27/08/2018

Can't Vote Liberal 'In Good Conscience': Alex Turnbull Blasts Climate Stance

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Alex Turnbull blamed "rent-seekers" backing the coal industry for felling his father Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister, saying it's "impossible" to vote for the Liberal-National coalition "in good conscience" because of its climate stance.
In a wide-ranging interview just days after his father lost power in a partyroom putsch, the Singapore-based fund manager told Fairfax Media the Liberal Party faced being hijacked by financial interests that stood to make windfall profits if coal-related assets were bolstered by taxpayers.
Alex Turnbull (left) with wife Yvonne, daughter Isla and parents Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull. Photo: Twitter

Those interests “have their hooks into the Liberal Party ... which has no money”, Mr Turnbull said, adding that returns could be "100 to 1" if policies fall investors' way.
Mr Turnbull's experience includes a stint at investment banking giant Goldman Sachs. Some of his work has also involved trading debt for Australian-based coal-fired power plants, giving him insights into that industry's outlook.
“If you create such an environment – with such a high rate of return – you’ll see a lot more of that [influence peddling],” he said.

'Snookered'
Speaking freely now that his father was no longer in power, Mr Turnbull said he was "massively in favour of a federal ICAC”, referring to a Commonwealth equivalent of NSW's Independent Commission Against Corruption. “I hope they find corruption then I don’t have to believe it’s all stupidity.”


From a single-father household to journalist, barrister, businessman and politician, it seemed Malcolm Turnbull had his eyes on the PM's office for a long time. 

 Mr Turnbull defended his father's efforts to craft an energy policy that sought to combine emissions reductions while boosting reliability of the grid and lowering prices. The new government under Scott Morrison has split the environment and energy portfolios, with most indicators suggesting the proposed National Energy Guarantee is dead.
“He was snookered," Mr Turnbull said of his father's fate. "You don’t know how hard he worked on this issue.”
“It’s impossible to vote for the LNP in good conscience,” Mr Turnbull said, adding he had no intention of entering politics himself. "My father fought the stupid and the stupid won."
Mr Turnbull was also critical of the government's overall climate action, saying that pulling of the Paris Agreement – as conservative MPs and pundits have been demanding – was irrelevant at this point.
”It’s like being in a university course, final exams are coming and you haven’t done three-quarters of the work," he said. "You’re going to fail anyway.”

'Human wontons'
Mr Turnbull also noted the pressure placed by his father's government on AGL to keep its ailing Liddell power station going beyond its scheduled 2022 closure date.
“This is the behaviour that exists in emerging markets, where the cost of capital is much higher," he said. "How can you expect people to make long-term investment decisions when clowns trying to game the news cycle are a key driver of investment returns?”
He said efforts to keep ageing coal-fired power stations going, noting that Western Australia's bid to stop the Muja plant going – at the cost of $300 million – "was a terrible failure".
“Such spending is like trying to keep crappy cars – like a 1994 Ford Laser – on the road.”
Worse, the operators of such plants as Liddell and Gladstone ran the risk of a "horrific industrial accident" that could literally cook unfortunate employees like a Chinese dumpling.
Such failures "could create ‘human wontons’ of any staff exposed to the 300-400-degree super-heated steam”, he said.
AGL has made little secret of the engineering challenges facing its staff have described as "old lady Liddell".

Disappointed Dad
Mr Turnbull declined to say much about this father's current disposition. However, in response to a question about whether he had been disappointed he couldn't have done more on climate action, he answered "yes".
The younger Turnbull had positive things to say about Tim Murray, the Labor candidate for Wentworth, his father's electorate. "He’s a great guy and I know him well," he said. "[It's] hard to back a Labor guy but not Tim."
He predicted Labor's left would keep that party "honest" on climate change.
Bill Shorten “doesn’t really care about climate change – he just wants the jobs”, Mr Turnbull said, adding that there were lots of them in Victoria and elsewhere as the renewable energy boom rolls on.
Two terms of federal Labor should mean Australia's electricity sector "would have crossed the magic line” – such as exceeding 40 per cent of supply from wind and solar. "They’re not going to be able to go back.”
Taking serious action on climate change “should be the response of any sane leader”, he said.

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At Last, Maybe A Real Choice On Climate Change

Australian Business Review - 

Newly-appointed energy minister Angus Taylor. Picture: AAP
It’s a good thing the National Energy Guarantee wouldn’t do much and doesn’t really matter, because it’s unlikely to be a big priority of the Morrison government.
The new energy minister, Angus Taylor, is a prominent anti-renewables campaigner and climate change sceptic. Appointing him, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he would be “the minister for getting prices down”.
So there seems little chance that anyone will be bothered doing the hard work needed to get the NEG across the line. In fact it would be surprising if the NEG wasn’t entirely ditched as policy pretty speedily, along with any kind of climate change policy at all.
Bring it on, I say. Then we might finally get a clear choice at the next election: action on climate change versus no action.
If so, it would be the first time in a decade that Australian voters would have been told the truth about climate change policies, instead of getting the lie of broad agreement about the need to reduce emissions, with the two sides only disagreeing about how much, and how to do it.
It would have been far better for the country if a clear choice had been on offer in 2010, 2013 and 2016. We might have got some kind of energy policy.
Instead, at each of those elections, the Coalition pretended to have a policy intended to reduce emissions and then, when elected, did nothing (except not abolish the Howard Government’s Renewable Energy Target).
As a result, Australians have never had the chance to tell the nation’s politicians clearly what they actually want.
In 2013, Tony Abbott campaigned ferociously on abolishing Labor’s “carbon tax”, but the two sides’ policies were essentially the same – to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by 5 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020. The difference involved how to achieve it: Labor proposed emissions trading, the Coalition had “direct action”, since abandoned.
Australians thought they were voting for action on climate change when they put “1” next to a Coalition candidate, but the policy was a lie.
At the 2016 election, after the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015, a difference opened up between the two sides’ emissions reduction targets for the first time: the Turnbull-led Coalition went with the Paris target of 26-28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 – Tony Abbott had actually signed that deal before being sacked – while Labor went with the Climate Change Authority’s recommended target of 45 per cent, after putting it through a six-month consultation process.
Once again, Australian voters were not offered a truthful choice.
It was pretty clear to close observers that most of the Coalition MP’s hearts weren’t in it, that they were only doing it because the polls told them had to in order to win the election, and it was obvious that “direct action” wouldn’t go anywhere near the target agreed in Paris. It was soon ditched.
But still, the formal policy position at the 2016 election was that both sides were climate change believers and only differed at the margin.
Since then Alan Finkel’s “Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market” came and went and his compromise proposal called the Clean Energy Target flared briefly, sputtered and died, strangled by Coalition conservatives.
In desperation, the COAG Energy Council asked the Energy Security Board to come up with a more compromised compromise.
So the ESB invented the NEG as the mildest possible nod to a climate change policy in the hope that it might get past the now-fully unveiled sceptics in the Coalition - led by backbencher (and thus free to tell the truth) Tony Abbott and his true believers in the media - while allowing the ALP to agree to it before the election and still keep its emissions reduction target of 45 per cent.
That is, to agree to the NEG, Labor would have to think – and more importantly, say – that the NEG could be adapted to its own emissions reduction target, which is what the ESB designed it to do.
Future Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg diligently began the task of selling it, and for a while it looked promising.
But of course history will show that the NEG collapsed last Monday when the Abbott sceptics promised to cross the floor to vote against any attempt to reduce emissions.
That started an avalanche that ended on Friday with Malcolm Turnbull replaced as Prime Minister by a man who had brought a lump of coal into Parliament in February shouting: “This is coal. Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared,” before launching into a tirade about the “coalophobia” of those opposite.
He has now appointed a climate change sceptic and anti-renewables campaigner to replace Frydenberg as energy minister.
This is excellent news.
In my view, Morrison should now go all the way with President Trump and pull Australia out of the Paris agreement, giving up all pretence of wanting to reduce carbon emissions. Australians would then finally get a clear, truthful election, and could make a proper choice.
But of course, it won’t happen because the Libs’ pollsters will tell Scott Morrison that if he does that, he will definitely lose the election. The Coalition, the polls will say, needs to go back to lying.
This time, though, it won’t wash.

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What Happens When Climate Change Meets The Courts?

Ars Technica - 

A detailed review explores trends in climate change litigation.
The courts have become another frontline in the battle against climate change. Patrick Feller / Flickr
In 2015, a group of children filed a climate change lawsuit against the US government on the grounds that “through the government’s affirmative actions that cause climate change, it has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.” The case, often referred to as the Juliana case, is scheduled for trial in October this year.
Will this strategy work? Litigation involving climate change and environmental regulations has had mixed success over the years, but there are some common trends that could be informative. A paper published in Nature Climate Change this week combs through hundreds of lawsuits to tease out what kinds of strategies have been tried out, and what’s been successful. The paper found that pro-regulation lawsuits often have a hard time proving injury but still have a decent track record on cases involving renewable energy.

On the case(s)
Sabrina McCormick, a sociologist at George Washington University, is interested in the social dimensions that shape climate change. She and her colleagues created a database of all 838 climate change lawsuits in the US between 1990 and 2016, classifying each case by factors like the kind of plaintiff and the outcome of the case.
Climate change lawsuits aren’t all trying to instigate climate action—some are trying to prevent regulation. So McCormick and her colleagues classified the suits as pro-regulation if “their motivation was to demand more protection of the environment or implementation of more rigorous environmental regulation.” Anti-regulation suits involved plaintiffs who were challenging existing regulations or laws.
The researchers found that suits involving air quality, like those focused on coal-fired power plants, were the most common, and they featured both pro-regulatory plaintiffs like NGOs and anti-regulatory plaintiffs like businesses. Overall, there were more anti-regulatory wins, even though there were more pro-regulatory cases overall. But there was one category where pro-regulatory cases seemed to do better: the small number that involved energy efficiency and renewable energy.
“There’s little in this article that will genuinely surprise US climate-litigation watchers, but it’s useful to see empirical support for the intuitions that most of us in the field already hold,” says Erin Ryan, an environmental law professor who wasn’t involved in the study. Using litigation to combat climate change “accomplishes certain objectives more effectively than others,” she says, and the analysis “makes this point effectively and backs it up with data.”

Cause and harm
The analysis explores how establishing harm and proving causality influence different outcomes. While anti-regulatory cases tended to make the case that regulation harms profits, pro-regulatory cases had a harder time convincing courts of harm or that climate change was causal in that harm. This wasn’t surprising, says Ryan, who added that it was “compelling to see that it is specifically the harmed profits of anti-regulatory interests that help get them through the courtroom door, while ordinary air-breathers have a harder time asserting their interests in court.”
On top of the data analysis, the researchers interviewed people involved a small number of particularly interesting cases to get a better understanding of the strategies and outcomes involved. They found that sometimes, winning or losing a case isn't as important as raising awareness or mobilizing the public. “The Juliana case is an excellent example of this,” says Ryan. “The plaintiffs there might count their legal effort as a success if it galvanizes the movement or brings millennial voters to polling stations, even if the case is ultimately unsuccessful in court.”
Although the analysis is an interesting look at the landscape, it’s not the last word. Some of the categories had only a handful of cases in them, making it difficult to extrapolate to general trends. And the world is changing fast. “The Trump administration has announced plans to substantially weaken the regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act, so it’s quite possible that the findings of this study will be dated by the time new litigants make strategic decisions,” Ryan points out. “It’s a complicated moment in time.”

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