20/05/2019

Labor Lost The Unlosable Election – Now It's Up To Morrison To Tell Australia His Plan

The Guardian - 

The big losers are action on the climate emergency and the likelihood that Labor will never be as ambitious with its policies again
Scott Morrison has won the 2019 Australian election. Now he will have to come up with a more substantial policy offering than was apparent in the campaign. Photograph: Rick Rycroft/AP 
There are a number of unknowns with Saturday night’s result – including whether Scott Morrison will govern in majority or in minority.
But some things can be known. This was an election in large part about the climate emergency, and the field evidence shows Australia in 2019 is deeply divided about the road ahead.
Some voters clearly want action. Inner metropolitan Australia swung to Labor in its safe seats and in safe Liberal seats, such as Kooyong, North Sydney and Higgins, and the voters of Warringah also showed Tony Abbott, the chief climate wrecker, the door – but the outer suburbs and regional Australia swung in the other direction. Queensland was an absolute disaster zone for Labor, with the ALP clubbed, with the help of Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson, in coal country.
Bill Shorten is finished as Labor leader, and Anthony Albanese is his most likely successor, although others are weighing up their options.
Chris Bowen, who suffered a 7% negative swing on Saturday night, has not ruled out running, and the Victorian rightwinger Richard Marles ducked a question about his intentions on Saturday night. It will be interesting to see the intentions of the Queensland rightwinger Jim Chalmers, and Tanya Plibersek.
Bill Shorten led Labor to a shock defeat in Saturday’s election. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian 
Given that Labor is shellshocked by this result, shellshocked and shattered, it is unclear whether the party will stick with its big-target election policies, including the climate offering.
While some on Saturday night were more inclined to blame franking credits, Shorten’s substantial unpopularity with voters and a poor campaign rather than climate policy for the defeat, it is unclear, as of now, whether the opposition will have the resolve to go to another election championing an ambitious policy.
In his concession, Shorten noted that the divisions on the climate crisis were etched into Saturday night’s result, and he said “for the sake of the next generation, Australia must find a way forward” on the issue.
Albanese – who will certainly stay the course on climate if he is the succession plan – sent a strong signal on Saturday night that Labor was a progressive political movement and would remain so. Labor existed, Albanese said, “to change the power balance in society, whether that be economic power, political power or social power – that is our task and it is one that I will continue to pursue whether in government or, if we aren’t fortunate to be in government in whatever capacity over the coming days, weeks, months and years”.
While Labor attempts to recover and recalibrate after losing the unlosable election, Scott Morrison, victorious in Sydney, gave thanks to miracles, and the Liberal party’s campaign director, Andrew Hirst, and to Queensland and the “quiet Australians” who stuck with the Coalition despite the government spending two terms in office giving them every reason not to.
Morrison is the hero of the hour for the Liberal party and rightly so, having pulled them out of the fire with a negative, ruthlessly efficient, gravity-defying solo act that convinced a majority of Australians in the right seats that if they didn’t trust Shorten, they couldn’t trust Labor.
The Liberal leader will emerge from the experience of the past six months with his authority enhanced among colleagues who have lived to roil, particularly if he pulls them all back into governing in majority, which is what backroom strategists in the Liberal party are predicting will be the end result.
Morrison spent zero time during this campaign telling anyone what he would do with this authority in the event it was conferred upon him by the voters – so that task awaits Australia’s prime minister-elect, beginning Sunday.

Links
at No comments:

Here There Be Monsters (Made Of Coal, Plastic And Pesticides)

The Revelator - John R. Platt

A series of paintings by artists Laura and Gary Dumm seeks to challenge viewers with images of pop-culture monsters facing ecological collapse. 
© Laura and Gary Dumm
Sometimes the latest bad environmental news makes us want to scream like someone in a horror movie who’s just come face to face with Frankenstein’s monster.
Frankenstein’s monster isn’t too happy about the news, either.
Neither are the Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong, Chucky or other horror-movie monsters who appear in a recent set of paintings by artists Gary and Laura Dumm of Cleveland, Ohio.

“Old King Coal” © Laura and Gary Dumm
The paintings — exhibited as the “Here There Be Monsters” series — depict the iconic characters surrounded by smog, pesticides, plastic pollution, oil, fracking flames and soon-to-be extinct species.
It’s a quirky, powerful series of paintings created by a duo with a long history of commenting on society through their work. Gary, 71, is a cartoonist and graphic novelist perhaps best known for his decades-long collaboration with “American Splendor” writer Harvey Pekar. Laura, 68, is a pop-art painter whose work often touches upon issues related to animals or social rights. Together they’ve worked together on numerous projects, with their environmental series being one of their most striking.

“Burning in Water, Drowning in Plastic” © Laura and Gary Dumm
We contacted the Dumms to talk about protest art and their look at the real-life monsters affecting the environment.

 What inspired you to develop this monstrous series?
Gary: We were looking for a way to do some serious collaborative works about the environment, and Laura first suggested doing a series about bugs and how certain issues like pesticide overuse were affecting them and the environment. We tried our damnedest to come up with something viable, but nothing was working well enough…until I came up with the broader idea of using classic horror monsters from movies as the main characters. Thinking about the fact that most of the monsters were failed scientific experiments made them a good match as recognizable vehicles for expressing some complex ideas. We agreed that these icons could be the “hook” to draw in viewers and also be the messengers for things that we had to say about threats to our environment. And the addition of humorous touches, to leaven the serious subject matter, has proven to be both popular and thought provoking in peoples’ reactions to this series.

 Did you have any challenges in completing the series?
Laura: The only challenge is the usual one: coming up with good ideas that resonate with both of us. There’s lots of research, thinking, discussion and sketching done to get each resulting piece to say what we want in a manner that simultaneously strong while not being a diatribe. We feel that we’ve come up with some wonderfully surrealistic and humorously bizarre paintings that hopefully resonate and stay with most viewers. Unfortunately, it appears that there are still too many dire subjects left for us to tackle about the future of our planet. We won’t be short of subject matter.

“The Four Horsemen of Extinction” © Laura and Gary Dumm
What do you hope viewers will learn or experience through this work? 
Gary: We hope to inform the public. When someone looks at any of the paintings they are first attracted by the monster or the color. After they stop, read the title, enjoy the monster, then they focus on the message and hopefully a conversation will follow. We had one person tell us he “doesn’t buy water in plastic anymore because of our painting.” One college-educated person had no idea what GMOs or Monsanto were. After talking about our “Scream of the Butterflies,” she did more research and became more informed.

“Scream of the Butterflies” © Laura and Gary Dumm
What comes next — for this series, or for you?
Laura: We do love collaborating for a cause, so when the right ideas hit us we will make time to continue this series.
Here There Be Monsters
DummArt
Click to enlarge image

Links
at No comments:

These Are The Cities Doing The Most To Combat Global Warming

Bloomberg -  | 

➤Group’s ‘A-list’ shows Boston, London and Sydney in the lead
➤Reykjavik says it already is running 100% on renewables

The U.K.'s Roadmap to Zero Carbon Emissions by 2050

 Cities, which are home to more than half the world’s population, are stepping up efforts to slash pollution, often wresting the fight against climate change away from national governments.
That’s the conclusion of CDP, a non-profit group that pushes institutions to detail their greenhouse-gas emissions. Often able to move faster than their national counterparts, metropolitan authorities from London to Sydney and Boston are among a group of 15 setting out the most rigorous plans to achieve carbon or climate neutrality by 2050.

Pushing Green Ambition
Cities across the globe that are front-loading aggressive climate change goals
Note: Includes only cities with target of 50% or more cut in emissions from their respective baseline year
Sources: CDP Climate A List, Bloomberg
The moves are evidence of ambition by local authorities to do their part in reining in global warming, almost two-thirds of global emissions come from cities. CDP wants to draw attention to their actions to encourage others to make similar commitments.
“Cities are doing a lot of the work, but they can’t get there alone,” said Kyra Appleby, global director of cities, states and regions at CDP. “Businesses need to act, national governments need to act as well, people need to change their own behavior in order for us to limit carbon emissions.”

Source: CDP
A smaller group consisting of five cities including Paris and San Francisco have set themselves 100% renewable energy targets. Reykjavik, population 123,000, says it already uses 100% renewable power. How fast other cities get to that point is largely down to the policies they enact.
Paris gets 35% of its energy from clean sources, and San Francisco gets almost 60% of its power from renewables, CDP said.
Almost 7% of the 625 cities that took part in the report were given the highest rating -- joining the CDP “A-list.” Among the top scoring, only 28 have set goals for carbon neutrality (balancing emissions of greenhouse gases), climate neutrality (designing wider policies to reduce the overall impact of human activity to the environment) or cutting emissions by half or more.
More than 20 U.S. cities got the highest rating showing how mayors and city level lawmakers can take the initiative on climate change in spite of a president who has repeatedly played down the effects of global warming.
Since the 2015 Paris Agreement that committed the world to slowing down global warming, the narrative has shifted from a problem that the world faces in the future to an issue that exists today. That was sped up by a 2018 United Nations report that spelled out the need for rapid action to grapple with a warming planet -- and what would happen to ecosystems if temperatures increased another half degree Celsius.
Cities have formed alliances to share knowledge and push for change -- like the C40 initiative that has 94 cities committed to implementing ambitious climate goals. Protests over the global warming have become more urgent with activists calling for climate emergencies to be declared.
CDP gives an “A” rating to any city that reports publicly on its climate adaptation and action plans as well as reporting on emissions inventories and reduction targets. The worst performing cities are handed a “D” although CDP doesn’t make those public.
“Cities are real hot spots of innovation, business and human life on earth so it’s crucial that cities are acting in order for us to meet the targets,” Appleby said.

Links
at No comments: