06/05/2019

I'm Willing To Go To Jail To Stop Adani And Save Our Beloved Country. Will You Stand With Me?

The Guardian - 

In this anti-Adani rally speech, novelist Richard Flanagan says the fight against the Carmichael coalmine defines the fight against the climate crisis
 Protestors dressed as Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten at the anti-Adani rally outside Parliament House in Canberra on Sunday. ‘It matters very much who you vote for this election,’ writes Richard Flanagan. Photograph: Rohan Thomson/AAP
I grew up in a remote mining town. I know the hardship. I saw the tragedy. One of my earliest memories is a whole town stopped for a miner’s funeral, family after family lining the main street, one people joined in grief.
And when politicians talk of caring about miners I don’t believe a word they say.
If they cared wouldn’t they be advocating to end black lung disease, a 19th century industrial disease now returned, because of unsafe working conditions, to kill Australian coalminers in the 21st century?
If they cared wouldn’t they be speaking out about the increasing casualisation and pay stripping of coalminers, supported by the Morrison government?
And if they cared wouldn’t they question whether Adani is an appropriate business to employ Australian miners? Adani, such a friend of the working man that, when building its giant Shantigram luxury estate in India, it housed workers in conditions so appalling that there were 15 recorded outbreaks of cholera.
Put a hi-vis jacket on that corpse and say you’re still for the working miners of Queensland, Scott.
But then Adani’s long-term aim isn’t to employ miners under whatever pitiful conditions and awards its paid-up political mates might legislate.
As Adani Mining’s CEO said in 2016, “When we ramp up the mine, everything will be autonomous from mine to port. In our eyes, this is the mine of the future.” That’s right: Adani’s ambition is ultimately that its mine is all robots. Not a miner, not a driller, not a driver in sight.
So the promised 10,000 jobs that turned out to be 1,462 jobs will in turn vanish like the mist as Adani buys in ever more robots.
But that’s not all. Modelling by Wood Mackenzie shows that if coalmining in the Galilee Basin, led by Adani, goes ahead, coal production in older, less efficient Australian coalmines will drop significantly and many coalmining jobs will vanish. Adani’s new mine will simply steal the jobs off the old mines.
Jabbering jobs, jobs, jobs, in a hard hat doesn’t change these truths. It doesn’t make a politician fair dinkum. It makes him or her a lying clown who sells every coalminer down the drain for another backhander from the bosses of the fossil fuel industry.
The coalmining communities of Australia deserve better. They deserve the truth. They need a responsible transition plan, not lies and deceit.
Because Adani’s mine is not happening to help miners. It’s not happening to help Clermont or Mackay or far-north Queensland. It’s certainly not happening to help the poor of India.
It’s happening because of one thing: greed.
And that greed controls our politics. How can Scott Morrison claim to care about climate change when his political survival now hinges on a deal with Clive Palmer, a man whose own massive Galilee Basin coalmine is dependent on Adani getting up? What exactly did Scott Morrison promise Palmer? The Liberals’ platform is nothing more than a smoking coal heap.
Forty-one years ago, I had just kayaked through a beautiful gorge on the Franklin River called Irenabyss. The Franklin was to be dammed and though there was opposition to the damming, no one I knew believed it was possible to defeat the all-powerful state and federal governments that were at the time hell-bent on building it.
The gorge opened out into small basin. At its rainforested edge there was a beach. I kayaked over to it and a lanky man appeared out of the rainforest. And there, on the banks of that beautiful, doomed river, I met Bob Brown.
I asked Bob did he really think the river could be saved. His answer was revealing. I think, he said, that there is hope.
There is no power on this earth that can resist an idea whose time has come
And this is what I learned from Bob Brown. The battle for that river raged for another four years. Governments came and went. At every step it looked like we had lost, and yet, what we could not see was that at every stop we were growing stronger. Thousands of people went to prison in the biggest act of civil disobedience in Australian history.
In the end the government was spending countless millions to get heavy machinery into that remote rainforest to destroy as much a possible to make that dam inevitable. And at the very last moment, the high court ruled the dam could not go ahead.
I am here today to say that there is hope. That the Franklin flows free and Adani will be stopped. These things happen because at a certain point enough people say there are things that matter more than politics or money. There is no power on this earth that can resist an idea whose time has come.
Message of hope: former Greens leader Bob Brown addresses an anti-Adani rally on Sunday. Photograph: Rohan Thomson/AAP
I am not going to waste your time today repeating the many facts with which you are already familiar, suffice to say one thing: the IPCC last October said we had 12 years to contain climate change – that is, decarbonise our economy so that the temperature rises no more than another half a degree on what it is today. If large-scale action is not taken now the IPCC warned that we will face a global warming catastrophe.
More than half a year of that 12 years has already passed without any meaningful national or international action. Our emissions are still rising. And that is why this is a crisis unlike any we have ever faced. On present trends much of Australia will become, quite simply, uninhabitable. And what remains liveable will be small bands of our country.
We will not have the means to generate the food we need, the wealth we are accustomed to. The most recent science suggests that around the world up to one million species on which we depend for food and clean water face annihilation, that the planet’s very life support systems are entering a danger zone. This is not science fiction. This is not a Netflix series. It is what the world’s leading scientists tell us.
The moment for believing this is a matter that can be solved by flying less or not eating meat has long passed. The solution will not be about personal choices. It will be about – and can only be about – political change.
And that change will not come about because of a messianic leader. It will not come about because of this party or that party. It will only happen if we wish it to happen and if we make it happen. We have only ourselves to blame and we have only ourselves to turn to save ourselves.
It matters very much who you vote for this election. And after May 18 it matters even more to press whoever wins to recognise this crisis is not an issue. It is the issue.
The fight against Adani is a fight for the soul of our country
The drying out of Australia is the issue. The collapse of our fisheries is the issue. The likelihood of not having enough water to sustain our population is the issue. The threat greater and greater mega-fires pose is the issue. The decline of our agriculture is the issue. The inability of our infrastructure to cope with ever-larger floods and more frequent cyclones is the issue. Sea rises are the issue. The death of our rivers, the death of the Great Barrier Reef, the death of the Tasmanian rainforests is the issue. The drying wheatbelt is the issue. If our very fate as a species is not the issue, then what is?
And that is why Adani has become the symbol of why our country is broken. That is why the fight against Adani is a fight for the soul of our country.
I know many of you may feel that you have no power, or lack the skills or abilities needed. Faced with the crisis that is climate change it is too easy to feel powerless, to feel the problem is beyond your powers or perhaps anyone’s to influence.
Perhaps the greatest problem we face is not climate change, but the myth of our own powerlessness. We believe only the most powerful – the politicians, the corporations – can change our world. Accordingly, we feel a great despair about our future because we can see no hope in any politician or any corporation.
But it is not so.
Because the only thing that will save us is us. Half of the carbon in the atmosphere was put there by us in the last 30 years. And now we have 11 and a half years to reverse that disastrous act.
It is a time to act and it is for us to act. Because there is no one else and there is no other time.
And if our politicians continue to deceive themselves and deceive us, if after May 18 we end up with a government that will not act, and if we are only left with only our bodies to oppose this mine, if it takes putting our flesh between the past and the future, between the bulldozers and the earth, if it means a blockade of the Adani site, then I, for one, will be there. And if that means being arrested and going to jail then I will go to jail.
And my question to you today is this: will you?
Will you stand with me, will you go to jail with me, to stop this mine and save our future? Because if you will, I ask you to raise your hand.
I tell you this: we will win.
The Franklin was more than a river. Adani is more than a mine. This rally, you people, are part of the river of hope that flows through this country, our beloved country, and it is a river that cannot be bought, that cannot be dammed, that cannot be poisoned, that cannot be bought and sold. And every day that river grows larger and stronger.
And I am hopeful. Why? Because 41 years ago I met a man who refused to abandon hope and led a movement with such moral clarity that the river still flows. And 41 years later I stand here before you, with that same man, to say that hope is never lost.
Never. Never. Never.
Bob Brown speaks during Sunday’s protest against Adani’s Carmichael coalmine. Photograph: Rohan Thomson/AAP

 Note: This is an edited version of a speech delivered to the anti-Adani rally in Canberra on 5 May

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The Media Is Failing On Climate Change – Here's How They Can Do Better Ahead Of 2020

The Guardian - 

We spoke to climate change experts for advice on how news outlets can cover the environment in ways that make voters listen
Young protestors hold placards at the office of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell during a Green New Deal demonstration. Photograph: Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock 
America elected Donald Trump at the end of the hottest year ever recorded, without debate moderators asking him a single question about global warming.
But after three years of record temperatures, devastating wildfires and some of the most destructive hurricanes in US history, the media is facing new pressure – often from the candidates themselves – to give the subject more prominence during the 2020 election.
Yesterday, MSNBC devoted more than five minutes to Beto O’Rourke’s rollout of a $5tn climate plan, calling climate a “kitchen table issue” for 2020. Jay Inslee, the Washington governor who is seeking to make climate change the central thrust of his campaign, is calling on the Democratic National Committee to host a debate solely focused on climate. Bernie Sanders raised the issue during his town hall on Fox News earlier this month – and even drew cheers from the audience when he talked about new jobs in the renewable energy sector. Rising temperatures and the crisis they pose for humans were part of every Democratic candidate’s pitch during CNN’s marathon of hour-long town halls last week.
In the run-up to 2020, as newsroom leaders grapple with their mistakes in the 2016 election – from reliance on inaccurate polls to underestimating the impact of fake news – the failure to press candidates on climate change is emerging as an area of self-examination.
“In 2016 there were almost no questions asked , which is insane,” says Tony Bartelme, a senior reporter who covers climate change for the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. “It’s a good start that we’re starting to hear questions for 2020.”
The Guardian is joining forces with Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation to launch Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World, a project aimed at dramatically improving US media coverage of the climate crisis. The project kicks off today with an event at Columbia Journalism School featuring CJR’s editor-in-chief, Kyle Pope, the Nation’s environment correspondent, Mark Hertsgaard, and the Guardian climate columnist Bill McKibben.
The Green New Deal – progressives’ vision for slowing climate change without further burdening the poor – has also helped catapult the subject into the 2020 conversation. In March, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes took the highly unusual step of devoting an hour to the idea, in a show featuring the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But even as there are signs that airtime for climate is beginning to increase, questions remain about the depth and quality of the coverage. “I don’t see the media paying much attention to differentiating how serious each candidate is on the climate question,” said David Gelber, the creator and executive producer for the Showtime series on climate change, Years Of Living Dangerously.
More Americans than ever are worried about climate change. A poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa ranked climate change about on par with healthcare as the top issues they want candidates to talk about.
Research indicates that major national newspapers are beginning to pay more attention to climate – but local publications and TV news haven’t kept up. The major broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX – spent just 142 minutes on climate change last year, according to one calculation from the progressive group Media Matters. And about half of Americans hear about global warming in the media once a month or less, according to surveys by climate communications programs at Yale and George Mason universities.
Meanwhile, five major national US newspapers – the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times – have, in aggregate, roughly tripled their coverage of climate change since four years ago, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The New York Times now has a desk of about a dozen covering climate. Climate editor Hannah Fairfield said the team is collaborating with the politics desk to report on the 2020 candidates’ climate positions.
But climate coverage is not just a question of volume– it’s also a question of approach. We spoke to experts in the field for their advice on how news outlets should cover climate in ways that make voters listen during the 2020 race.

Quote conservatives
Adam Berinsky, who studies why some people believe political rumors – such as that climate change is a hoax – said people who buy into political rumors are driven by a “combination of conspiratorial dispositions and political motivations”. They are more likely to change their minds if they hear from sources they identify with, often fellow conservatives.
Aaron McCright, a sociology professor who studies public opinion at Michigan State University, said journalists should give the small but growing numbers of conservatives who care about climate change “more of a mouthpiece so that their message could start competing” with science denialism.
Republicans who want to limit climate pollution for the sake of national security or as part of a plan for energy independence need to compete better with climate deniers, said McCright. “Those could be effective messages if they’re promoted hour by hour, day by day, week by week, by dozens or hundreds of conservatives in everyday life, TV, papers, Congress.”

Bring up climate, even when the candidates don’t
Gelber says reporters should bring the campaign story back to climate change, even if the candidates aren’t discussing their proposed solutions. He said they should help audiences differentiate between the candidates, explaining to viewers and readers how specific they have gotten in their plans.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez greets audiences following a televised town hall event on the Green New Deal in New York City on 29 March 2019. Photograph: Jeenah Moon/Reuters
Cover climate as a local news story
Edward Maibach, a George Mason climate communications scientist, said “most people are saying they rarely hear climate change news because most people pay attention to local news. Most climate news in America is not local news”. Maibach’s program, Climate Matters, trains weathercasters and local reporters to explain the local consequences of a warming world.
Bartelme suggests trying to connect local catastrophes to the climate story and explain why the extreme weather is happening.
“What we can do is make those connections for people,” Fairfield said. Reporters can seek out “local stories that have climate fingerprints on them”.

Focus on solutions
Elizabeth Arnold, a longtime reporter and professor at the University of Alaska, argues that “doom and gloom” coverage alone may force the public to disengage.
“Repetition of a narrow narrative that focuses exclusively on the impacts of climate change leaves the public with an overall sense of powerlessness,” she said in an introduction to one paper.

Choose words carefully
Susan Hassol, director of the organization Climate Communication, said the phrase “heat-trapping pollution” is easier to understand than “greenhouse gas”, and “global warming” conveys more meaning than “climate change”.

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The Media Has Failed Spectacularly On Climate Change

Crikey - 

The media's coverage of climate change in the election campaign has reflected the Coalition's long-term strategy of denialism, rather than a desire for genuine scrutiny.
Image: Unsplash/Brad Helmink
In the last couple of weeks, there have been plenty of journalists complaining about the social media abuse to which they’ve been subjected in relation to election coverage.
The level of contumely directed at political journalists has indeed been noticeably worse, and much of it has been driven by the rage of left-wingers that the media isn’t acting as the eager trumpeteers of a Shorten victory. Instead, journalists dare to question Labor policies and push for details.
“This election is a contest, not a coronation,” Chris Uhlmann correctly noted, and there are many progressives on Twitter enraged at that, prepared to call bias at anyone not acting as a PR agent for Labor.
But on climate policy, the mainstream media — Nine, News Corp, the TV networks and the ABC — have indeed failed voters, and spectacularly so, in three crucial aspects.
First, climate change should be the central issue of the campaign. That’s not merely because climate change is the most serious threat to Australia’s economic future, and threatens major disruption to the global economy beyond the costs it is already imposing.
It’s also because climate change is the central issue of Australian politics. Twice in the last 10 years the Liberal Party has removed a leader over the issue. It played a key role in the demise of Julia Gillard. Scott Morrison is only prime minister because of the Liberal Party’s unwillingness to accept the existence of climate change and the need to address it.
Despite that, climate has been mostly at the margins of the campaign. Neither side has been particularly willing to talk about it, except where it is the pretext for new spending. Labor spent the entire first two weeks of the campaign talking about health, an area of policy success for Australia that needs little extra attention for all its totemic political importance. The media have taken their cue from the parties and mostly ignored climate.
Second, a gross imbalance exists in reportage of the two sides, given Labor is the only major party with a genuine climate policy. Scott Morrison is rarely questioned on the lack of any serious Coalition climate policy — journalists seem to take it as a given that the Coalition just doesn’t do climate, so it gets a pass from scrutiny.
That appears to be why the Coalition’s figleaf “direct action” policy, intended only to prevent the charge of wholesale denialism and pump more money to Coalition supporters, attracts no critique. The media know it’s a fake policy, so have never examined it closely in the 10 years since it was put together on the back of an envelope in the wake of Turnbull’s first removal.
Third, to the extent that the issue has featured in campaign coverage, it has been entirely around the issue of the economic cost of climate action policies. This is exactly the Coalition’s preferred framing of the issue, and one that it has used since the Howard years to obstruct action.
The framing involves using economic modelling to claim that climate action will impose massive economic costs, when even the modelling does not show that, but shows the difference between two fictional scenarios involving “business as usual” and an assumption-laden confection of the policies the Coalition wishes to discredit.
In fact, the Coalition has actually brought back the very man who was central to that technique, Brian Fisher, who is getting another run today with a new round of nonsense modelling claiming massive costs for climate action.
Remarkably, the mainstream media never mention Fisher’s central role in the Howard government’s climate denialism strategy (or that strategy itself). News Corp has even attempted to portray Fisher as “independent” and some sort of even-handed economist who served both sides during his time in government.
In fact, he comes to the debate with little credibility given his long history of peddling modelling designed to discredit climate action. Saliently, as he himself has admitted this time around, his modelling never addresses the costs of failing to address climate change.
And political history demonstrates how little real interest the media has in the issue of the economic impact of climate action. The Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme was estimated by Treasury to have a one-off impact on household CPI of 0.7%.
This was virtually never reported; instead, the Abbott opposition’s claims of spectacular price increases and warning it would be a “wrecking ball”, a “python squeeze”, a “cobra strike” etc were given strong prominence.
As it turned out, the carbon price may had had even less impact than Treasury predicted, as an array of economists noted in the aftermath. This, too, received little media attention. The focus on costings is thus not a mechanism to genuinely assess the impact of climate action but to deter action.
There are plenty of reasons for scrutiny of Labor’s climate policy — it’s a grab bag of measures, some of them adapted from the government, rather than a coherent policy like Gillard’s carbon-pricing scheme.
Very little of the economy is actually caught by its proposed safeguards scheme, some of the biggest polluting industries will be given exemptions to continue pumping out greenhouse emissions. But little of that is being reflected in the coverage.
Instead, the media is stuck in the same rut it’s been in since the Howard years.

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