30/01/2020

Top Academics Write To Morrison Government Asking For 'Deep Cuts' To Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions

ABC News - Michael Slezak

The academics have called Australia "ground zero" for climate impacts and climate policy uncertainty. (ABC News: Michael Barnett)
Key points
  • Australia's top academics say research has identified what technologies are needed to address the solution
  • Angus Taylor stands by the track record of the Federal Government on the issue
  • Researchers believe Australia can be a world leader on the issue if governments accept the need for action
Eighty of Australia's top academics have written an open letter declaring an "urgent need for deep cuts" to Australia's greenhouse gas emissions following the current unprecedented bushfire crisis.
The group of Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellows describe Australia as "ground zero for both climate impacts and climate policy uncertainty" and warn that without strong action on climate change, the world may not support human societies "in their current form and maintain human well-being".
They say research has identified what policies and technologies are needed to address the solution but "what is lacking is the courage to implement them at the required scale".
The letter calls on Australian governments to "acknowledge the gravity of the threat posed by climate change driven by human activities" and "reduce greenhouse gas emissions in time to safeguard against catastrophe".
"We owe this to younger generations and those who come after them, who will bear the brunt of our decisions."
The letter, signed by 80 past and present ARC Laureate Fellows, notes that decades ago, scientists warned that the impacts we're seeing now, like the bushfire crisis, were coming.
It is only the second time the group of Australia's top academics have taken such action. The first was in December last year when 50 of them wrote in defence of whistleblowers who raised concerns about international students on ABC's Four Corners.

More than just fire management
The letter was coordinated by Professor Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist from the University of New South Wales, and includes top academics in fields including economics, healthcare, history and law, as well as many different scientific disciplines.
Professor Steven Sherwood has called for action on greenhouse gas emissions. (Supplied: UNSW)
"We're a small group that has been selected by the Australian Research Council as the top researchers in our respective fields," Professor Sherwood said.
"It's a good group to think about all aspects of the problem — it's not just a science problem. It's a problem that spans all of those areas."
They call on governments to do more than just focus on adaptation to future fires.
Adaptation isn't enough, they say, since the world is still warming and is "only at the beginning of the climate change phenomenon."
"The current impacts are happening with just one [degree] Celsius of global temperature increase, but we are set for the best part of another degree even if very strong international action is taken to reduce emissions."
"If strong action is not taken, environmental degradation and social disruption will be much greater and in many cases adaptation will no longer be achievable.
"It would be naive to assume that such a world will still support human societies in their current form and maintain human well-being."
Opportunity for Australia
The researchers note that Australia cannot fix the problem on its own, but argue Australia's "visibility as ground zero for both climate impacts and climate policy uncertainty" means we could become a leader on the issue."Doing so will aid our economy, strengthen our standing in international affairs and relations with neighbours, and help secure Australia and the world from the impacts of climate change."
Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor has backed the Morrison Government's record on climate change. (ABC News: Marco Catalano)
Professor Sherwood noted the transition could be painful for some communities and they will require assistance.
"For example, we probably need to provide economic support to coal-mining regions," Professor Sherwood said.
"Many mining jobs are set to disappear no matter what our governments do, so this would be a concern even if we didn't care about the planet's future."
The letter concludes: "We call on all governments to acknowledge the gravity of the threat posed by climate change driven by human activities, and to support and implement evidence-based policy responses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in time to safeguard against catastrophe.
"We owe this to younger generations and those who come after them, who will bear the brunt of our decisions."
"It's an urgent problem and a problem where the political sphere isn't moving fast enough," Professor Sherwood added.
In a statement, Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor said the Federal Government has a track record of which "all Australians could be proud".
"We have beaten our first Kyoto target, we are on track to overachieve on our 2020 target by 411 Mt and the most recent projections published in December 2019 show we are on track to beat our 2030 target."

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Climate Change Splits The Public Into Six Groups. Understanding Them Is Key To Future Action

ABC Radio National - Rebecca Huntley (Big Ideas)

We must create a chorus of different communities demanding a viable future. (Getty: Mark Evans)
Rebecca Huntley
Dr Rebecca Huntley is an adjunct senior lecturer at the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales.
A researcher on social trends, Dr Huntley presents The History Listen on RN each week. 
This article is an edited extract of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute Oration given by Dr Huntley at the University of Melbourne. It was recorded and broadcast by ABC RN's Big Ideas program.
In Australia there is now widespread public acceptance of the reality of climate change; we seem to see its effects almost hourly.
But the electorate still votes for political parties with environment policies that I would call recalcitrant, and with significant groups of climate deniers in their ranks.
The issue of climate change has become a battle of ideologies, values and worldviews, something that has become much more pronounced in the last decade thanks to our political class and to parts of the media.
Knowing what we know about human beings, our psychological and evolutionally makeup, there's no evidence that these divisions are going to be broken down by more scientific evidence or just the passage of time — not that we have much time to spare.
And we should not assume that as climate change becomes worse, these divisions will start to heal.
For these reasons, I have long been keen to understand the ways people respond to climate change — and the language we need to use to convince people to take action.

Six groups of people
I have spent the past 15 years listening to Australians talk about climate change. (Supplied: Rebecca Huntley)
Last year I spent time with researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which has conducted countless scientific studies on public opinion and behaviour around climate change.
Much of what they do is informed by the Six Americas study, a segmentation first conducted in 2009.
It measures the American public's climate change beliefs, attitudes, risk perceptions, motivations, values, policy preferences, behaviours — including voting patterns and media consumption — and underlying barriers to action.
It groups the public into six different segments, varying in size and well differentiated in terms of their attitudes to climate change and their views about action.
  • The Alarmed: This group is fully convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change and already taking individual, consumer, and political action to address it.
  • The Concerned: This group is also convinced that the globe is warming and that it's a serious problem, but have not yet engaged with the issue personally, including not always voting for political parties with strong climate policies.
  • The Cautious, the Disengaged and the Doubtful: These groups represent different stages of understanding and acceptance of the problem. None are actively involved.
  • The Dismissive: This group is very sure that climate change is not happening, and often actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce emissions. Some of them are in significant positions of power in government, industry and the media.
The public is grouped into six segments depending on their attitudes to climate change and their views about action. (Supplied: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication)
As someone who has spent about 15 years listening to Australians talk about climate change, this approach immediately resonated with me. It made sense.
The qualitative research I've done has revealed the extent to which attitudes about climate are informed not by an understanding of science, but by world views, values, political identification, social and cultural conditioning and gender identity.

Shifting segments
As I contemplated this Six Americas study, the mammoth task of the climate change movement was taking shape in my mind.
We need to increase the Alarmed cohort, absolutely no doubt.
But we also need to develop and hone their skills of talking to others not of the same mindset.
And we need to provide social and emotional support as many of them — many of us — struggle with feelings of grief, dread and burning anger about what's happening to the planet and the response of many of our political leaders.
How spending $200 a year
could help prevent climate change
On average, Australians are willing to chip in an extra $200 a year to prevent climate change. It turns out that money could go a long way.
We need to shift more of the Concerned group into the Alarmed group.
We need to find a way to convince the Cautious that urgent action is necessary.
This, very difficultly, often requires language that isn't fraught with tones of crisis. More on this in a moment.
We need to engage the Disengaged — probably the hardest task of all, because it requires us to rebuild their faith that our democratic institutions are capable and willing to do something about it.
And finally — in my opinion, and I say this with no trepidation whatsoever — we need to drive the Dismissive group out of positions of power in our government, stop the flow of their donations into our political parties, and find smarter ways to engage with them in the media, including social media.

What underpins our response to climate change?
There is an Australian version of the Six Americas study, led by Donald W Hine from the University of New England.
It took a similar approach and came up with five groups — which echo the Yale segments but without the Disengaged.
It was conducted in 2013 — a relatively long time ago given all that's happened since — but remains highly valuable because it takes into account a broader range of cognitive and emotional factors that underpin human responses to climate change.
These include:
  • How close do people feel to climate change effects?
  • Do they see local manifestations or not, and do they identify them as being connected to climate change?
  • Do they feel an emotional connection to nature?
  • How much do they trust climate change authorities or authorities in general?
  • How much do their self-reported feelings of shame, guilt, anger and fear condition them to respond in certain ways to the climate change issue and remain open or closed to solutions?
These are now the questions I ask myself in the process of developing, conducting and analysing any research on climate change.

How climate change has impacted
the world since your childhood
Global warming is already changing the world before our eyes — let's see what has happened in your lifetime.
Language matters
I've also spent a lot of time wondering about the efficacy of the language around climate change, around emergency, crisis and urgency.
The facts of climate change and the need for rapid response absolutely merit these terms.
To not use them seems to be more than a sin of omission but an outright lie to the public about the scale of the threat and what's at stake.
Those in the Alarmed group feel more than comfortable with this message.
Some of the Concerned group respond well to messages of urgency, and others not so well.
But the language of crisis and emergency can actually turn off those who are Disengaged and Cautious, and make them more critical of attempts to address climate change.
The ABC's Australia Talks survey found people in Queensland and the NT are more conservative on environmental issues. (Getty: Virginia Star)
These people can have a strong belief that the issue is overplayed by the media and "politicised".
They dislike the gloom and doom tone of the debate, its remote and inaccessible language, and the fact they feel guilty and depressed when listening to climate change messages.
They rightfully question whether our political and business leaders have the capacity or the desire to ensure that any transition to an economy built on renewables doesn't penalise already struggling groups in our society.
My research has taught me important lessons about climate change communication: be solution-focused and positive, understand the values of the people you are trying to convince, do not fuel division and conflict, and relate solutions to our sources of happiness and common concern.
The challenge is how to activate cooperative values rather than competitive values.
In my view, we must stress what we have in common: the desire for secure work, safe neighbourhoods, a good standard of living, security and happiness — whatever that might look like for different groups of people.

A transformative moment
We also need to find ways to shift those in the large Concerned segment into the Alarmed cohort.
A moment from my own recent past shows it is possible.
In December 2018 I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee and turned on the TV.
I saw hundreds of teenagers skipping school and protesting in the streets about climate change, with handmade signs that spanned from the serious and angry to the humorous and profane.
"There are no jobs on a dead planet." "You're burning our future." And my favourite: "Why should we go to the school if you won't listen to the educated?"
After watching young people strike, I made a decision at that moment to put climate change at the heart of everything I do. (ABC News: Jedda Costa)
As I sat sipping my coffee, I thought to myself, "Good on those kids telling the powers that be, the older generation, that they need to do more about climate change."
And then it hit me. At almost 50 years of age, I am part of that older generation, part of that generation with a platform and a voice some of these young people don't have yet.
It was as if those teenagers were speaking to me.
In that moment something shifted inside me, a sensation hard to describe and yet I can recall it now with clarity. It actually felt physical. I felt like they were telling me to do something.
And so I made a decision at that moment to put climate change at the heart of everything I do: in my work, as a parent, as a consumer, as a citizen.
It's a factor in every decision I make about the research jobs I will accept, about the energy that I will have in my house, about the transport that I will take, about the food that I will eat and about where I will invest my superannuation.
This transformative moment, the moment I tipped from concerned to genuinely alarmed, didn't happen because I read an ICCP report or sat through a presentation from a climate scientist about CO2 levels.
I reacted to a crowd of children holding up signs in the streets, girls who were only a few years older than my eldest daughter. Suddenly it became very personal.
That I can make a contribution to this movement, probably the most important in our history, is such a relief to me and helps me manage the angst that overwhelms me from time to time in the night.
My first task is to understand how we maintain our optimism as we move deeper into a climate change-affected future.
I, we, can protest, change the terms of our super fund, install solar panels, and vote for parties with strong climate policies — or any climate policies, really.
We have to stop voting for parties who don't have sufficient climate policies. (Getty: Martin Ollman)
But one of the most important things we can do is understand why other people feel the way they do about climate change, and learn to talk to them effectively.
What we need are thousands, millions, of everyday conversations about climate change.
That will help enlarge the ranks of the Concerned, engage the Disengaged and make the Cautious more convinced of the need for action.
This will then expose those who dismiss both the science and the solutions, the denialists — who are today a minority, albeit a powerful one — as what they are: out of step with the rest of us, determined to put our collective wellbeing and our way of life at risk.
We must not let their voices be the loudest in the public arena.
We must create a chorus of different communities united in asking, indeed demanding, that we act now to preserve a liveable world and a viable future.

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Inequality Makes Climate Crisis Much Harder To Tackle

The Guardian - 

What Davos didn’t face up to is that we can’t expect poor people to make all the sacrifices
Greta Thunberg (second from right) and other young climate activists at Davos last week. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP
For those perched at the top of the mountain, the view is perfectly clear. Climate change is the issue of the moment and has to be tackled without delay. Governments, companies and individuals are all going to have to adjust to the new reality.
Anybody who is not with the agenda – for example, Donald Trump – is either mad or bad. There was a big US delegation to Davos last week but it found itself isolated – in public, at least – on the climate emergency. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum found Greta Thunberg’s call to arms much more compelling.
Later in the year there will be a much more important event than the World Economic Forum: the UN climate change summit (COP26) in Glasgow. In Davos it was hard to move without hearing the phrase “race against time”.
Almost 15 years ago Nick Stern, then head of the UK Government Economic Service, produced a report on the economics of climate change in which he called the failure to deal with a heating planet the greatest market failure of all time. He argued that the benefits of early action outweighed the costs.
Last week Prof Stern, now chair of the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, said the threat was now being taken a lot more seriously. There were four reasons for that.
First there was evidence, after a 1C increase in temperatures since pre-industrial times, of the failure to act. “We are seeing some pretty nasty stuff already,” he said.
Second, the scientific evidence was now clear that there was a big difference – for example, in the length of droughts – between a 1.5C and a 2C increase in temperatures.
Third, the education system was producing a generation of young people across the world well versed in climate, sustainability and environmental issues, and they were putting pressure on their parents to act. Young people wanted to know why the economics profession had been slow to include climate risks into their models, which was a justifiable criticism, Stern said. Only a tiny fraction of the papers published in economics journals have related to sustainability.
Finally, Stern noted, an awareness was growing that there is a more attractive way of doing things. The days of the internal combustion engine were numbered, the cost of solar energy had collapsed and there had been dramatic advances in battery-storage technology.
Yet the chances are that Glasgow will not deliver as much as the scientists say is necessary. In part that’s because some important countries, including the US, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia most prominently, will resist pressure to make the commitments that are needed.
But it is also because the view from the bottom of the mountain is hazier than the view from the top. Consider why Emmanuel Macron did not show up at Davos this year. The French president took precisely the kind of action deemed necessary to tackle the climate emergency – whacking up the cost of driving fossil-fuelled vehicles – only to find the country erupt into protest.
The message to Macron from those on low incomes was clear: don’t talk to us about the end of the world until you have told us how to make ends meet at the end of the month.
Trump and his team see things through the lens of the yellow vest protesters. When Olaf Scholz, Germany’s finance minister, said his government was committed to taxing carbon emissions more heavily, the US treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, replied: “If you want to put taxes on people, go ahead and put a carbon tax. That is a tax on hardworking people.”
It’s easy to dismiss Mnuchin’s comments as those of a politician with his head in the sand, but he has a point. Speedy action to tackle the climate emergency requires political action. But political action will only be possible if governments can carry their voters with them. And that is not going to be possible if the measures enacted appear to be all pain and no gain.
The Stern report came out in 2006 and it is now 2020. In the intervening years there has been a whopping financial crisis, and a decade in which living standards for the majority of people have moved sideways. It is much easier to worry about the future of the planet if you are comfortably off and don’t have to rely on a food bank.
The problem – and this goes to the heart of what is wrong with Davos – is that nobody really wants to confront the issue of inequality. There was plenty of hand-wringing about the climate crisis, much talk about the need for higher investment in new technologies, and a lot of head-scratching about weak growth. What there wasn’t – as usual – was any willingness to adopt the obvious solutions.
Any sensible person observing the World Economic Forum annual meeting from the outside would come up with the following analysis: working people are going to be less terrified about new technology if they are represented by a trade union.
Growth would be higher, and less dependent on debt, if workers were able to bargain collectively. Public support for more rapid action to fight global heating would be stronger under a more progressive tax system. Entrepreneurs would develop new green technologies more quickly if governments set more onerous targets for reductions in carbon emissions.
All these notions are anathema to those running multinational corporations. They hate the idea of trade unions, they are ideological in their opposition to stronger states, and they recoil from the idea that they should pay more tax.
But if poor people are expected to make all the sacrifices, expect some resistance. And expect the battle ahead to be long and hard.

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