07/03/2019

Scientists Slap Down Australia Government Over Fake Climate Claims

Renew Economy - 

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor
AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts
Perhaps it was federal energy minister Angus Taylor repeatedly declaring on Sunday’s ABC Insiders program that national emissions were “coming down,” and that Australia would meet its Paris climate targets “in a canter.”
Perhaps it was the looming federal election and a feeling that now, more than ever, our most senior politicians should be held to account for what they say about such globally significant issues as climate change.
Perhaps it is because at the close of Australia’s hottest summer on record, Victoria is now burning through its hottest start to autumn in 30 years.
Whatever the trigger, the nation’s leading climate and energy experts have had enough.
A group of 28 climate scientists, academics and former heads of energy companies on Monday released a joint statement to correct the record, and remove any ambiguity on the subject:
  • Australia is NOT on track to meet its 2030 emissions reduction target;
  • Even if it was (it’s not), the target itself is woefully inadequate for what science says must be done to avert dangerous climate change.

“It is unbelievably misleading,” said signatory and Climate Councillor Greg Bourne on ABC Radio on Monday morning. “Anyone who goes into the data sets, and they’re really quite easy to look at, with some very nice graphs, show emissions rising ever since, basically, the Abbott government came in.”

The statement – signed by a slew of experts including ANU Professor and Climate Councillor Will Steffen, energy advisor Tim Forcey and APVI chair Renate Egan – notes that Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution has been rising for four years in a row, ever since the scrapping of the carbon price, as mapped out by the federal government’s own most recent data.
According to that data, the signatories say, direct combustion, transport and fugitives have all increased greenhouse gas pollution levels since 2005 and are projected to continue increasing emissions to 2030.
The joint statement also reminds those who need reminding that Australia’s 2030 target is economy wide, meaning that total greenhouse gas pollution must be reduced across all sectors: electricity, stationary energy, transport, fugitive emissions, industry, agriculture, waste and land use.
“The electricity sector has been going down… but the overall energy sector, if you take energy as a package, energy emissions for Australia have been going up continuously,” said Bourne, who is also the former CEO of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
“Transport emissions have been going up continuously, and continue, just continue to go up. …Stationary energy and industrial processes – still going up; fugitive emissions – still going up.”
“It’s almost as if, if the politicians can get us to concentrate on the electricity sector, which has shown some downward slope, then we’ll forget all about the rest.”
Meanwhile, as The Australia Institute’s Richie Merzian explained on Sky News, the Morrison government will also be relying on “dodgy credits,” squirreled away through some tricks of accounting over a decade ago.

As Bourne explained it to Fran Kelly on the radio, when Australia used these credits back in the context of Kyoto, it was bad enough.
“Using those credits right now, and trying to bring them forward, will be seen by every other country as – this is just disgusting, just disgusting,” he said.
The timing of the joint statement – and fact check – is important. As the signatories note, global temperatures have risen 1°C in the era following mass industrialisation and this is already directly affecting humankind via worsening extreme weather events.
And Australia is in the firing line, facing increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events including heatwaves, intense rainfall, and extreme bushfire conditions.
But the timing is also important in terms of the election. And the federal Coalition – of all parties – should be heeding the call, as evidence mounts that voters, even Liberal and National ones, care deeply about climate.
Even the Murdoch press can see that. An “exclusive” story by The Australian’s associate editor on Monday reports that former competitive skier Zali Steggall is set to steal the seat of Warringah from former PM Tony Abbott, from a platform of strong action on climate and renewables.
The story says Steggall’s campaign has scored the backing of “wealthy investors who want immediate action on climate change” and who have a financial stake in the shift away from coal, to renewables.
One of those backers is reported to be renewables industry veteran and founder of Solar Choice, Angus Gemmel, who announced on Facebook that he had “taken on the coal lobby” with a postcard drop in Mosman about “solar farm facts and figures.”
Renewables, of course, will be key to meeting Australia’s emission reduction obligations – but that, too, needs continued policy support to encourage the investment needed, the experts say. What we are getting instead looks rather like investment support for coal.
“Using another horse metaphor, (Taylor) is flogging a dead horse. That horse is not going to get there in a canter, not a chance at all. …There are no policies, yet, in the electricity sector beyond 2020 which will bring the emissions further down. Sure, there’ll be some more investment, but not by any policy in government.
“…The battery of the nation, that will help in terms of creating storage for whatever will be creating electricity… so it’s also encouraging for coal.
“It’s only when you actually take out the fossil fuel plants that the Tasmanian program actually begins to make economic sense. And we’re still not sure that Snowy 2.0 makes economic sense.”

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Support Is Surging For Teens’ Climate Change Lawsuit

National Geographic - Laura Parker

The U.S. Constitution protects the right to a safe climate, say 30,000 kids and eight members of Congress in support of the suit.
Lawyers and the youth plaintiffs lineup behind a banner after a hearing before Federal District Court Judge Ann Aiken between lawyers for the Trump Administration and the so called Climate Kids in Federal Court in Eugene, Ore. Wednesday July 18, 2018. The Trump administration has gone to the U.S. Supreme Court in its effort to stop a lawsuit filed by young activists who say the government is failing to protect them from climate change. Photograph by Chris Pietsch, The Register-Guard via AP
The 21 youths suing the federal government over climate change have gained a new round of supporters, including 30,000 youths who signed onto a legal brief asking an appeals court to allow the long-delayed case to go to trial.
The “Young People’s Brief” was among 15 new amicus briefs filed Friday by environmentalists, religious and women’s groups, business leaders and eight members of Congress– all in support of the case being tried in court.
The youth filing is noteworthy, as a growing youth movement calling for political leaders to act more urgently on climate change is rapidly spreading around the world. Young people in 50 nations have organized a strike from school on March 15 as part of a global protest.
“I’m part of an amazing group of plaintiffs who won’t put up with adults jeopardizing our futures any longer,” Miko Vergun, 17, of Beaverton, Oregon, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement. “…The amount of young people, in the United States and around the world, who added their names to support this brief is a representation of all the youth who know that their futures and their planet are at stake.”
The trial, originally scheduled to begin last October, has been delayed while government lawyers have sought to have the case dismissed before trial.
In court papers, the government said the “assertion of sweeping new fundamental rights” the youths claim “has no basis in the nation’s history and tradition”—and no place in a federal court. The government lawyers twice appealed to the Supreme Court, which returned the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Arguments in that appeal are scheduled to be heard the first week of June.

Four years so far
The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States,was originally filed against the government in 2015 during the Obama administration. The suit contends that the federal government pursued energy policies that caused climate change even though it knew for more than a half-century that carbon emissions would destabilize the climate. The government’s failure to forestall the effects of climate change, the suit alleges, violated future generations’ constitutional right to live in a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.”
The case hinges on the question of whether the Constitution guarantees such a right.
Both the Obama administration and now the Trump administration have argued repeatedly that the issues of climate change are more properly addressed by Congress and not by the courts.
In another amicus brief filed last week, eight Democrats in Congress disagreed and urged the court to hear the case. “[T]he intractability of the debates before Congress and state legislatures and the alleged valuing of short-term economic interest despite the cost to human life, necessitates a need for the Courts to evaluate the constitutional parameters of the action or inaction taken by the government,” the lawmakers wrote.
The Sunrise Movement Education Fund attached more than 20 testimonials to its brief, from youths in an assortment of states already suffering the effects of climate change.
“Until we force our government and our business owners to recognize that change needs to happen, it will not happen, and we will be unable to deal with the threats that await us…,” wrote Max Stefanescu, 15, of Alabama.
“As a citizen of America, I have the same right to life, liberty, and property as my forefathers,” wrote Leon Zha, 17, of California. “But what life do I have if I die twenty years early from carcinogenic smog? What liberty, if I must stay indoors all day to avoid the stroke-inducing heat? What property, if the land itself is burned to ash?”

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