12/02/2019

Coal Miners Derided Climate Action 'Sideshow'. Now It's The Main Event

Fairfax - David Morris | Brendan Dobbie

Authors
  • David Morris is CEO of the NSW Environmental Defenders Office
  • Brendan Dobbie is its acting principal lawyer
The nascent field of climate litigation in Australia came of age on Friday. The Chief Judge of the NSW Land and Environment Court, Brian Preston, delivered a landmark judgment refusing to approve a new coal mine because of its impacts on climate change. In the Chief Judge’s words, the mine proposal was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
When we first argued that our client, the Groundswell Gloucester, should be a party to this case and put a climate-change ground before the court, the mining companies thought it a laughable proposition, and said it would be “a sideshow”. As it happens, climate change became the main event in this court, as it is elsewhere.
A protest sign in Forbesdale, near Gloucester, opposing the proposed Rocky Hill coal mine. CREDIT: LIAM DRIVER
The ramifications are likely to ripple out across Australia and possibly the world. This is climate litigation writ large.
The Chief Judge refused the Rocky Hill Coal Project,  near the mid-north coast town of Gloucester, on a range of grounds, all of which are important, but what his judgment says about climate change is of greatest significance. The court accepted the evidence put by Professor Will Steffen about the global carbon budget – that is, there is a limit on the amount of fossil fuels that can be burnt if we are to meet the Paris Agreement targets and avoid dangerous climate change.
The challenge of remaining within the global carbon budget presents a major barrier for new fossil fuel developments. They must overcome what we characterise as the Chief Judge’s “wrong time test”. To pass that test, a fossil fuel proponent must now establish why their project should be allowed to proceed at this time in history, when it is clearly recognised that there is an urgent need for rapid and deep decreases in greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve this, most fossil fuel reserves need to remain in the ground unburned.
The Rocky Hill project failed this test. It failed because its impacts on climate change were adjudged to be unsuitable at this time. It failed notwithstanding it was a relatively small project, with comparatively fewer emissions, and one proposing to mine coking coal for steel making rather than the more frequently discussed thermal coal for energy. That would indicate that future fossil-fuel projects, which are either larger, produce more emissions, or seek to generate fuel for energy rather than steel making, face an even steeper challenge in passing the “wrong time test”.
In the Rocky Hill case, the mining company put forward four arguments as to why its project should be allowed to pass the “wrong time test”. First, the emissions could theoretically be offset by alternate mitigation measures at some point in the future. The court rejected this as speculative and hypothetical.
Second, it argued refusal of the project was not the most cost-efficient way to meet the global carbon budget. This was rejected, as it is not the court’s role to determine the least-cost way of achieving global emissions reduction (as an aside, that is the role of leadership and policy – in which we are sadly lacking).
Third, the company mounted, effectively, the drug dealer’s defence: if we don’t mine it here, they’ll mine it somewhere else. This was rejected because there is “no inevitability that developing countries … will instead approve a new coking coal mine … rather than following Australia’s lead to refuse a new coal mine”.
Fourth, the company argued the mine was necessary for the steel production industry. This was rejected on the basis that the mine is not in fact necessary to maintain worldwide steel production and therefore its impacts on climate change could not be justified.
Gloucester residents were jubilant after their win in the Land and Environment Court. CREDIT: JANIE BARRETT
These arguments are standard fare for fossil fuel companies. Until Friday, they had proven incredibly successful in frustrating attempts to address the cumulative impacts of multiple smaller projects on global climate change. The companies’ success had been enabled by policy settings that create no meaningful nexus between our international commitments to emissions reductions, and the approval of fossil fuel projects at a local level, where those emissions are actually produced.
Now the Land and Environment Court’s most senior judge has accepted the causal link between a project’s contribution to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change. That, in and of itself, is a matter of great importance.
In one sense this case says the starting point for a new fossil fuel project is “no” because of climate change. A fossil fuel development may argue its unique circumstances justify approval, but it must do so in light of climate change science telling us that there are already sufficient fossil fuel projects approved to exceed the target limit agreed in Paris of a 1.5C rise on the pre-industrial global average  temperature.
We suspect we are only beginning to understand how profoundly influential this judgment will be on the legal landscape in Australia. This won’t be the last project consigned to the dust-bin of history on the grounds of climate change. It is just the first.

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Plummeting Insect Numbers 'Threaten Collapse Of Nature'

The Guardian - 

 Insects could vanish within a century at current rate of decline, says global review
The rate of insect extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. Photograph: Courtesy of Entomologisher Verein Krefeld 
The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

Scarce copper butterflies. Photograph: Marlene Finlayson/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy 
Quick guide
Insect collapse: the red flags

Butterflies and moths
There has been a “severe reduction” in butterflies and moths in the Kullaberg Nature Reserve in Sweden compared to 50 years ago. Scientists found over a quarter of the 600 species once found had been lost. Butterflies were hardest hit, losing almost a half of species, including the large tortoiseshell and scarce copper. In England, two-thirds of 340 moth species declined from 1968-2003.
Bumblebees
Museum records enabled scientists to assess the fate of 16 species of bumblebees in the US midwest from 1900 to 2007. They found four had completely died out, while eight were declining in number, and blamed intensive agriculture and pesticides.
Dragonflies
Red dragonfly populations have fallen sharply in Japan since the mid-1990s, which scientists link to insecticides in rice paddies that stop the water-living nymphs emerging into adults. In the US, recent surveys across California and Nevada found 65% of dragonflies and damselflies had declined in the 100 years since 1914.
Leafhoppers
Leafhoppers and planthoppers often make up a large proportion of the flying insects in European grasslands. But scientists found their abundance in Germany plunged by 66% in the 50 years to 2010. Soil acidification, partly due to heavy fertiliser use, was the main cause.
Ground beetles
In the UK, dramatic declines in ground beetles have been seen in almost three-quarters of the 68 carabid species studied from 1994-2008. A few species increased, but overall one in six of all the beetles was lost in that time.
Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: “The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.
“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”
The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.
“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” said Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, at the University of Sydney, Australia, who wrote the review with Kris Wyckhuys at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing.
The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.
The new analysis selected the 73 best studies done to date to assess the insect decline. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit. For example, the number of widespread butterfly species fell by 58% on farmed land in England between 2000 and 2009. The UK has suffered the biggest recorded insect falls overall, though that is probably a result of being more intensely studied than most places.
Surveying butterflies in Maine, US. Photograph: Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Getty Images
Bees have also been seriously affected, with only half of the bumblebee species found in Oklahoma in the US in 1949 being present in 2013. The number of honeybee colonies in the US was 6 million in 1947, but 3.5 million have been lost since.
There are more than 350,000 species of beetle and many are thought to have declined, especially dung beetles. But there are also big gaps in knowledge, with very little known about many flies, ants, aphids, shield bugs and crickets. Experts say there is no reason to think they are faring any better than the studied species.
A small number of adaptable species are increasing in number, but not nearly enough to outweigh the big losses. “There are always some species that take advantage of vacuum left by the extinction of other species,” said Sanchez-Bayo. In the US, the common eastern bumblebee is increasing due to its tolerance of pesticides.
Guardian graphic. Source: Sánchez-Bayo & Wyckhuys, Biological Conservation, 2019
Most of the studies analysed were done in western Europe and the US, with a few ranging from Australia to China and Brazil to South Africa, but very few exist elsewhere.
“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,” Sánchez-Bayo said. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.” He said the demise of insects appears to have started at the dawn of the 20th century, accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s and reached “alarming proportions” over the last two decades.
He thinks new classes of insecticides introduced in the last 20 years, including neonicotinoids and fipronil, have been particularly damaging as they are used routinely and persist in the environment: “They sterilise the soil, killing all the grubs.” This has effects even in nature reserves nearby; the 75% insect losses recorded in Germany were in protected areas.
German conservation workers inspect an urban garden for insects. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images 
Why are insects in decline,
and can we do anything about it?

What is the sixth mass extinction?
Many scientists think the current worldwide annihilation of wildlife is the beginning of a huge loss of species on Earth. It has happened five times in the last 4bn years, as a result of meteorite impacts, long ice ages and huge volcanic eruptions. But this one is the result not of natural causes, but of humanity’s actions.
How bad is it?
Extremely. By some measures, the biodiversity crisis is even deeper than that of climate change. Since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals. In the last 50 years alone, the populations of all mammals, birds, reptiles and fish have fallen by an average of 60%.
How about insects?
The new global review says it’s even worse for bugs, with the proportion of insect species declining being double that for vertebrates. The insect decline is at least a century old, but seems to have accelerated in recent decades.
Does that matter?
Yes. There are more than a million species of insect, compared with just 5,400 mammals, and they are the cornerstone of all terrestrial ecosystems. Without them, you get what scientists call a “bottom-up trophic cascade”, in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain, wiping out higher animals. And without healthy ecosystems, there is no clean air and water.
Why are we only really noticing the insect collapse now?
The lack of bugs on car windscreens after a drive in the country, compared with a few decades ago, is real. But hard scientific data requires careful and long-term research, and relatively little has been done. Insects are small and often hard to identify, and they are certainly much less charismatic than elephants or eagles. Worse, just when we need more information, researchers say entomology courses are being cut.
What can be done?
Ultimately the size of the human population and how much land it uses for the food, energy and other goods it consumes determine how much wildlife is lost. Protecting wild spaces is important, as is reducing the impact of industrial, chemical-based farming. Fighting climate change is also vital, particularly for the many insect species in the tropics. So demanding political action, eating fewer intensively farmed meat and dairy products, and flying less could all help.
The world must change the way it produces food, Sánchez-Bayo said, noting that organic farms had more insects and that occasional pesticide use in the past did not cause the level of decline seen in recent decades. “Industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is the one that is killing the ecosystems,” he said.
In the tropics, where industrial agriculture is often not yet present, the rising temperatures due to climate change are thought to be a significant factor in the decline. The species there have adapted to very stable conditions and have little ability to change, as seen in Puerto Rico.
Sánchez-Bayo said the unusually strong language used in the review was not alarmist. “We wanted to really wake people up” and the reviewers and editor agreed, he said. “When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern.”
Other scientists agree that it is becoming clear that insect losses are now a serious global problem. “The evidence all points in the same direction,” said Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in the UK. “It should be of huge concern to all of us, for insects are at the heart of every food web, they pollinate the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more. Love them or loathe them, we humans cannot survive without insects.”
Matt Shardlow, at the conservation charity Buglife, said: “It is gravely sobering to see this collation of evidence that demonstrates the pitiful state of the world’s insect populations. It is increasingly obvious that the planet’s ecology is breaking and there is a need for an intense and global effort to halt and reverse these dreadful trends.” In his opinion, the review slightly overemphasises the role of pesticides and underplays global warming, though other unstudied factors such as light pollution might prove to be significant.
Prof Paul Ehrlich, at Stanford Universityin the US, has seen insects vanish first-hand, through his work on checkerspot butterflies on Stanford’s Jasper Ridge reserve. He first studied them in 1960 but they had all gone by 2000, largely due to climate change.
Ehrlich praised the review, saying: “It is extraordinary to have gone through all those studies and analysed them as well as they have.” He said the particularly large declines in aquatic insects were striking. “But they don’t mention that it is human overpopulation and overconsumption that is driving all the things [eradicating insects], including climate change,” he said.
Sánchez-Bayo said he had recently witnessed an insect crash himself. A recent family holiday involved a 400-mile (700km) drive across rural Australia, but he had not once had to clean the windscreen, he said. “Years ago you had to do this constantly.”
Volunteers look for the wormwood moonshiner beetle in Suffolk, UK. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian
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This Summer Is Angry: Are You?

Independent Australia - Dr Geoff Davies

We are hitting a boiling point in climate devastation. Now is the time for comprehensive action.
Flooding in Townsville (screenshot via YouTube)

Dr. Geoff Davies is an author, commentator and scientist. He is a retired geophysicist at the Australian National University and the author of Desperately Seeking the Fair Go and The Little Green Economics Book. He blogs at BetterNature Books.
I STILL ENCOUNTER people who say "there’s always been climate change". 
They mean: don’t worry about global warming, it’s not our fault and there’s nothing we can do about it. You hear other excuses, too.
So, should we not worry about the Reef and the rivers, about Townsville, about Tasmania, about the kelp forests and the mangrove forests and the many other symptoms of a climate awry?
Do the "sceptics" think the scientists haven’t thought of all the "reasons" they find to ignore global warming? Evidently so. But of course, the scientists aren’t quite that stupid. They have thought of all those possible ways out of the conclusions, and a lot more besides.
They’ve checked them all out. They don’t work.
Global warming, caused by us, is still there, pretty much on the course predicted decades ago.
Except that it may now be accelerating.
Not only does the warming correlate with our greenhouse gas emissions, the atmosphere is also warming in the way you’d expect and the actual imbalance of heat coming in versus heat escaping back to space has been measured. The evidence is abundant and of many kinds, both direct and indirect. There is no wiggle room left. Global warming is real and we are the cause.
Many of the people who resist that conclusion may actually be worried that our society might change drastically, that we’ll regress to living in caves or something absurd like that. But we can have clean energy and we can fix many of the other problems while maintaining a comfortable life, even improving it. Unless, that is, we fail to change what we are doing. That is by far the biggest risk of regression, even collapse.
I don’t blame most of the people who wish global warming away. They have been deceived by the grievous omissions, gross distortions and outright lies pouring out of the media all the time. The media controllers, the opportunistic politicians and the self-interested bosses are the culprits.
Writer Richard Flanagan has called them out. He wrote, eloquently, but sadly:
'Laugh at us all, Scott Morrison, you and the others who sit with you, grinning fools at the entrance to hell. Laugh and laugh as the ash falls soft as silent despair.'
You may have noticed that I haven’t been saying "climate change", I’ve been saying "global warming". The latter is the more accurate term. Even more accurate is "anthropogenic global warming", human-caused global warming. Such is the power of those who manipulate our society that they deliberately changed our language, so most people now say "climate change". It’s then an easy step from that phrase to "there’s always been climate change".
It’s true there has always been climate change, but you might not have wanted to be around for a lot of it. Most of it was very slow, but even that caused many extinctions. The more rapid changes, triggered by big volcanic eruptions or meteorite strikes, caused mass extinctions. The present change is very rapid compared to most, and we are in the early stages of what can become a mass extinction unless we rapidly change our ways.
IMAGE
Do you wish that risk for your grandchildren?
An irony is that we’ve had 10,000 years of remarkable climate stability during which our vaunted civilisation has arisen. The present global industrial system is extremely fragile and will very likely collapse into simpler forms even if we do pull back from the flames. Some form of "civilisation" will probably continue, but it’s not clear what.
Meanwhile around half of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Surely you’ve heard that? The thing almost no one says is that global warming has momentum, it will continue for several decades almost regardless of what we do. It’s hard to see the Reef being more than a small southern remnant after that.
Several summers ago, we also lost vast tracts of mangrove forests across the north and vast kelp forests off the west coast. Now the ancient alpine heaths and Gondwana forests of Tasmania are burning. They haven’t burnt for thousands of years and they won’t easily recover. The Darling River and the Coorong were in big trouble during the millennium drought and now there are mass fish kills.



Our land is dying before our eyes. It is reverting to simpler, harsher forms. Many suffer now, and our children will suffer more.
Our firefighters and disaster managers, the ones who work on the ground, are speaking very clearly: we are experiencing unprecedented heat, floods and fires. It means we are in the early stages of a vastly greater calamity. We don’t know if we can turn it around, but if we don’t try it will come upon us remorselessly.
As this angry summer proceeds, reflect on what is really important. Do your tribal political affiliations really amount to much? Your vote is your power. If you use it the same old way you’ll get the same old result. If you want something better you have to change your vote.
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