Climate Change Top Of Voters' Minds In NSW Election

Fairfax - Alexandra Smith

Climate change is a key election issue for most people in NSW, polling shows, as the environment emerges as a more pressing concern for voters than hospitals, schools and public transport.
Exclusive Herald polling shows that 57.5 per cent of voters say they will be swayed by climate change and environmental protection when deciding who to vote for on March 23.

57.5 per cent of voters say they will be swayed by climate change and environmental protection.

Credit: Brook Mitchell

Almost 37 per cent of people said climate change would not be a vote changer, and five per cent were unsure, the UComms/ReachTEL poll reveals.
Voters identified the environment as their top concern after the management of the state's finances, but ahead of health and hospitals, transport, schools and cost of living pressures.
Internal party research showed climate change played a major role in last year's Wentworth byelection and is shaping up to be a key issue in former prime minister Tony Abbott's seat of Warringah.
With climate change again looming as an issue at the federal election in May, Mr Abbott on Friday abandoned his call to withdraw from the Paris agreement to reduce carbon emissions, falling in to line with Prime Minister Scott Morrison on the key policy.

Independent candidate for Warringah Zali Steggall and former PM Tony Abbott debate over the cost of renewable energy.

A war of words broke out between the NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin and the federal government late last year, when Mr Harwin attacked the Morrison government as "out of touch on energy and climate policy".Mr Harwin's strong stance was seen as a way of differentiating the state Liberals from their federal counterparts over the issue of climate change but also more broadly.
As part of the state election campaign, Premier Gladys Berejiklian has announced interest-free loans to 300,000 households for solar and battery systems while Labor has pledged to put solar on 500,000 homes over the next 10 years through rebates.
Labor Leader Michael Daley has committed to the state government's agencies acquiring 100 per cent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025. By the 2030, the state will have a renewables target of 50 per cent and aiming for 100 per cent renewables by 2050.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific Campaigner, Holly Dawson, said the poll results showed voters did not view climate change as a federal issue.
"This poll reflects an ongoing trend - NSW across the political spectrum cares about the environment and expect the state government to act on climate change," Ms Dawson said.
"This poll is a strong mandate for climate change to be at the front of negotiations if a hung parliament were to occur. The independents that both parties will court to form government have already publicly announced that they want strong action to address climate change."
The three independents – Sydney MP Alex Greenwich, Lake Macquarie MP Greg Piper, and Wagga Wagga MP Joe McGirr – are demanding Labor and the Coalition take action on climate change.
The crossbenchers, who will hold the balance of power if the government loses six seats, wrote to the Premier and Mr Daley last week asking them to act on transitioning from coal mining to clean energy.
The poll of 1019 voters across NSW on Thursday night also showed Labor ahead of the Coalition 51:49 on a two-party preferred basis and had Labor leader Michael Daley as preferred premier.
It also revealed that opinions were mixed about which party is best equipped to lead the state amid falling house prices and forecasts for slower growth.
Only one-third of voters said the state's economic outlook makes them more likely to vote for the Berejiklian government, despite the Premier using financial management as a key selling point.
As the leaders ramped up their campaigning ahead of next week's poll, Ms Berejiklian visited a school yesterday to spruik her policy for more before and after school care, while Mr Daley announced 5000 extra teachers.

Links

• Climate change a vote changer in NSW: poll
• Climate change policies major battleground in NSW election
• NSW Labor Party aims for renewable energy target of 'at least' 50 per cent by 2030 if elected
• Koalas and climate to the fore as environment looms large in NSW election
• NSW election: Nationals' hold on environment policy drags down Coalition
• Climate, The Crisis That Threatens Our Political Duopoly
• When The Polls Are Tight The Coalition Pretends To Care About Climate
• Climate Change A Burning Issue (Again) In Voters' Minds
• 'The Right Time': Climate-Change Action The Rallying Cry For Emerging Independents

Victoria Can, And Should, Lead The Country On Climate Change

Fairfax - Jonathan La Nauze*

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has spent much of the past few weeks trying to repair the Coalition’s terrible reputation on climate change.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the government's climate package at a function in Melbourne.
Credit: AAP

It appears he has finally heard the sustained and unequivocal demand from Australians to step up on this issue – though after a summer of record high temperatures, crippling drought, mass fish deaths and more bushfires, there should be no prizes for noticing.
But a big part of what has caught Morrison’s attention is the voters of Victoria, who sent the Coalition a clear signal last November and appear willing to do so again at the impending federal election.
The signs Victoria was ready to lead the country were evident back in August. Malcolm Turnbull chose appeasement on the National Energy Guarantee and ultimately lost his prime ministership. That same week, Premier Dan Andrews confidently announced his first big election commitment – half-price solar for 650,000 homes.
It was a startling contrast. The federal Coalition couldn’t stomach the most modest of climate policies, while state Labor plastered theirs on the side of their campaign bus. Support for rooftop solar became Victorian Labor’s most visible election commitment and biggest contrast with the Liberal opposition, which had pledged to scrap the renewable energy target and build a new gas or coal power station instead.
After the thumping win for Labor, Victorian Liberals conceded they’d misread the public mood on clean energy and cutting pollution. Having lost his blue-ribbon seat of Hawthorn, shadow attorney-general John Pesutto acknowledged many conservative people “just want our party to do something” about climate change. His own daughter joined the student climate strike rallies.

Julian Burnside will run as the Greens candidate in the seat of Kooyong.
Credit: Jason South

If replicated at the federal election, November’s swing would see Liberals lose safe seats across Melbourne. This has inspired several prominent independent candidates – plus, last week, lawyer Julian Burnside for the Greens – to run against the Coalition in Victoria, with action on climate change central to their pitch. It’s hard to imagine this happening if the Victorian election hadn’t proven voters will dramatically shift loyalties, given a credible climate alternative.
But at the federal level, neither Labor nor the Coalition is offering a serious plan to get us off coal and gas in a meaningful timeframe.
Two days before the Victorian election, Bill Shorten announced a plan for cleaning up Australia’s energy system. Perhaps he was emboldened by polling showing Andrews’ apparent conversion of support for renewable energy into electoral reward. But Shorten’s plan still lacks urgency and would keep pollution at catastrophic levels for decades.
Morrison’s recent policy offerings would be even more damaging to our climate. Some have merit but overall they fail to do the obvious and most important thing needed to stop global warming – limit pollution from coal and gas power stations.
This is the gaping hole in the two major parties’ response to the climate crisis and it presents a unique opportunity for Victoria to step up once more.
Why? Because Victoria’s Environment Protection Authority is currently reviewing the licences of our state’s three coal-burning power stations, which are among the dirtiest in the world, and Victoria’s biggest source of climate pollution.
The EPA already licenses and regulates other types of air pollution, such as toxic particles and sulphur dioxide, but hasn’t yet imposed any constraint on the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.
Victoria could be the first Australian state to put limits on this pollution from coal-burning power stations and the decision would come smack-bang in the middle of a federal election campaign fought on climate change.
We know it would be popular. People hate the big energy companies and want the government to pull them into line. Polling shows overwhelming demand for government action on climate change, including intervening in the electricity market. And imposing a legal limit on pollution is a simple proposition to put to the public.
The conditions today are similar to the debate over renewable energy last August. The federal government is in chaos and the public is crying out for real action, not fudging half-measures.
Many people see climate change as a federal domain, but actually the states are responsible for energy supply and have most of the regulatory levers – like the EPA – to cut pollution across all sectors of the economy. Plus Andrews has already done the hard yards cranking up the renewables we will need as we phase out Victoria’s ageing coal power stations.
All of which means Victoria can, and should, lead the entire country on the issue.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that human civilisation has just 12 years to avert an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. We live in an extraordinary time and it calls for extraordinary leadership, not merely sound management. The Andrews government has just won an election with a massive mandate on climate change and renewable energy and here is the perfect political moment to act. Will they seize it?

*Jonathan La Nauze is CEO of Environment Victoria.

Links

• Scott Morrison pledges $2 billion, 10-year boost to Direct Action fund in election climate pitch
• 'Serious questions' over whether Australia's emissions cuts are real
• Annual emissions keep rising as gas jump counters power sector drop
• Pro-coal Nationals hold electorates most at risk from climate change
• 'Cantering off a cliff': Investor group warns on weak emissions goals
• Living in fairyland': Nats leader links emissions to night sport
• Morrison government hit by new internal dispute over coal
• 'Underhanded': States baulk at Labor's reluctance to nix Kyoto credits
• The one thing we have to fear is fear itself
• Tony Abbott performs major backflip on withdrawing from Paris climate agreement

Students Are Striking For Action On Climate Change — A Truancy Everyone Should Applaud

Los Angeles Times - Haven Coleman | Bill McKibben

A student with her face painted participates in a climate change protest
 organized by 'Youth Strike 4 Climate' in London on Feb. 15.
Facundo Arrizabalaga / EPA-EFE / REX

Haven Coleman Haven Coleman, a student in Denver, has been striking for the climate weekly since January. She is founder and co-director of US Youth Climate Strike. Bill McKibben Bill McKibben wrote the first book on climate change in 1989, and helped found the global climate campaign 350.org.

Consider this a note explaining why one of us will be absent from school on March 15 — and why everyone else should applaud this truancy.
Beginning last August, a Swedish schoolgirl named Greta Thunberg went on strike from her classes, choosing instead to spend the days on the steps of the Parliament building in Stockholm.
Her reasoning: If her government couldn’t be bothered to safeguard her future by taking action against climate change, it was a bit rich to demand that she spend her time preparing for a future that might not exist.
Her protest soon spread across Scandinavia, Europe, Britain and Australia.
Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren have now participated worldwide, and the protest has drawn some prominent support: German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on March 2, “I very much welcome that young people, school students, demonstrate and tell us to do something fast about climate change." But of course others have been less understanding.
During climate demonstrations in Australia, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, “We do not support our schools being turned into parliaments. … What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.”

Lacking access to piles of cash, young people do what they can. And a strike is one such measure.

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AUSTRALIA
School Strike 4 Climate Action

Join A March 15 Strike
DETAILS

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On Friday, many thousands of American students will be joining the school strike, so we’d like to lay out the reasoning behind it in more detail, in the hopes that people will view these protests with the seriousness they deserve.
It was 30 years ago that scientists first explained that burning fossil fuels was changing the composition of the atmosphere and driving the rapid warming of the Earth. That is enough time to educate a student all the way from preschool to a PhD, but it hasn’t been time enough for our politicians to learn how serious a climate catastrophe we are facing.
The American government, in particular, is a study in inaction. Our federal government has reversed course on every effort to change laws and regulations. Our current president has taken steps to drop out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the only international effort to combat global warming. Young people see that their future is on the line, which is why they’ve been at the front fighting against oil companies, pipelines and fracking wells.
You don’t need to be much past first grade to know that when you’re in a hole you should stop digging. Or, in this case, drilling. It is time to replace fossil fuel energy with power from the sun and wind — and we have the cheap solar panels and turbines to do it. But America has become the largest producer of gas and oil in the world, and most politicians lack the courage to stand up to the industry. Both of us, for instance, worked last fall on a modest Colorado referendum that would have prohibited oil wells right next to homes and schools, only to watch fossil fuel companies outspend local activists 40 to 1 and narrowly defeat the measure.
So, lacking access to piles of cash, young people do what they can. And a strike is one such measure.
It’s not a stunt. A stunt is Australia’s now-prime minister bringing a lump of coal to parliament to pass around to his colleagues. A stunt is former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper literally drinking a cup of fracking fluid.
A school strike, instead, recalls some of the most pivotal moments in American history. In 1963, for instance, the Rev. Martin Luther King found that he had run out of adult volunteers to stand up to Bull Connor at the height of the civil rights battle in Birmingham.
So, after much soul-searching, King asked the city’s schoolchildren to leave class and face the police dogs and firehoses. “Don’t worry about your children,” he told their frantic parents. “They’re gonna be all right. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job not only for themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.”
No one striking for the climate on March 15 will confront the immediate perils those brave schoolchildren had to endure. But just as they anticipated a future blighted by segregation, so today’s young people face a future blighted by environmental destruction. And so they must act.
It would be better, of course, if adults had taken the lead. Stopping climate change is their responsibility. But they haven’t. Though pretty much every politician has made it out of college, their education seems to have done them little good.
Maybe, at least for a day, there’s more education to be found out in the street. Instead of studying history, it’s time to make it.

Links

• Striking Schoolkids Should Wear Storm Of Criticism As A Badge Of Honour
• Why I'm encouraging my daughter to wag school
• Climate Change And The Power Of One
• Striking For The Future: From Australia To Japan To India, Youths Will Skip School On March 15 To Protest Against Climate Change
• Generation Greta Will Step Up Their Climate Strikes On 15 March
• How Greta Thunberg’s Lone Strike Against Climate Change Became A Global Movement
• Youth Climate Strikers: 'We Are Going To Change The Fate Of Humanity'
• Young Climate Strikers Can Win Their Fight. We Must All Help
• How A 7th-Grader’s Strike Against Climate Change Exploded Into A Movement