19/10/2018

Pacific Nations Aren’t Cash-Hungry, Minister, They Just Want Action On Climate Change

The Conversation - 

Environment Minister Melissa Price is accused of insulting Kiribati’s former president, saying he was only in Australia “for the cash”. Lukas Coch/AAP
Environment Minister Melissa Price has been trending on Twitter this week – and not for any good environmental reasons.
Price was introduced to the former president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, during a dinner at a Canberra restaurant hosted by Labor Senator Pat Dodson. Tong has brought global attention to his country because of the existential challenges it faces from climate change and rising sea levels.
According to Dodson, Price made what many have deemed an insulting comment to Tong:
I know why you’re here. It’s for the cash. For the Pacific it’s always about the cash. I have my chequebook here. How much do you want?
Others at the restaurant verified Dodson’s version of the incident. For his part, Tong said he has some hearing problems and others closer to Price could better hear what she said.

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My response on Twitter was that in Kiribati, it’s rude to call out bad behaviour in public.
Maybe Price thought she was making a good Aussie joke. Or maybe she’d observed other members of her party laughing at the expense of the Pacific and wanted to crack one like the rest of the boys.
Peter Dutton’s foray into comedy in 2015 springs to mind. In response to a quip by then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott about how islanders are not good at being on time, Dutton said:
Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.
Water lapping at the door apparently doesn’t translate into concern over climate change and global warming – a matter of urgency for the low-lying island nations in the Pacific.
Rather than share the concerns of Pacific leaders on this issue, some Australian politicians have chosen to trivialise them and accuse Pacific nations of only being interested in a cash grab.
Just last month, Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald also accused Pacific nations of swindling money from Australia to address the effects of rising sea levels. The Sydney Morning Herald reported him saying:
They might be Pacific islanders, but there’s no doubting their wisdom and their ability to extract a dollar where they see it.
If Macdonald had been listening to the Canberra speech last month by Dame Meg Taylor, the secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, he would have heard a very different message:
It is absolutely essential that we work together to move the discussion with Australia to develop a pathway that will minimise the impacts of climate change for the future of all … including Australia.
So far this call has fallen on deaf ears.

Australia’s history of phosphate extraction
Australians know well how polite and friendly Pacific people are. Flights to Fiji during school holidays are packed with families seeking sun, sand and true island hospitality. But both the shallow view of the Pacific as a paradise, and political slurs of cash-hungry islanders, reveal a deep Australian ignorance of Pacific histories, environments, peoples and cultural values, and of Australia’s projects of colonial extraction in the region.
For over a century, Australia has had an intense social and cultural relationship with Oceania, paralleling its economic and geo-strategic interests, and not just with Papua New Guinea or Melanesian states.
From the start of the 20th century, Australian mining companies began extracting phosphate as fast as they could from Nauru and Banaba island (in what is now Kiribati) in order to grow the country’s agricultural industry.
Australian mining officials and workers on Banaba. National Archives of Australia/Author provided
And grow it did, exponentially, while consuming the landscapes of much smaller Pacific islands. Pacific phosphate – and the superphosphate fertiliser it produced – was the magic dust of Australian agriculture. Little could have been grown here without it, as Australia has always been “a continent of soils with a low plant nutrient supply”.
But decades of phosphate mining on Banaba stripped away about 90% of the island’s surface. By the late 1970s, when the mining operations ended, 22 million tons of land had been removed. The island wasn’t rehabilitated and all the mining infrastructure was left to rust and decay.
Many Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji over the years, including my grandfather. It was a migration that foreshadows future relocations that many Pacific islanders face due to climate change.
It’s hypocritical for Australian leaders to accuse the Pacific of being solely after money, when Australia exploited Banaba and other Pacific islands in this way. At a time, when the future of many Pacific nations is under threat, a little compassion, responsibility and real action on climate change is in order, not jokes or barbs at islanders’ expense.

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The Morrison Government’s Biggest Economic Problem? Climate Change Denial

The Conversation - 

The government’s stubborn commitment to coal is alienating it from its natural supporters in the business community. Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND
Last week Peter Costello accused Malcolm Turnbull of failing to develop an economic narrative to unite the Coalition. Turnbull promised this when he challenged Tony Abbott for the leadership of the Liberal Party, but, said Costello, it never came, and the result is a government struggling to manage deep differences over social issues. There was “jobs and growth”, but this is really just a goal without much of a story about how to get there, except for the company tax cuts.
The big question, though, is why the government does not have a coherent economic narrative.
One possible answer is that it has been too preoccupied with social issues such as religious freedom and before that, same-sex marriage, to give the economy sufficient attention. There is something in that.
But this does not get to the heart of the problem, which is the inability of the Coalition to face the reality of climate change and its stubborn determination to live in a parallel universe of business as usual. It is climate change denial that is preventing the government from developing a coherent economic narrative.
To be sure, those who doubt the seriousness of climate change are now more likely to describe themselves as sceptics rather than outright deniers, but the effects are the same. Doubting the risks of climate change, opposing serious counter measures and believing in coal’s long-term future is an identity issue for many Coalition politicians.
Then-treasurer Scott Morrison brings a lump of coal to question time in February 2017. Climate change denial is holding back the government from a clear economic strategy. AAP/Mick Tsiakis
As an identity issue, it is largely impervious to evidence, as we saw in government ministers’ hasty dismissal of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report – before they had even read it, one suspects. Identity issues are also resistant to the normal processes of bargaining and compromise with which many political conflicts are resolved. The National Energy Guarantee was the last of the government’s energy policies to founder on the suspicion that a market mechanism might damage coal. Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s Clean Energy Target met the same fate.
So now, some members of the party of private enterprise and the free market, which argued for and oversaw the privatisation of most of Australia’s power utilities, are seriously advocating that the government develop a coal-fired power station. Barnaby Joyce has been at it again in recent weeks.
When AGL announced the planned closure of its ageing Liddell coal-fired power station last year, the government strenuously tried to dissuade it, keep it running for longer or to sell it to rival power company Alinta. The pressure was very public on AGL to “do the right thing”, but also private, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ringing AGL Chairman Graeme Hunt. It was to no avail, and AGL persisted with its commercially based decision to close the plant and invest instead in the generation of renewable energy, as it had every right to do.
To state the obvious, the stubborn commitment to coal is pulling the government’s economic policy towards the sort of state socialism it is supposed to abhor. No wonder it is having difficulty developing a coherent economic narrative.
Further, it is alienating the government, and the Liberal Party in particular, from its natural supporters in the business community. With the collapse of the NEG, the government has no energy policy to provide certainty to business and investors. The focus of the new minister for energy, Angus Taylor, has contracted to reducing power prices for consumers. Climate policy has been shifted back into the portfolio of the Minister for the Environment, separating energy from emissions and further demonstrating the identity denialism that distorts the government’s economic narrative. Faced with doubts about Australia’s capacity to meet its agreed to Paris targets, the government blithely says we are “on track”.
But most big business outside the fossil fuel industries is not in denial about the real risks of climate change, nor the imperatives of international action. Since Turnbull walked away from the NEG in a vain attempt to appease his critics and save his leadership, the Australian Industry Group and the Business Council of Australia have both been discussing ways to “go it alone” on emissions reduction.
Australian Financial Review journalist Phil Coorey last week quoted a member of the Business Council of Australia’s Energy and Climate Change Committee:
Someone has got to do something. This has to be industry-led unless government wants to take over the markets.
Industry needs certainty to invest, and to maintain and create the jobs that are central to the government’s focus on “jobs and growth”. That certainty needs to last beyond the tenure of one government or even two, and have bipartisan support.
Yet the government is unwilling to provide that certainty. As Angus Taylor told an AFR National Energy Summit last week:
There is no room for bipartisanship when we have a 26% [reduction target] and the other side has 45%.
But because climate policy has become an identity issue for some members of the Coalition, and they fight on it tooth and nail, is has been removed from the normal processes of policy formation.
No wonder the government can’t develop a coherent economic narrative.

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Dutch Court Upholds Urgenda, Says Government Must Reduce Emissions

Climate Liability News - Ucilia Wang

Urgenda Foundation celebrates Dutch court ruling upholding emissions reductionsPlaintiffs celebrate a Dutch appeals court ruling upholding the historic Urgenda decision that the Netherlands must reduce emissions to protect its citizens. Photo credit: Urgenda Foundation
An appeals court in the Netherlands upheld a historic ruling that requires the Dutch government to reduce emissions in the name of protecting the rights of its citizens.
The Hague Court of Appeal on Tuesday denied the request of the government to overturn the lower court ruling in Urgenda Foundation v. The State of Netherlands, which ruled in 2015 that the Dutch government must reduce emissions 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.
The plaintiffs in the case, the Urgenda Foundation and a group of 886 citizens, cited the European Convention on Human Rights as a basis of their complaint, a novel approach that has inspired other cases around the world. They also pointed to data showing that the government has had limited success in cutting emissions so far—only  13 percent, leaving only two more years to reach 25 percent.
“The court said climate change is a grave danger, and the action of the government is violating the rights of it citizens,” said Dennis van Berkel, legal counsel of the Urgenda Foundation in Amsterdam.
“The European Convention on Human Rights applies to other countries. But it’s not just about specific provisions. It’s about the universality of the ruling, where the court says humans have a fundamental rights to be protected from this danger,” van Berkel said.
The ruling will also likely have a significant impact beyond Europe. Internationally, climate lawsuits are increasingly popular as the impacts of climate change grow more visible and damaging.
Since the case was filed in 2013, similar lawsuits have popped up in countries including the U.S., Norway, Pakistan, Ireland, Belgium, Colombia, Switzerland and New Zealand.
These lawsuits are trying to hold either governments or fossil fuel companies accountable for the effects of climate change. Many seek policy actions to cut emissions and limit fossil fuel development; others ask for compensation to help communities deal with damages from climate impacts like intense wildfires, hurricanes and threats to public health.
A U.S. case that is headed to trial in Oregon later this month has survived numerous legal challenges from the Department of Justice, which is trying to have the case halted. The government attorneys filed its latest motion to delay the case last Friday.
The case, Juliana v. United States, was filed in 2015 by 21 young plaintiffs who argue that the government’s support of fossil fuel development has exacerbated climate change and violated the public trust doctrine as well as their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property. The case has surprised scholars in how far it has advanced.
“The rights from the European Convention on Human Rights very much resonate in the constitutional rights that the federal court in Oregon has established,” Van Berkel said.
The Urgenda ruling came a day after the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a dire warning about the need to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels by 2030. That target was added to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement as a concession to island countries that will absorb the heaviest impacts of more intense hurricanes, sea level rise and other natural disasters. The agreement set 2 degrees Celsius as the primary goal.
Scientists for the IPCC report acknowledged that they had underestimated how the difference of 0.5C could unleash significantly more destruction to the wildlife and the environment and affect humans in the process as more droughts and floods lead to public health crisis and food shortage. The world has already warmed 1 degree C since pre-industrial times.
The IPCC report, coupled with the Urgenda ruling, will help to frame the U.N. negotiations on climate change in Poland this December, said Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington, D.C.
“You have a court decision immediately after the IPCC report that said relying on hypothetical technology is not a responsible answer to the crisis of climate change. That’s tremendously significant,” Muffett said.
Van Berkel said the new IPCC report underscored the urgency for the Dutch government to not only act but to cut emissions more than 25 percent, which is at the low end of the range to keep temperatures from rising 2C. The government had pledged to cut emissions by 30 percent but when it was slow to implement those policies, the Urgenda lawsuit was filed.
After losing the case in the lower court three years ago, the government announced it would start to implement policies to cut emissions by 25 percent, which the plaintiffs in the Urgenda case argued was the minimum that the government needed to undertake. But the plan it put in place, such as phasing out all coal power plants, was still more about hitting long-term goals beyond 2020, and the latest court ruling told the government it needs to hit the short-term goal, van Berkel said.
Despite promising it would lower emissions, the government said at the time it would  appeal because it disagreed with the court’s opinion that the government had a “duty of care” to protect the environment for its people. That phrase formed the heart of the decision that established a legal obligation to cut emissions. The government argued that the court shouldn’t interfere with its ability to set climate policies.
“For the Dutch government, the Urgenda procedure is not about climate policy. Instead it is about the basic question whether it is legitimate for an independent legal court to judge on government policy and in doing so, change that policy,” Paul van der Zanden, a spokesman for the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, wrote in an email after the appeals court ruling.
The government is considering whether to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Van der Zanden said regardless of the appeal, the government will work to meet the 25 percent reduction, which he said is “feasible” by 2020.
“The Dutch government is fully committed to execute this verdict,” he said.

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As The Fracking Protesters Show, A People’s Rebellion Is The Only Way To Fight Climate Breakdown

The Guardian - 

Our politicians, under the influence of big business, have failed us. As they take the planet to the brink, it’s time for disruptive, nonviolent disobedience
Illustration by Bill Bragg 
It is hard to believe today, but the prevailing ethos among the educated elite was once public service. As the historian Tony Judt documented in Ill Fares the Land, the foremost ambition among graduates in the 1950s and 60s was, through government or the liberal professions, to serve their country. Their approach might have been patrician and often blinkered, but their intentions were mostly public and civic, not private and pecuniary.
Today, the notion of public service seems as quaint as a local post office. We expect those who govern us to grab what they can, permitting predatory banks and corporations to fleece the public realm, then collect their reward in the form of lucrative directorships. As the Edelman Corporation’s Trust Barometer survey reveals, trust worldwide has collapsed in all major institutions, and government is less trusted than any other.
As for the economic elite, as the consequences of their own greed and self-interest emerge, they seek, like the Roman oligarchs fleeing the collapse of the western empire, only to secure their survival against the indignant mob. An essay by the visionary author Douglas Rushkoff this summer, documenting his discussion with some of the world’s richest people, reveals that their most pressing concern is to find a refuge from climate breakdown, and economic and societal collapse. Should they move to New Zealand or Alaska? How will they pay their security guards once money is worthless? Could they upload their minds on to supercomputers? Survival Condo, the company turning former missile silos in Kansas into fortified bunkers, has so far sold every completed unit.
Most governments, like the UK, Germany, the US and Australia, push us towards the brink on behalf of their friends
Trust, the Edelman Corporation observes, “is now the deciding factor in whether a society can function”. Unfortunately, our mistrust is fully justified. Those who have destroyed belief in governments exploit its collapse, railing against a liberal elite (by which they mean people still engaged in public service) while working for the real and illiberal elite. As the political economist William Davies points out, “sovereignty” is used as a code for rejecting the very notion of governing as “a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials”.
Nowhere is the gulf between public and private interests more obvious than in governments’ response to the climate crisis. On Monday, UK energy minister Claire Perry announced that she had asked her advisers to produce a roadmap to a zero-carbon economy. On the same day, fracking commenced at Preston New Road in Lancashire, enabled by the permission Perry sneaked through parliament on the last day before the summer recess.
The minister has justified fracking on the grounds that it helps the country affect a “transition to a lower-carbon economy”. But fracked gas has net emissions similar to, or worse than, those released by burning coal. As we are already emerging from the coal era in the UK without any help from fracking, this is in reality a transition away from renewables and back into fossil fuels. The government has promoted the transition by effectively banning onshore wind farms, while overriding local decisions to impose fracking by central diktat. Now, to prevent people from taking back control, it intends to grant blanket planning permission for frackers to operate.
None of it makes sense, until you remember the intimate relationship between the fossil fuel industry, the City (where Perry made her fortune) and the Tory party, oiled by the political donations flowing from both sectors into the party’s coffers. These people are not serving the nation. They are serving each other.
In Germany, the government that claimed to be undergoing a great green energy transition instead pours public money into the coal industry, and deploys an army of police to evict protesters from an ancient forest to clear it for a lignite mine. On behalf of both polluting power companies and the car industry, it has sabotaged the EU’s attempt to improve its carbon emissions target. Before she was re-elected, I argued that Angela Merkel was the world’s leading eco-vandal. She might also be the world’s most effective spin doctor: she can mislead, cheat and destroy, and people still call her Mutti.
Other governments shamelessly flaunt their service to private interests, as they evade censure by owning their corruption. A US government report on fuel efficiency published in July concedes, unusually, that global temperatures are likely to rise by 4C this century. It then uses this forecast to argue that there is no point in producing cleaner cars, because the disaster will happen anyway. Elsewhere, all talk of climate breakdown within government is censored. Any agency seeking to avert it is captured and redirected.
In Australia, the new prime minister, Scott Morrison, has turned coal burning into a sacred doctrine. I would not be surprised if the only lump of coal he has ever handled is the one he flourished in the Australian parliament. But he dirties his hands every day on behalf of the industry. These men with black hearts and clean fingernails wear their loyalties with pride.
If Jair Bolsonaro takes office in Brazil, their annihilistic actions will seem mild by comparison. He claims climate breakdown is a fable invented by a “globalist conspiracy”, and seeks to withdraw from the Paris agreement, abolish the environment ministry, put the congressional beef caucus (representing the murderous and destructive ranching industry) in charge of agriculture, open the Amazon Basin for clearance and dismantle almost all environmental and indigenous protections.
With the exception of Costa Rica, no government has the policies required to prevent more than 2C of global warming, let alone 1.5C. Most, like the UK, Germany, the US and Australia, push us towards the brink on behalf of their friends. So what do we do, when our own representatives have abandoned public service for private service?
On 31 October, I will speak at the launch of Extinction Rebellion in Parliament Square. This is a movement devoted to disruptive, nonviolent disobedience in protest against ecological collapse. The three heroes jailed for trying to stop fracking last month, whose outrageous sentences have just been overturned, are likely to be the first of hundreds. The intention is to turn this national rising into an international one.
This preparedness for sacrifice, a long history of political and religious revolt suggests, is essential to motivate and mobilise people to join an existential struggle. It is among such people that you find the public and civic sense now lacking in government. That we have to take such drastic action to defend the common realm shows how badly we have been abandoned.

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