationwide rallies. Observers are anticipating shifts in public opinion to translate into escalating action as millennials and the oldest members of Generation Z begin to exercise their growing power.
They’ve already featured prominently in international climate
campaigns. Ahead of the Paris climate conference in 2015, a coalition of
small island nations and other countries most at risk from climate
change pushed hard to get other countries to sign up for an ambitious
goal: Limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees C above
preindustrial levels.
One of the most memorable voices from that campaign was Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a poet from the Marshall Islands.
Jetnil-Kijiner’s stirring poem, written to her infant daughter and read
at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in 2014, laid out
the threat of climate change and promised to protect her child from the
rising waters.
Seemingly through the force of persuasion, her pledge and thousands of others like hers worked.
As millennials take a larger role in the discussion around climate
change, some are pushing for a new political movement that prioritizes
collective action. For Sydney Ghazarian, a millennial activist in Los
Angeles, that means socialism.
Ghazarian is a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Climate and Environmental Justice Working Group,
with dozens of local branches around the country. She considers climate
change to be part of a web of problems. “It’s not just that the oceans
are acidifying,” she explains. “It’s also a crisis of racism. It’s a
crisis of labor.” To her, all these result from a free market system
that’s operating with few political constraints.
In the wake of the competitive presidential campaign of Senator
Bernie Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist who caucuses with
Democrats, Ghazarian is trying to do the legwork of turning enthusiasm
for Sanders and his issues into real change. By looking at climate
change as a symptom of a larger problem, rather than just an
environmental issue, Ghazarian hopes to help inspire an overhaul of economics and politics — or as she calls it, “a new system for organizing nature.”
“It’s about appealing to people where they are,” she says. “It’s kind
of hard to make time for climate change when you’re worrying about how
you’re going to get your next meal. Our only hope is to reimagine a
future that puts people and planet ahead of profit.”
Democratic socialists like Ghazarian believe that there’s a natural
connection between distributed energy generation from wind and solar
power and decentralized political power. She envisions a future of
community-owned electrical generation, more walkable neighborhoods, and
governments that prioritize public health.
Ghazarian applauds efforts to block pipelines and tree-sitting
protests but thinks there are simply too many pipelines to fight and too
many forests to protect. Her focus is on rallying people to start
building a better world so that there will no longer be a need for so
many targeted, isolated protests.
“That is part of a positive vision of the future, one that values the
collective voice of the communities that also see their interdependence
with the environment,” she says. “Pipeline resistance holds space for
our future, a future for energy democracy, public banks, localized
agriculture, public and democratic ownership of water and resources, and
whatever else is part of our cooperative reimagining of society.”
Anushree Fadnavis / Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Imagining such a future is the easy part. Bringing it to reality?
Well, that may never happen. But people like Ghazarian see the benefit
in at least trying — and taking steps toward their ideals.
For me, that ideal is a world where we’ve averted the worst climate
change can offer — and a fair amount of the stuff ahead of that, too.
The process of thinking of the future as a direct result of present
actions has been oddly liberating. When focused on the next 80 years,
it’s easy to make what might seem like tough decisions to others living
in my privileged, Midwestern bubble — eschewing air travel, commuting by
bicycle, raising my kids to be mostly vegan, teaching them to consider
the consequences of their actions.
The science on climate change is brutal and unforgiving. Returning
the Earth’s atmosphere to 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, perhaps feasible
with current technology, isn’t the right goal. The aim of climate
activism isn’t to erase the sins of the previous generations; it’s to
ensure that future generations are handed a world that isn’t at the
threshold of going to hell. That won’t happen in my lifetime without a
truly radical remaking of the global economy. And if it doesn’t happen
in my lifetime, then it’s very likely future generations won’t get
another chance.
Sign rendered pointless by the 2007/2008 Australian drought. Rawnsley Park Station, South Australia. Image credit: Peripitus via Wikimedia
Rainfall is going south for winter
Australia is a continent of droughts and flooding rains. In other
words, rainfall totals can see-saw from year to year while averages give
an illusion of reliable weather. In reality devastating droughts litter
Australia’s colonial period, and the stories of the First Nations’ peoples reveal their long history of survival through climate extremes. So what’s new?
Southern Australia depends upon autumn and winter rains, and these have declined over the period of European settlement. At least in part this is because westerly winds that bring winter cold fronts and storm systems have shifted south, dumping their rain on the southern ocean instead of parched paddocks.
The movement of these westerlies towards or away from the south pole is measured by the Southern Annular Mode
(SAM). During positive SAM phases the westerlies are pushed further
south than normal by a ridge of high pressure that descends from the
subtropics, and southern Australia misses out on winter rains.
Positive SAM in winter is when high pressure systems move further south, pushing rain-bearing westerlies away from Australia. In a negative phase the highs are further north and fronts bring rain to southern Austalia. (Credit: Kate Doyle, ABC Weather. Used with permission.)
The SAM can switch quickly, and Victoria went from a dry early winter in 2018, to a cold and wet late winter. Nevertheless, the increased southward shifts in these weather patterns due to human influences means less moisture on land and greater vulnerability to the next factor.
The boy child grows up
In Spanish the phrase El Niño means ‘boy child’, but for Australian farmers it usually means above average temperatures and below average rainfall. The name El Niño is given to periods when trade winds
that usually blow from east to west across the Pacific Ocean weaken,
and warm surface water stays closer to South America instead of building
up to Australia’s north.
Video: Bureau of Meteorology
In an El Niño less rain forms near Australia and less falls on eastern Australia. About two thirds of El Niño events since 1900
have brought drought to at least parts of Australia. Some of the worst
droughts in Australia’s colonial history coincided with intense El Niños,
including the Federation drought of the early 1900s, the World War II
drought, and the Millennium drought of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
While we’re not in an El Niño at the moment, there’s a real chance of one forming by the end of the year. This would turn up the dial on the current drought even further.
An El Niño brings a double whammy of desiccation to a landscape already denied rain by migrating westerly winds. Higher temperatures quickly evaporate what little rain falls, leaving less runoff for dams and rivers. And with little moisture left to evaporate, temperatures climb higher still.
Although the inner workings of the El Niño cycle are still being studied, it does look like they are strengtheningwith climate change. So recent droughts are probably worse than they would have been without climate change, and El Niño events will be even more intense in future. The boy child is growing up.
