06/01/2020

(AU) Morrison's Government On The Bushfires: From Attacking Climate 'Lunatics' To Calling In The Troops

The Guardian - 

From May 2018 to January 2020, the Coalition government has had an evolving stance on the fire crisis
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, speaks with Paul and Melissa Churchman at their Wildflower farm in Sarsfield, Victoria, which was destroyed by the bushfires. Photograph: James Ross/AAP
From describing bushfire warnings as the concerns of “inner-city raving lunatics” to calling in the defence forces, the following is a timeline of Scott Morrison’s government’s evolving stance on the fire crisis.

May 2018
The National Aerial Firefighting Centre sends the commonwealth government a business case requesting a permanent increase of $11m to its annual budget. Payments are made on a top-up basis only.

April 2019
The Emergency Leaders for Climate Change, a group of 22 former emergency services leaders led by former commissioner of NSW Fire and Rescue Greg Mullins, writes to the federal government alerting them to the threat of “increasingly catastrophic extreme weather events and calling on both major parties to recognise the need for “national firefighting assets”, including large aircraft, to deal with the scale of the threat.

 16 September 2019
The Emergency Leaders for Climate Change write again to Morrison asking why the government has not yet given them a meeting, despite being told on 4 July that Angus Taylor’s office would be in touch to arrange one.
“It appears that Minister Taylor, or perhaps his office, fails to grasp the urgency of this matter,” Mullins writes. “I must assume from this response and the months of delay in Mr Taylor making contact, that the minister appears at best disinterested in what the Emergency Leaders might have to say.”

8 November 2019
Australian defence force liaison officers start working with Emergency Management Australia.

9 November 2019
Carol Sparks, the mayor of Glen Innes, raises the link between climate crisis, drought and bushfire activity after the town faces down an inferno that killed two of its residents. “We are so impacted by drought and the lack of rain,” she says. “It’s climate change, there’s no doubt about it. The whole of the country is going to be affected. We need to take a serious look at our future.”

11 November 2019
Michael McCormack told Radio National it was ‘pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies’ linking climate change with the bushfires. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
The deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, tells Radio National that it is “pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies” and “inner-city raving lunatics” like Richard Di Natale and Adam Bandt from the Australian Greens that are “trying to get a political point score” for raising the link between climate crisis, drought and the devastating bushfires.
David Littleproud, the minister for emergency management, says that Taylor’s office has received no formal request for a meeting from Mullins or the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action but that his office will reach out to them.

11 December 2019
Australia is rated the worst-performing country on climate change policy out of 57 countries in a report prepared by international thinktanks. The report also criticises the Morrison government for being a “regressive force” internationally.

12 December 2019
Morrison attempts to reassure voters that he understands bushfires are a natural emergency and that he accepts the link between climate change and an extended fire season, while dismissing international censure of his government’s climate policies as “not credible”.

16 December 2019
Reports circulate that the prime minister has gone on holidays to Hawaii, as Sydney battles extreme smoke pollution as out-of-control bushfires burn through the Blue Mountains. The prime minister’s office says his whereabouts are “not a story” and that claims he is on holiday in Hawaii are “wrong”.

17 December 2019
Littleproud says he met with Mullins and told the delegation they “should take great comfort and great pride in the current cohort of fire chiefs around the country who have planned meticulously for these fires”.
Littleproud says fighting bushfires is “obviously … the responsibility of states but the federal government kicks the tin. We don’t walk away from this.”

17 December 2019
The Emergency Leaders for Climate Action say they will hold a summit after the current bushfire season because of their “huge disappointment in the lack of national leadership during a bushfire crisis”.
It comes as fires raged across New South Wales and Western Australia on Monday and as Australia was named as one of a handful of countries responsible for thwarting a global deal on the rulebook of the Paris climate agreement.

19 December 2019
Two volunteer firefighters, Geoffrey Keaton, 32, and Andrew O’Dwyer, 36, die fighting fires south-west of Sydney when a tree hits their tanker.

20 December 2019
He says the government is considering calls to pay volunteer firefighters but notes that is “in the first instance” a matter for state governments.

23 December 2019
Morrison says calls to reduce carbon emissions are “reckless” and that Australia doesn’t need to do more on tackling climate crisis. He rejects calls from the opposition to bring forward a meeting with state governments to address the bushfire crisis.

29 December 2019
Morrison agrees to compensation payments made to NSW volunteer firefighters who have lost income due to fighting bushfires, but he sees no further role for the commonwealth. “We’re there to help the states and territories as they address these crises. The states are the ones, as premier knows all too well, who are directly responsible for the funding of their fire services and all the other things that are done.”

30 December 2019
A third NSW RFS volunteer, Samuel McPaul, is killed when his truck rolls during extreme conditions at a fire near Jingellic, on the NSW/Victoria border.

31 December 2019
Morrison releases a statement through social media offering condolences to McPaul’s relatives and emphasising the leading role of the state and territory firefighting authorities in the bushfire crisis. He says the commonwealth will continue in its role of providing “support” to those efforts.

1 January 2020
Morrison shares his new year message urging Australians to celebrate living “in the most amazing country on earth” and remember “there’s no better place to raise kids anywhere on the planet”. He does not make any connection between the bushfires and global heating, suggesting that Australians had faced similarly terrible ordeals throughout history.
Later that day, Morrison hosts the annual New Year’s Day Cricket Australia-McGrath Foundation reception with the Australian and New Zealand teams at Kirribilli in Sydney. In his address to the teams, he says forthcoming Sydney Test match will be “played out against terrible events” but that “at the same time Australians will be gathered whether it’s at the SCG or around television sets all around the country and they’ll be inspired by the great feats of our cricketers from both sides of the Tasman and I think they’ll be encouraged by the spirit shown by Australians”.

2 January 2020
At a press conference, Morrison says he’s “always acknowledged the link … between the broader issues of global climate change and what that means for the world’s weather and the dryness of conditions in many places” but that “no response by any one government anywhere in the world can be linked to any one fire event”.
Morrison reiterates he has no plans to change Australia’s emissions reduction policy. He defends his government’s response to the fires by saying he doesn’t want state and federal governments “to be tripping over each other in order to somehow outbid each other in the response”.
Navy ships and army aircraft are dispatched to help fight bushfires in Victoria.

3 January 2020
While initially saying it was “still the plan” to go to India later in January for trade and defence talks, at which Australia’s coal exports were expected to feature heavily, Morrison says only hours later that he is “inclined not to proceed” with the visit, which has now been postponed.

4 January 2020
The army reserve is called in to assist with firefighting efforts.
Morrison says the federal government will agree to a request made 18 months ago to permanently increase funding to Australia’s aerial firefighting capacity.
The prime minister’s office releases an ad spruiking its firefighting efforts, backed by a jaunty jingle.
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(AU) We Are Seeing The Very Worst Of Our Scientific Predictions Come To Pass In These Bushfires

The Guardian - 

As a climate scientist I am wondering if the Earth system has now breached a tipping point
‘The thing that really terrifies me is that weather conditions considered extreme by today’s standards will seem sedate in the future.’ Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images
Dr Joëlle Gergis
Dr Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer based at the Australian National University.
Currently, there are tens of thousands of people in coastal NSW and Victoria stranded in towns where the highways are closed, supermarkets are running out of food, and queues for petrol snake down the streets of devastated towns. The scenes experienced by those caught up in the ordeal are being described as apocalyptic – rightly so.
Meanwhile, the locals face the infinitely more serious situation of returning to find their homes completely incinerated. Cars melted, pets killed, beloved landscapes destroyed. A lifetime of memories razed to the ground. As Australia’s climate continues to warm, the most intimate places of human safety – our very homes – are being threatened in an increasingly dangerous world.
It’s confronting to see military evacuations, usually reserved for developing regions of the world following natural disasters, happening right here in 21st-century Australia. The sheer scale and severity of the emergency has actually overwhelmed our capacity as a nation to deal with the unfolding events. Not just in one area following a single event, but across multiple disasters occurring simultaneously in every state and territory of our nation.
As a climate scientist, the thing that really terrifies me is that weather conditions considered extreme by today’s standards will seem sedate in the future. What’s unfolding right now is really just a taste of the new normal.
At this point I could restate all the lines of scientific evidence that clearly show the links between human-caused climate change and the intensification of extreme weather conditions not just in Australia, but all over the world.
To avoid sounding like a broken record, instead I will say that as a lead author on the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report of the global climate due out next year, I can assure you that the planetary situation is extremely dire.
It’s no exaggeration to say my work as scientist now keeps me up at night.
As I’ve watched the events of this summer unfolding, I’ve found myself wondering whether the Earth system has now breached a tipping point, an irreversible shift in the stability of the planetary system.
There may now be so much heat trapped in the system that we may have already triggered a domino effect that could unleash a cascade of abrupt changes that will continue to play out in the years and decades to come.
Rapid climate change has the potential to reconfigure life on the planet as we know it.
We know this because the geologic record contains evidence that these events have occurred in the past. The key difference is that we’ve never had 7.5 billion people on the planet, so the human species really is in uncharted territory.
The scientific community is acknowledging this by including new sections on abrupt climate change throughout key areas of the upcoming IPCC report. We now consider these “low probability, high impact” scenarios an increasingly critical part of our work.
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, adapting to climate change in the driest inhabited continent on Earth is going to take a bit of work.
To prepare our nation for the very challenging times ahead, we need political leaders – at every level – prepared to face this harsh reality.
I single out our political leaders because the rest of the country is already leading the way. The leadership and true guts being shown out there by our local communities, often with minimal resources and under intense duress, has been staggering. The resilience, dedication, generosity and heart being demonstrated by our emergency services and embarrassingly unpaid volunteer firefighters is truly the stuff of legends.
Cynics might say that our government seems to be taking advantage of the fact that we are a remarkable people willing to do whatever it takes to defend our incredibly unique nation. But the longer we leave things on a national policy level, the worse things are going to get.
Failing to adequately plan for the known threat of climate change in a country like Australia should now be considered to be an act of treason.
The scientific community has been trying to warn the government of the need to plan to adapt to climate change for at least a decade. In fact, the world’s first global conference on climate change adaptation was hosted here in Australia, on the Gold Coast in 2010.
This conference was run by the former National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCARF), which lost its federal funding in June 2018. It was a visionary initiative to attempt to help the most vulnerable nation in the developed world prepare for climate change. Despite this immensely important task, the initiative is now vastly scaled-down and operating through Griffith University by a handful of dedicated researchers.
How anyone thought that axing funding to the only dedicated national climate change adaptation program in the country was a good idea is completely beyond me.
This summer has been a brutal reminder that no matter how much we want to avoid addressing the problem of climate change, it simply can no longer be ignored. As this summer has shown, it is now part of every Australian’s lived experience.
Now is the time for our political leaders to make a choice about which side of history they want to be on. There is much work to be done, and we are fast running out of time.
As a climate scientist I find prime minster Scott Morrison’s request for people to be “patient” as infuriating as it is condescending. With respect prime minster, the science of climate change has been ignored in this country for decades. We are now seeing the very worst of our scientific predictions come to pass.
Everyone’s patience has worn thin. The Australian people are justifiably angry and are now demanding true leadership in the face of this climate emergency.
We have already squandered over a decade debating climate policy in Australia. All the while, the clear reality of a rapidly destabilising planet accelerates all around us.
There genuinely is no more time to waste. We must act as though our home is on fire – because it is.

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(AU) Could A Lawsuit Tip The Scales On Climate Policy?

Canberra Times - Mark Kenny*

 "Is the climate changing? Why weren't we told?" chided broadcaster Phillip Adams as a long-feared drought-heatwave-bushfire trifecta neared its deadly apotheosis.
It might sound fanciful - and costly - but some lawyers say a class action against those responsible for climate change could in fact be successful. Picture: Shutterstock
Eight words that nailed the smouldering betrayal which is now as pungent in the public nostril as the acrid smoke blighting south-eastern Australia.
The New Year's Eve jibe came as the last twigs of the Coalition's she'll-be-right assurances were themselves cremated - a vengeful coda to a decade of climate negligence. Of putting short-term electoral advantage before the national interest.
Only months ago a coal-brandishing Liberal Prime Minister had been re-elected.
Making consistency his sole virtue, Scott Morrison would later think little of taking off on a luxurious overseas holiday as the crisis he regarded as nothing unusual rolled forward.
And just to emphasise his party's zen-like state, the NSW Minister for Emergency Services would, astoundingly, follow suit, venturing to Europe during the very event for which he had been sworn in - a major state emergency.
This brazenness also characterises the embattled federal Emissions Reduction Minister, Angus Taylor, who confidently claims that Australia produces just 1.3 per cent of global carbon emissions and is thus doing everything required of it.
He also urges the world to keep burning as much Australian coal as we can dig out, while shamelessly pleading our case to use accounting carry-overs (from our laughably low Kyoto obligations) to meet the mediocre Paris target we were set.
If it weren't so serious these failings would qualify as high farce.
Of course our government had been told about global warming. Clearly. Repeatedly. Authoritatively.
Steadily accumulating data pointed unmistakably to catastrophic implications.
While some parts of the globe would become wetter, others would become much hotter, drier, functionally uninhabitable.
Sea levels would rise, exacerbating storm surges. Low-lying Pacific nations would disappear.
Our government has been told about global warming - clearly, repeatedly and authoritatively. Picture: Shutterstock
Atmospheric volatility would bring more furious storms, and with them floods, cyclones, chaos.
Species loss would accelerate.
In short, the preconditions for a state of more-or-less galloping crisis.
All of these threats have coalesced in recent weeks and months.
Soaring temperatures and extraordinary turbulence across tinder-dry ground have created hellish conditions.
Yet while Australia burns - 2019 being the hottest and driest year on record - in the nearby capital of Indonesia, unholy rains have seen at least 30 dead.
Jakarta's heaviest falls in 24 years (perhaps ever) have brought widespread drownings and fatal landslides.
Again, such events had been predicted.
But to what effect?
The absence of visionary leadership has been evident globally, but nowhere more self-destructively than in Australia, a sophisticated polity with perhaps the greatest interest in securing concerted action.
Yet far from doing that, Australia has actually led the resistance.
And its most successful political party, shielded by influential media barrackers, has instead preferred to undermine the scientific consensus, to inhibit action at home, and, most damningly, to lend legitimacy to tardiness abroad.
Viewed historically, this is hardly Australian. Viewed strategically, it is self-serving to the point of being unpatriotic.
Even as a small nation, Australia has boldly contributed to global initiatives in the past.
Examples include unhesitating engagement in two world wars, championing the creation of the United Nations and showing moral leadership against apartheid South Africa. Or there's the establishment of the International Criminal Court, the progression of free trade rules, and the creation of the G20 and APEC.
"The absence of visionary leadership has been evident globally, but nowhere more self-destructively than in Australia."
Yet on the existential question of climate change? Fecklessness.
Abatement has been politicised as the panicked ravings of a "climate cult", the science informing it pilloried, and the only legislated mechanism for reducing domestic carbon output triumphantly repealed.
Remarkably, the Coalition went to the 2019 election with no energy policy and no serious carbon-reduction plan - nor even any desire for one. And it prevailed.
Think about that.
Little wonder younger voters doubt democracy.
It is not just that politicians fail to deliver, or that some lie - it is that there is no electoral consequence for negligence and moral turpitude.
But what if there were consequences? Liability even.
It's a long bow, but imagine a class action against government itself, against individual politicians, ministers, their political parties, and perhaps even their media apologists?
That the damage is real is beyond debate - we all know the figures. But the liability?
That case could be brought by farmers, regional businesses, burnt-out homeowners, families of deceased residents and firefighters, their insurers, conservationists - all of them seeking to show that an officially sanctioned rejection of expert advice amounted to a negligence born of self-interest and a reckless indifference on the part of governments, political leaders, individual MPs and their various organs.
Sound fanciful? Perhaps, but statutes such as the NSW Rural Fires Act, 1997 set out a very clear responsibility for ministers and officials requiring them inter alia to make provision: "(a) for the prevention, mitigation and suppression of bush and other fires in local government areas, and (c) for the protection of persons from injury or death, and property from damage, arising from fires, and (c1) for the protection of infrastructure and environmental, economic, cultural, agricultural and community assets from damage arising from fires..."
There could be other legal bases for an application also.
There's no doubt such an action would be novel and highly adventurous. It would face significant technical hurdles, and would be potentially costly.
Unlike the US, Australian litigants are generally required to pay the other's costs in the event of failure.
Even the threshold challenge would be problematic: proving a causal link between global warming and the firestorm(s).
Only after that could the claimants go on to assert that, through its particular negligence, the Coalition had increased the danger, thus breaching its duty of care.
Legally, this is a heavy burden, even if the moral and political case seems open and shut.
What is clear, however, is that the expert advice was repeatedly shelved and that the whole issue of climate change and its associated dangers was cynically politicised to the material disadvantage of citizens - current and future generations - and the national estate.
If justiciable, and that is a big "if", the words and actions of senior Coalition figures undermining the science as "crap" and claiming any risks were manageable are legion.
Just weeks ago, the Deputy Prime Minister, for example, described those linking climate to bushfires as "woke inner-city greenies".
Add to this, the repeal of the carbon price, refusal to seek global action, failure to take reasonable steps on available knowledge to avoid loss of life, loss of property, and destruction of native flora and fauna.
Would an Australian court entertain such an application? According to several lawyers contacted, it is not impossible.
Tony Abbott's replacement in the North Shore seat of Warringah, Zali Steggall, took to Twitter on New Year's Day.
"Very hard to celebrate a decade where governments had all the facts on the risks ahead and failed to act. #ClimateEmergency #ClimateActNow"
They did know. But claimed they knew better. They were wrong. Legally or otherwise, that is a fact.

 *Mark Kenny is Senior Fellow at ANU's Australian Studies Institute

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