11/02/2020

(AU) Australia Will Take New Emissions Reduction Target To Glasgow Climate Summit

The Age - Rob Harris

Australia will take a new long-term emissions reduction target to November's UN climate summit, as the Morrison government weighs up whether to join more than 80 countries to commit to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
A review into the potential economic impacts of adopting the goal will be finalised later this year in time for the Glasgow summit, as a growing number of Liberal MPs speak out on the need for the Coalition government to adopt more-ambitious climate policies.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who shares a close relationship with his Australian counterpart, Scott Morrison, has called on countries around the world to follow the United Kingdom in adopting the 2050 target as part of the climate talks this year.
Federal Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor: The government expects to reach an emissions target before the Glasgow summit. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Federal Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor told The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald the government would settle on its 2050 strategy before Glasgow, which has been billed as the most-critical meeting since Paris five years ago.
"The government expects to deliver a long-term emissions reduction strategy before COP26 (the Glasgow summit)," Mr Taylor said.
Mr Morrison last week vowed not to be "bullied” on climate change as the moderate and conservative wings of the Coalition slugged it out behind closed doors over energy and emissions policies.
While Nationals MPs Barnaby Joyce, George Christensen, David Gillespie and former minister Matt Canavan have called for greater support for the coal industry, a group of Liberals including Tim Wilson, Katie Allen, Fiona Martin, Trent Zimmerman and John Alexander warned their constituents wanted greater action.
Independent MP Zali Steggall, who deposed former prime minister Tony Abbott on a platform of climate action last May, will on Monday seek support from a number of disaffected Liberal MPs  following two months of devastating bushfires and smoke-choked capital cities.
Ms Steggall will release the details of her private member's bill to establish a new independent Climate Change Commission which would outsource climate targets and policies to public servants.


The top 10 highest carbon emitters have been named, can you guess who they are?

Mr Taylor said on Sunday the government believed the answer was not a new tax or more bureaucracy but "practical change" driven by science and technology.
"The pathway to meaningful impacts on global emissions is through development and deployment of new technologies," Mr Taylor said.
"That is where Australia can have the biggest impact on reducing global emissions."
He confirmed the government expected to deliver a long-term emissions reduction strategy before the Glasgow summit.
About 80 countries around the world are committed to such a target, but many are small economies with small greenhouse gas outputs.
The European Union is the biggest bloc on the brink of signing up to net zero, with major economies such as China, the US and India showing little sign of similar ambition.
All Australian state governments have adopted the target, with Mr Morrison committing to review the goal as part of last year's Pacific Islands Forum.
When asked directly about the 2050 target, Mr Morrison said he would "never make a commitment like that if I couldn’t tell the Australian people what it would cost them”.
Mr Taylor and Mr Morrison have continued to declare Australia would "meet and beat" its 2030 Paris targets of reducing emissions by between 26 to 28 per cent on 2005 levels, potentially without using Kyoto carryover credits.
As a signatory to the Paris Agreement, the government has also committed to achieving net zero emission globally in the second half of the century.
The government is also close to finalising its draft Technology Investment Roadmap, which it says will set a framework for investment priorities in emissions-reducing technologies over the short term (to 2022), medium term (to 2030) and long term (to 2050).
Ms Steggall will circulate the details of her bill to all MPs as well as business, environmental and relevant stakeholder groups on Monday, with the crossbench MP urging a conscience vote on the issue on March 23.
"It is time to take the party politics out of climate policy," she said. "Now is the time for a rational approach to climate change."
Labor deputy leader Richard Marles said on Sunday the opposition wanted to achieve bipartisanship with the government on climate change policy.
“We have been seeking bipartisanship for a long time in relation to this. But to get bipartisanship, we actually need to have a side that we can talk to,” Mr Marles said.

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(AU) Media Watch Host Paul Barry Fans Flames, Dodges Climate Change Facts

The Australian - Chris Kenny

Media Watch host Paul Barry.
The ABC’s Media Watch, hosted by Paul Barry, claims the high moral ground, declaring it exposes “conflicts of interest, journalistic deceit, misrepresentation, manipulation and plagiarism”. But the problem is that it is full of journalistic deceit, misrepresentation and manipulation itself.
It flouts ABC charter demands for objectivity and accuracy. Rather than be an independent arbiter of media standards, Barry uses it to target the ABC’s commercial rivals and wage ideological battles supporting political causes dear to the green left.
The program shows only occasional interest in revealing ABC deceptions and cannot bring itself to examine the organisation’s chronic political bias.
Instead, it entrenches them. Media Watch is Barry’s vehicle for preaching his climate change-obsessed views and trying to corral journalism within his jaundiced boundaries. Rather than measure reporting against facts, the program weighs journalism it doesn’t like against the opinions that dominate the green-left Zeitgeist.
Last week’s first program for the year was a classic of the genre because it misrepresented people and facts in order to promote global warming alarmism and denounce News Corp journalism.
Barry’s opening line was demonstrably untrue. “Welcome to Groundhog Day,” he said, “where the loudest voices at News Corp are adamant that the summer’s terrifying bushfires have nothing to do with climate change.”
Barry and his team must have known it was a lie when putting their program together. For instance, my repeated position on television and in print, based on public scientific and expert documents, was only that activists were grossly exaggerating the role of climate change.
On December 14 in this newspaper I wrote of bushfire and drought that: “The expert analysis shows that if there is a long-term influence from climate change on either of these blights, it will be to make each of them slightly more common in a land where they are common already. Whatever Australia does on carbon emissions can have no impact on any of this, at least for decades to come as global emissions continue to rise.”
Host of Media Watch, Paul Barry. Picture: Sam Mooy
On January 18: “The climate change debate should be part of the discussion but is marginal compared with the central fire management issues and has been ghoulishly fanned as activists exploit real-life trauma for politics … The science is clear, predicting that in the southeast of the country bad fire conditions will become more common because endemic summer heat and dryness are expected to increase, while regions such as northern NSW may have summer rains delayed more often, as they have been in this drought year. The reason these climate changes should be relatively marginal in the discussion is that they relate to making an existing catastrophic threat slightly more common.”
Naturally I made many similar comments on TV and radio. Barry also misrepresented my Sky News colleague, Australian Financial Review columnist and Spectator Australia editor Rowan Dean, who says climate policy in Australia could only have a small (1.3 per cent) effect on bushfire intensity.
Barry also created the impression Andrew Bolt, of Sky News and The Herald Sun, had referred to climate science as ­“lunatic stuff” when he knew Bolt was referring to climate protesters. This is the sort of misrepresentation that trashes ABC guidelines and journalistic ethics; and Barry and the ABC do this in pursuit of ideological goals.
Media Watch was full of other idiotic comments such as this: “Passionate denial that the bushfires should make us act on climate change runs right across the Murdoch media in this country reaching an audience of millions.”
Again it is based on a false premise — Barry and the ABC must know Australia is a signatory to the Paris climate agreement and is doing more to reduce emissions than most other nations — and it is also absurd to suggest a bad summer of bushfires should be the sudden catalyst in global warming policy. This is the rhetoric of climate activists, not a serious media watchdog.
Paul Barry outside the main entrance to the ABC building at Ultimo in Sydney.
Barry referred collectively and offensively to me, Bolt, Dean, Alan Jones, Peta Credlin and Paul Murray as “News Corp’s deniers” even though I have never disputed the science of anthropogenic global warming. Others also accept the science and have a variety of nuanced views, and the strongest opponents of climate action, Dean and Jones, are as closely or more closely linked to Nine Media rather than News Corp (guess those facts don’t suit Barry’s narrative).
Barry said we “all sing from the same song sheet on climate change”, when clearly we have differing views (perhaps from the groupthink of the ABC this diversity of views is hard to comprehend). What we do have in common is a thirst for facts, which we inject into the debate. But Barry’s critique avoided facts.
Media Watch focused on how some of us challenged and exposed claims made as far back as November that this season’s fires were unprecedented.
We did this through diligent attention to verifiable information and historical records.
Barry dismisses these assessments, not based on facts, but based on opinions he prefers.
Some of his preferred opinions were from authoritative voices but they were still just opinions — what matters are facts.
Barry’s case to establish a lack of precedent was emotive tosh: “Mass evacuations, homes and businesses destroyed, a billion animals dead, an area 1.5 times the size of Tasmania burnt to ashes, our big cities choking with smoke and fires still raging.” He completely dodged the fact that none of this was unprecedented.
I have demonstrated this through sharing of facts and historical records in this newspaper and on Sky News.
Other colleagues have done similar. Media Watch knows this but censors this reality in order to make its malicious, jaundiced and ideological case.
The ABC has not reported these facts. The ABC adopts the sinister approach of censoring these facts to mislead the public, and then has the audacity to build a farrago of lies in order to discredit journalists who research and share the facts. This is not journalism but its evil twin.
Barry gave the game away when he said: “There’s no doubt climate change activists across the world think the fires should be a tipping point.” Clearly his thesis, his whole show, is not about facts, fairness and reality, it is about distorting reality so he can share the vibe of the climate activists.
Media Watch is using the taxes of Australian families against their own interests. And no one at the ABC or in the government has the fibre to intervene.

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(AU) Zali Steggall To Unveil Climate Change Bill And Push For A Conscience Vote For MPs

The Guardian - 

Now is the time for ‘modern Liberals’ to speak for their community rather than toe the party line, independent MP says
Zali Steggall says it is time to take the party politics out of climate policy, which is why she is calling for a conscience vote on her bill. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
  • Aims to limit global warming to well below 2C, pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
  • Net zero carbon emissions target by 2050.
  • To achieve the target, the minister creates an emissions budget.
  • Establishes a Climate Change Commission to prepare a national climate change risk assessment every five years.
  • The commission is made up of a chair, Australia's chief scientist and five other members - who must have experience in either climate science, business, agriculture, environmental management, energy, transport or regional development.
  • The assessments cover the risks climate change poses to the economy, society, agriculture, environment, and ecology.
  • In response, the minister creates a national adaptation plan.
  • The commission provides the minister with yearly adaptation plan progress reports.
  • Decisions made under the Act must be based on the best available science.
The woman who toppled Tony Abbott in Warringah at the last election on a platform of climate change action now has the whole parliament in her sights as she seeks bipartisan support for a climate change framework bill aimed at transitioning Australia to a decarbonised economy.
Zali Steggall – along with her fellow crossbenchers Rebekah Sharkie, Helen Haines and Andrew Wilkie – will release the climate change national framework for adaption and mitigation bill on Monday, ahead of its introduction to the parliament in March.
Steggall and the crossbench have begun a conscience vote campaign online and within their communities. They hope to win over enough government MPs to see the bill, which has been modelled on existing legislation in the UK, New Zealand and Ireland, pass in Australia.
However, the crossbench faces an uphill battle, with Scott Morrison declaring just last week he would not be “bullied’ into more action on climate change.
Steggall has previously called on the self-styled “modern Liberals” to support the legislation, which she said became imperative following the summer of unprecedented bushfires and resulting hazardous air quality that left communities reeling.
With the government’s party room once again at war over climate policy, Steggall said it was time to let individual MPs speak for their communities rather than toe a party line.
“The bill will be circulated to all MPs as well as business, environmental and relevant stakeholder groups on Monday,” she said.
“It is time to take the party politics out of climate policy. It is a matter of principle that we should all be committed to a safer future. I am urging for a conscience vote when I present the bill on March 23 as a private member’s bill. Now is the time for a rational approach to climate change.”
The crossbench group, working with climate action organisations, has already launched petitions calling on MPs to be allowed a conscience vote on the legislation once it is introduced.
Without a conscience vote, the bill is doomed to fail, with the government holding the numbers in the lower chamber.
Steggall said the events of the summer, on top of the climate impacts Australia was already suffering through, should be enough to prompt MPs to follow their conscience and vote on behalf of their constituents.
“This bill is a sensible and bipartisan approach to safeguarding Australia’s future against the impacts of climate change,” she said.
“The devastating fires that ripped through Australia over summer; the drought; and our deteriorating air pollution have shown how the impacts of climate change are a real threat to our way of life.”
Dave Sharma in Wentworth, Tim Wilson in Goldstein and Jason Falinski in Mackellar, as well as Brisbane’s Trevor Evans and North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman are being targeted as potential allies. Newcomer Katie Allen, who won the seat of Higgins at the last election, and Bennelong MP John Alexander, who have both urged their government to take more action on climate policy in recent weeks, are also being urged to vote according to their electorate’s wishes.
Steggall has previously warned of voter backlash if moderate Liberals ignore their wishes on climate action.
“I think they have to be mindful of their electorates feeling disenfranchised if they aren’t voting in accordance with their majority wishes,” Steggall told the Guardian last month.
“The Liberal party is the party of the free vote – I am not asking them to do something they have never done before, and I think crossing the floor to vote for a climate act is something they need to do to represent their constituents.
“If you choose to ignore the amount of people in your electorate [who want stronger climate action] … you do so at your peril.”
Steggall and the crossbench have kept much of the bill under wraps, but have said they are aiming for a statutory long-term target of net zero emissions by 2050, as well as a climate change risk assessment for all sectors.
The group wants the government to focus on a national adaption schedule for Australia’s industries, based on what the science has revealed in regards to impacts of climate change.
To ensure accountability, the group wants to follow the UK’s lead and establish some sort of climate change authority, which would act independently of the government, and report back on the progress each year.
Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, said the opposition was looking to work with the government on a bipartisan climate policy.
“We have been seeking bipartisanship for a long time in relation to this,” he told the ABC on Sunday.
“But to get bipartisanship, we actually need to have a side that we can talk to. Right now, we’re watching a whole lot of people having a war with each other inside their party room … and that’s preventing the conservatives in this country even coming to the table to have a discussion about this.”

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