12/08/2019

We’Ve Been Arguing About Climate Policy For Five Elections: How Many More Before We Get It Right?

Sydney Morning Herald - Matt Wade

A decade ago I visited a dusty shanty town in India’s capital New Delhi to interview a remarkable Australian family.
Mark and Cathy Delaney had left Brisbane suburbia to settle among the urban poor and explore a different way of living.
Their sons Tom, now 22, and Oscar, now 17, were born in India and have spent much of their lives there.
Mark and Cathy Delaney on the roof of their house in a Delhi slum in 2009. Credit: Brendon Esposito





I wrote about the Delaney family for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in 2009 while working in India as a foreign correspondent.
They lived in a small brick room in a densely populated slum on Delhi’s sprawling outskirts. They had no running water, no TV, no fridge and no washing machine. Meals were eaten sitting on the floor and they shared a tiny squat toilet with their landlords. The family’s possessions were kept in a few steel trunks.
But the Delaneys spoke passionately about the personal fulfilment and deep friendships they had found in the slum.
“The longer we’ve stayed here, the more we can see the positive effect it has had on us as people,” Cathy Delaney told me at the time.
This week the Delaney family were in the news again.
Mark, Cathy and Oscar, who returned to Australia in April, were arrested with eight others at a climate change protest at the Brisbane offices of GHD, an engineering contractor linked to the construction of infrastructure for the Adani coal mine.
The protesters were calling on the firm to do no further work to facilitate the controversial Adani project.
Mark and Cathy were charged with “contravening a police direction” and will face court later this month. Oscar was not charged.
Mark and Cathy Delaney lived in an Indian slum in Delhi. Credit: Brendan Esposito
A legacy of the years the Delaneys spent living in slums is a deep concern about climate change, especially the way it disproportionately affects poor communities.
Low Carbon & Loving It:
Adventures In Sustainable Living From The Streets Of India 
To Middle Class Australia
Mark Delaney and his son Tom, who still works in India as a volunteer educator, spent a long period researching climate change. Last year, the pair published a book which draws together their reflections on slum life and the need for climate action.
The book, called Low Carbon and Loving It: Adventures in sustainable living from the streets of India to middle-class Australia, describes the family’s many experiments in low-carbon living including using trains rather than flying. On a trip from Delhi to Brisbane they substituted air travel as much possible - it took seven times longer and was three times more expensive than a direct flight, but had a carbon footprint of around one third.
When the Delaney’s returned to Australia they were surprised by the lack of action to combat climate change.
Mark Delaney, who is a lawyer by training, met with local MPs and urged them to do more to reduce Australia's emissions.
He has reached out to schools, churches and other community groups in different parts of Australia offering to speak about how the family’s experiences in the slums and their concerns about climate change. The reception has been lukewarm.
Mark has decided the non-violent resistance which led to his arrest last week is now his only alternative.
“We have tried talking calmly to politicians, participating in the political process, doing education work in schools and churches, even writing a book,” he said.
“Now there seems to be no other option but to engage in civil disobedience … the time has come for ordinary Australians to say enough is enough.”
Mark Delaney (pictured) and his son Tom wrote a book about climate change which draws on their experiences living in Indian slums. Credit: Louise Kennerley
Some will disagree with Mark’s conclusion. But his frustration is understandable.
As public anxiety about climate change grows it seems effective policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions become more elusive.
The Lowy Institute's annual poll, released in June, found climate change topped the list of threats to Australia’s vital interests in 2019, ranking above cyber attacks from other countries, international terrorism and North Korea’s nuclear program. Six in 10 Australians (61 per cent) agreed global warming is a “serious and pressing problem” about which “we should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs". That share has surged by 25 percentage points since 2012.
A separate survey published in March by social research firm Ipsos found 46 per cent of Australians now agree climate change is “entirely or mainly” caused by human activity. That's the highest share since 2010 when Ipsos began asking the question in its annual study of attitudes to climate change. Only 13 per cent of respondents said the Morrison government was doing a good job tackling climate change.
To make matters worse, the toxic nature of climate politics has contributed to an erosion of voter trust. That will make it all the more difficult to craft effective policies to reduce carbon emissions, which are inevitably complex.
Australia’s fruitless struggle over climate policy has also left less political legroom for other important economic reforms to boost productivity.
Climate policy has featured in the past five elections but I fear it might take another five before Australia settles on a high-quality, economically efficient mechanism to reduce carbon emissions.
No wonder the Delaney family is resorting to civil disobedience.

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Green Growth Is Trusted To Fix Climate Change – Here’s The Problem With That

The Conversation - 

Greening’ our current economic system can only take us so far. GTS/Shutterstock
You may have missed it, but a recent report declared that the main strategy of world leaders for tackling climate change won’t work.
It’s called green growth, and it’s favoured by some of the largest and most influential organisations in the world, including the United Nations and the World Bank.
Green growth is a vague term with many definitions, but broadly speaking, it’s the idea that society can reduce its environmental impacts and slash its emissions, even while the economy continues to grow and the quantity of stuff that’s produced and consumed increases.
This would be achieved by improving the efficiency of production and manufacturing processes, transitioning to cleaner energy sources and developing new technologies to deal with the pollution that economic activity creates. Better yet, it’s argued, all of this could be done fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement target of keeping global warming to below 1.5ᵒC.
Fixing the climate crisis without having to compromise on economic growth sounds appealing. But the Decoupling Debunked report echoes work by prominent academics in finding that there is no evidence that societies have ever managed to decouple economic growth from emissions at this scale in the past, and little evidence they have the capacity to achieve it in the future.
World leaders and august institutions like the UN have put their faith in green growth, but it’s likely misplaced. EPA/KELD NAVNTOFT
It’s no surprise that, historically, global carbon emissions have gone up as economies have grown. The processes that produce the goods and services we all consume use raw materials as inputs and generate pollution, carbon emissions and waste.
Making these processes more efficient and swapping fossil fuels for renewables can, and has, reduced the average emissions that come with each additional dollar of economic growth. This is known as “relative decoupling”, because each dollar of new economic growth has fewer emissions attached to it, relative to each dollar of past growth. But, emissions still rise in absolute terms because the economy is still growing.
Since it is the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere that matters in the race against climate change, we need to contrast this idea of “relative decoupling” with the stronger concept of “absolute decoupling”. Absolute decoupling means that even as the economy grows, total carbon emissions fall year-on-year.
With this distinction in mind, the question becomes: is absolute decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions possible? And can it be done fast enough to prevent catastrophic climate change?

The scale of the challenge
According to the IPCC, there is a 66% likelihood that the world can remain under the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C of warming if we emit no more than 420 billion additional tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, from early 2018.
Humans currently emit about 37 billion tonnes of carbon every year, and that number is still growing. Even the most generous projections suggest that if emissions continue at this rate, the carbon budget will be used up in less than 20 years.
The rate of decarbonisation that’s needed is huge, and far in excess of anything that’s been seen previously. Economic growth makes that challenge even harder, as gains in decarbonisation may be outweighed by increases in production and consumption. But green growth advocates insist it’s possible.
The IPCC’s Special Report, released in October 2018, gives 90 scenarios that would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, while also continuing with economic growth. So far, so good. But almost every single one of these scenarios relies on a negative emissions technology called Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) that’s completely untested at large scales.
BECSS involves growing large plantations of trees, which draw down carbon from the atmosphere, then harvesting and burning them to generate energy. The CO₂ emissions from this process are then stored underground. To limit warming to 1.5°C, this technology would need to absorb 3-7 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year. That’s at least 2,000 times more than it’s currently capable of doing.
In order to absorb that much carbon, an area two to three times the size of India would need to be covered with tree plantations. Think about the difficulty of acquiring that much land, the pressure it would put on other land uses, like food production, and how much natural habitat it could erase.
No one can say that these feats are categorically impossible. But the evidence suggests that the chances of meeting the 1.5ᵒC warming target alongside continued economic growth are, at best, highly unlikely. Can we really take this risk — relying on unproven technologies to rescue us from the threat of climate change? Given the consequences of getting the gamble wrong, surely the answer is no.
Negative emission technologies don’t exist at the scale they’re needed – and could do more ecological harm than good. Mariusz Szczygiel/Shutterstock
Where does this leave us?

Proposals for green growth that rely solely on technology to solve the climate crisis are based on a flawed idea. This is, that the limits to the world’s physical systems are flexible, but the structure of its economies are not. This seems entirely backwards and more a reflection of the importance of politics and power in determining what solutions are deemed viable, than any reflection of reality.
So society should ask, are these global institutions promoting green growth because they believe it’s the most promising way of avoiding climate breakdown? Or is it because they believe it’s simply not politically feasible to talk about the alternatives?
If we can be optimistic about humanity’s ability to develop fantastical new technologies to bend and overcome the limits of nature, can’t we lend that same optimism to developing new economic structures? Our goal in the 21st century should be creating economies that allow people to flourish, even when they don’t grow.

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Extinction Rebellion: Hitting A Nerve At Australia's Climate Flashpoint

The Guardian - 

The amorphous climate action group has fired up activists and opponents alike as it tries to shut down Brisbane
Extinction Rebellion protesters block the corner of Margaret and William streets during a climate change protest in Brisbane. Photograph: Dan Peled/EPA
The Extinction Rebellion protesters think you should be angry. They want politicians and opinion columnists to be angry. The more people they upset stopping traffic in the Brisbane city centre – the louder the car horns, the more vicious the insults – the more certain it is they’ll be back.
“It’s not an enjoyable experience, we don’t take pleasure in doing it,” says Emma Dorge, an activist arrested in Brisbane on Tuesday, during a day of mass civil disobedience that shut down Australia’s third-largest city.
“It is a polarising tactic. But this is an emergency, and we’re out of other options.”
Extinction Rebellion, the decentralised global movement calling for aggressive action on the climate crisis, has engaged in similar disruption tactics in major cities on every continent. Those protests have been most effective when they are most polarising, like in Queensland, where talking and writing and screaming and marching about the climate emergency has not shifted public sentiment; a state home to the threatened Great Barrier Reef, and also the world’s most controversial coal project.
Seventy-two people were arrested and charged by police during “rebellion day” protests in the heart of Brisbane on Tuesday. They have been stopping commuter traffic in the city for months. As outrage grows, so does the sense that climate change is finally subject of the anger it deserves.
Police arrest Extinction Rebellion protesters after they blocked the corner of Edward and Queen streets in Brisbane. Photograph: Darren England/AAP
Dorge, who works as a midwife and has previously been involved in anti-coal protests, says: “There’s nothing holding our governments accountable now.
“But shutting down central business districts of cities, if they can’t function anymore, if our cities are continually shut down and immobilised, that will force action. That’s what we’re building towards.
“These disruptions will only increase in frequency and duration. We’re not planning to stop until all of our demands are met.”
Clancey Maher was studying to be a nurse, working two jobs, when she headed north from Canberra about two years ago. Since then she has been involved in several anti-coal and climate protests.
“We are not kidding ourselves,” Maher says. “We’re not winning every person who gets stopped in a car. It’s necessary to force a reaction because the issue is so urgent.
“One of the key tactics is definitely disruption.
“You can ignore a petition, you can ignore a rally. This way it promotes public debate on the issue. If you weren’t already talking about climate change at the very least now you’re talking about the disruptions.”

A line in the sand
Extinction Rebellion’s global focus lends itself to actions in larger cities; pushing for the sorts of transformative changes that can be enacted by governments and corporations, the powerbrokers who might be caught in the commuter jams. About 1,000 people in have been involved in those various protests in Brisbane, with more than 100 arrested.
At the same time, the movement runs in parallel to the work of dozens of coordinated environmental groups – some of which run conventional public campaigns and others engaging in blockades – that target the operations of prominent coal companies and their contractors. Many of the Extinction Rebellion protesters have converged on Brisbane while maintaining links to the direct action movement.
A day after the chaotic Extinction Rebellion protests in Brisbane, the group Frontline Action on Coal (Flac) issued a long-awaited “red alert” – a call for activists to head to central Queensland and to join physical efforts to stop Adani’s Carmichael coalmine.
‘It is a polarising tactic’: About 1,000 people have been involved in protests in Brisbane. Photograph: Darren England/AAP 
Carmichael has become the totem for both climate activists and backers of the coal industry – a new thermal coalmine, potentially opening up a new thermal coal basin, built at a time when the calls for action on climate change have become more desperate. The Adani project is a line in the sand – or a hole in the central Queensland dirt – for many activists and backers of the coal industry.
For several years, Flac has maintained a camp at a rural property between Bowen and Collinsville; a potential base for launching protest activities at the Carmichael mine site, along the proposed rail route, or at the Abbot Point coal terminal. Flac expects potentially thousands to head north in response to its call.
“We need mass occupancy and mass amounts of people to stop this mine from going ahead,” says Amy, a Flac spokeswoman. “We’ve called the red alert because we now believe that it’s time for everyone to start mobilising and heading to central Queensland.
It’s about getting those people who say they’re against Adani to physically get involved. Amy, Frontline Action on Coal
“It’s about getting people to understand that they now need to shift to playing a more active part in stopping [the Carmichael mine]. It’s about getting those people who say they’re against Adani to physically get involved and take part in direct action.”
As the company began land-clearing works on Wednesday, two Flac activists temporarily stopped about 17 bulldozers by suspending themselves from poles. They say attempts to stop work at Carmichael will continue and escalate.
Sophie, a midwife working in central Queensland, is one of many preparing to take a break from her job to take part in the protests.
“I feel like the next few months, the next few years are going to be super critical,” Sophie says. “I really love what I do but I want to ensure the kids I see every day being born are coming into a safe climate future.”

Police action called into question
As the disruptions in Brisbane become more frequent, the backlash has amped-up in volume and vitriol.
In News Corp newspaper the Courier-Mail, protesters have been described variously as “ferals”, “ratbags”, “idiots”, “twerps”, “selfish, conceited, misguided … ideological zealots”, “unemployed thugs” and more.
Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk called for the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations to stop. Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP 
Some commentators have even pined for the days of authoritarian Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who cracked down on street marches and cut a secret deal with police not to penalise officers who acted to suppress protests.
The current Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has been more measured but called for the demonstrations to stop.
“When you stop people going to and from their workplace, I don’t think people like that,” Palaszczuk said.
The tactics of police have, during the past few weeks, become noticeably more direct.
At first, police resisted making mass arrests when protesters performed a “swarm”, blocking an intersection for up to 10 minutes. On Tuesday a young man was chased from the road by a police officer and tackled by a bystander. He broke his arm.
Police have also been accused of abusing their power by using bail conditions to punish protesters and shield corporate interests.
Fuelling the anger is the way the state crackdown on environmental protesters compares to its treatment of corporations who break environmental laws.
Last month, the Guardian revealed that a thermal coalmine in the Darling Downs region, New Acland, committed a “major” breach of the state’s environmental protection act by drilling 27 illegal bores. The company was fined $3,152.
Fuelling the anger is the way the state crackdown on environmental protesters compares to its treatment of corporations who break environmental law. Photograph: Dan Peled/EPA
Queensland courts have given activists fines almost 20 times that amount for staging protests. Al Wicks was fined $61,000 earlier this year for blocking coal trains. Others face aggressive civil damages claims launched by corporate interests.
“They want us to pay for our damages. The fossil fuel industry will never pay,” Wicks says. “It’s more about silencing activists, it’s deterring activists from doing these actions. At the end of the day the people in this movement know what’s at stake, and for that it’s worth losing our liberty and losing our money as well.”

‘We are society’
Protesters aged 18 to 73 were arrested in Brisbane on Tuesday. Hannah Doole is one of the younger ones. She finished school in 2017 and has since devoted her time to climate activism.
“When you’re stopping traffic, people have to stop and think about what’s happening,” Doole says. “You’re not creating tension out of nothing, but you’re forcing it to the surface.
“The backlash, the dehumanising nature of it, I think it shows we’re gaining popularity and we’re gaining momentum and that’s gotten under the skin of the right wing.
“I am inspired by the diversity of people who have become involved, people who might be doing very respectable jobs, whether they’re scientists or working for the government.
“We’re not some group on the fringes of society. We are society.”

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