Lethal Heating: 12/19/18

ABC - Malcolm Sutton

Students walk out of school to rally for action on climate change (ABC News)

Key points:

Climate inaction protests and participants rising
Major parties fail to implement lasting policy
Protesters targeting financers of fossil fuel

Mass protests of the scale held during the Vietnam War are just around the corner for people concerned about climate change, environmentalists have warned, as a growing number of activists turn their attention to those who fund fossil fuel industries.

Activists on Sunday disrupted Labor's national conference in Adelaide to oppose oil drilling in the Great Australian Bight and the Adani coal mine in Queensland — two proposals considered "lightning rods" for unilateral climate protests.
It happened weeks after thousands of school students defied Prime Minister Scott Morrison and marched on capital cities to demand significant action to reduce carbon emissions — surprising authorities with the number of participants involved.
"The divide between the Government and the young people of Australia is probably the greatest it's been since those huge protests of the Vietnam War era, and I think it's for a similar reason," Greenpeace chief executive David Ritter said.
"Back then, 18 to 20-year-olds [facing conscription in the 1960s] felt their future was being callously taken away by a war they could see no justification or point for.

"The young people of Australia today can see the future being callously taken away to prop up the old fossil fuel industries that have to go if we are to have a flourishing future.

"A 14-year-old is perfectly capable of looking at the news and seeing terrible wildfires in California, bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, the Arctic burning.
"People can see the climate consequences [of inaction] and they are not going to stand around and watch their future disappear."

The Vietnam War divided opinion across Australia in the 1960s. (ABC Archives)

Australia's School Strike 4 Climate campaign started earlier this year in Victoria, after children were inspired by the actions of 15-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg.
Greta has pledged to protest outside Parliament House in Stockholm until her country catches up on its Paris Agreement commitments.
Some students have also taken inspiration from a landmark climate lawsuit filed by 21 teenagers in Oregon against the US Government for failing to take meaningful action against climate change.

Protesters with multiple targets
Professor Quentin Beresford is joining Mr Ritter to speak at Womadelaide's Planet Talks program in March at an event called Adani, Coal Wars and the National Interest.
The author of Adani And The War On Coal said a strong protest movement was well underway, and pointed out the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), which is comprised of several different youth organisations, already had more than 150,000 members.

Climate policy keeps sinking PMs

Federal Parliament has proven itself unable to reach consensus on climate change policy, even when the parties are close enough to touch.

Professor Beresford said protests today were a blend of non-violent direct-action protests witnessed during the Vietnam War and social media activism.
"What we're seeing now is a maturing of the broad environment movement and they're developing multiple strategies," he said.
"One of the effective strategies is to go for the institutional funders, the big corporations, the big banks and investment houses.
"The rely on their reputation, because if there is no social licence for a project, no public approval, [vocal criticism] can have a powerful effect."
It has resulted in banks refusing to support projects like the Adani coal mine, even if it has the backing of some politicians.
"Targeting political parties is necessary, but it doesn't necessarily bring you success and effectiveness because of the power of the fossil fuel industry and how it's captured the political system," Professor Beresford said.

"When both major parties more or less support the project, where are you going to get the break-off?"

Protesters interrupt Bill Shorten's keynote speech at the ALP conference. (ABC News)

Professor Beresford said Adani had been "a lightning rod for the climate movement and for activist politics in general".
"It just doesn't make sense for Australia to allow this mine to release catastrophic levels of CO2 into the atmosphere in an era of climate change," he said.

Australia rudderless on carbon reduction
Although it ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, Australia remains without a significant federal policy to reduce emissions.
Both major parties have proposed varying strategies to appease public sentiment since 2007, only to be abandoned, repealed or put on the backburner.
In the meantime, emissions are on the rise after a marginal fall between 2007 and 2013.

Scott Morrison once used a lump of coal to get his point across in Parliament. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

Mr Morrison, when he was treasurer, infamously brought in a lump of coal to Question Time in 2017 while making a point about renewable energy versus base-load coal-fired power.
When asked about last month's school strike, he said the Government wanted "more learning in schools and less activism in schools", to which the young protesters said that if "he was doing his job properly, we wouldn't be here".
AYCC campaigns director Kelly Albion said there were 160 different "stop Adani groups" across Australia in an "organic movement" that was growing on its own.
"We saw a couple of weeks ago high school students and primary students alike willing to make their voices heard about an issue that affects their generation," she said.
"Climate change is an issue that affects us all and we need to make sure our political leaders are doing everything they can to make sure we avoid the worse impacts."
The Womadelaide world music, arts and dance festival runs from March 8 to 12 at Botanic Park in Adelaide.

South Australian students protested at Parliament House in Adelaide in November. (ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton)

Links

AFR (Reuters) - Agnieszka Barteczko | Nina Chestney

Katowice: Fractious climate change talks in Poland showed the limits of international action to limit global warming in a polarised world, putting the onus on individual governments, cities and communities to stop temperatures rising.
Nearly 200 countries at the United Nations talks in Katowice - in the coal mining region of Silesia - saved the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement from disintegration on Saturday by agreeing a package of guidelines for its implementation.
But it deferred rules on carbon credits - a spur to business - and lacked any firm commitment to strengthen countries' emissions cut targets by 2020, when the agreement comes into force.

A scientific report requested by the Paris signatories said the share of coal-fuelled power would have to be cut to under 2 per cent by 2050. MARTIN MEISSNER

As such it left the parties a long way from the Paris deal's goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, let alone the cap of 1.5C needed to avert more extreme weather, rising sea levels and the loss of plant and animal species.
The world is heading for a 3-5C rise in temperatures this century, the UN World Meteorological Organisation has said.
The Paris Agreement is based on individual commitments and expectations for the Polish talks to produce much more than rules for how those would be measured had always been low: the unity built in Paris had been shattered by a wave of governments placing national agendas before collective action.
Only a handful of country leaders were present in Katowice and the UN Secretary-General had to fly back to the meeting to urge progress.
"Political will is missing," Alden Meyer, director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit science advocacy group said as the conference staggered towards a finish delayed for more than 24 hours by last-minute wrangling over parts of the text.
"But it provides the hooks for governments, cities, businesses, civil society etc to do the work to get [to the Paris Agreement goals]," he said.

A heating and power plant in Bedzin, near Katowice, which is among the most polluted cities in Europe. CZAREK SOKOLOWSKI

For conference president Michal Kurtyka it was a job well done. "Mission accomplished," he wrote on Twitter. "Our children look back at our legacy and recognise that we took the right decisions at important junctures like the one we face today."

Scratching the surface
For nations already suffering from climate change, the agreement, which did not make clear how pledged funding would be provided, was only just better than nothing. Simon Stiell, Environment Minister of Grenada in the Caribbean, told Reuters it "is barely scratching the surface of what we really require".
Investors said it would take more action at government level to persuade them to pump in the amount of money needed.
"Those countries . . . who push ahead with ambitious, long-term climate policies will be the ones to reap the investment and economic advantages of doing so," said Stephanie Pfeifer, chief executive of Institutional Investors' Group on Climate Change, noting the low-carbon transition was already underway.

Michal Kurtyka: "Our children look back at our legacy and recognise that we took the right decisions at important junctures like the one we face today." PETER KLAUNZER

The United States, set to withdraw from the UN process at the behest of President Donald Trump, staged an event touting the benefits of burning fossil fuels, including coal, more efficiently, while back at home, Trump has termed the Paris deal "ridiculous".
A scientific report requested by the Paris signatories said the share of coal-fuelled power would have to be cut to under 2 per cent by 2050, along with big cuts to other fossil fuels, to stop temperatures rising more than 1.5C and causing devastating floods, storms, heat waves and drought.
The United States, as well as fellow oil producers Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait, refused to "welcome" the report, a term sought by countries seeking to focus minds on its findings.
The final statement merely welcomed its timely completion and invited parties to make use of the information it contained.
Yet the row over the report was far from the only one: China, India, Russia, Australia, Japan, Brazil and the European Union were all drawn into various rifts, although China won some praise for helping to overcome concern, especially from the United States, that it would sidestep any rules.
"I think they have come a long way in recognising they need to provide confidence," Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said of the Chinese negotiators.
Describing Washington as "out of touch", Morgan noted the rules agreed in Poland nevertheless bound all countries, including the United States until its planned withdrawal in 2020, an achievement in itself.
"But that doesn´t substitute for the need to build ambition," she said.

Choking coal
Poland, hosting its third UN climate conference, came in for criticism for its commitment to coal, the most polluting of fossil fuels.
The meeting's final statement merely "noted" Warsaw's call for a "just transition" allowing communities dependent on coal more time to adjust.
The appointment of Kurtyka, Poland's deputy environment minister, to preside over the talks appeased some campaigners angered by the government's previous choice, former environment minister, Jan Szyszko.
Szyszko had expressed doubts that global warming is man-made in the past and increased logging in the ancient forest of Bialowieza, declared illegal by the European Union's top court.
However, Kurtyka's job was complicated by Poland's environment minister saying he did not want discussion about raising ambition at the talks and Poland's president vowing not to let anyone "murder coal mining".
A focus on technicalities in the first week was interpreted by campaigners as a pretext to avoid discussions on pledging deeper emissions cuts. Kurtyka got countries to focus on the guidelines near the end of the second week, but there was no collective action to harmonise or improve disparate pledges.
"Each delegation has its own domestic interests," Adam Guibourge-Czetwertynski, Poland's chief negotiator, said in the second week of talks. Our role, as the presidency, is to find balance, which ensures reaching a compromise."
Poland's ruling party, the nationalist-minded Law and Justice (PiS), wants to scale back the share of coal in electricity production from 80 per cent to 60 per cent by 2030.
But the production of hard coal is expected to be stable for decades, although 72 per cent of Poles think it should be gradually phased out to reduce emissions, according to a survey by state-controlled pollster CBOS in November.
Katowice, the heart of Poland's coal region, is among the most polluted cities in Europe, because many people heat their homes by burning low-quality coal, which is the cheapest. Residents say they have no choice.
"No climate decisions, even the best ones, will change the content of our wallets," said Maria Ligeza, an 83-year-old Katowice citizen. "Without help, people will be still burning what they have."

Links

19/12/2018

Intensifying Climate Change Protests 'Could Rival Vietnam War Activism'

Summit Passes The Buck In Race To Stop Climate Change