29/05/2020

(AU) 'Some Things Were Out Of Bounds': Fire Chiefs 'Gagged' On Climate Change Warnings To Government, Inquiry Told

Sydney Morning Herald - Mike Foley

Decorated former firefighter and climate action advocate Greg Mullins says current fire chiefs have been effectively gagged from raising the bushfire risks created by global warming with politicians.

Mr Mullins said he had "deep concerns over climate change", which was fuelling "unprecedented" bushfires in evidence to a Senate inquiry into the 2019-20 bushfire season on Wednesday.

NSW RFS crews extinguish a fire that crossed the Monaro Highway, four kilometres north of Bredbo, NSW, in February this year. Credit: AAP

Asked by Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson if he thought "the current serving fire chiefs are gagged in some way", Mr Mullins replied: "yes".

Mr Mullins, a former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner, said when he was in the role "some things were out of bounds and often climate change was one of those issues, even to the point of having to work around it when preparing documents, and I think that is a tragedy".

Greens senator Janet Rice asked Mr Mullins if it was "still the case" that fire chiefs were discouraged from raising the effect of climate change on bushfire risks with politicians.

"I know it's the case," Mr Mullins said. "I’ve had a number of discussions and it's clear."

Mr Mullins had a 39-year career in NSW Fire and Rescue, and was appointed commissioner in 2003. He retired in 2017.

Mr Mullins was representing the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action group, which comprises 33 former fire and emergency service leaders from around the country.

Mr Mullins said he was pressured not to speak out on climate change when he was a public servant.

"We self-censored because we knew what would be acceptable, and what would not, for certain political masters and if you went outside those bounds life could be made very unpleasant for you," he said.

The Emergency Leaders for Climate Action unsuccessfully sought meetings with Prime Minister Scott Morrison in April and again in May last year, ahead of the long 2019-20 summer bushfire season about the looming "catastrophic" fire season.

Significantly less property may be have been lost to the fires if the government had heeded their warnings, and moved to secure lease agreements for an expanded fleet of water bombing aircraft ahead of the most recent fire season, Mr Mullins said.

"These aircraft weren’t available and arrived too late," he said.

A concurrent hearing of the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements heard evidence from NSW’s National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) Blue Mountains Branch Director David Crust fire impacts to the only known stand of ancient and endangered Wollemi Pines left in the wild.

Mr Crust revealed it could be five years before "we've got a really clear idea of ... what the longer term mortality is going to be of individual trees within the population".

NPWS co-ordinated a last ditch aerial and ground firefighting operation last summer to protect the only known stand of the ‘living fossil’ Wollemi Pines, which date back at least 200 million years, from the Gospers Mountain Fire that would go on to scorch much of the Wollemi National Park.

A mere 200 trees cling on in remote, rugged and deep gorges which have been gouged out of the sandstone escarpment.

"In the short term, it looks like the sites are generally okay," Mr Crust told the commission. "Most of the mature trees were impacted by fire, but appear to have survived."

Mr Crust is optimistic even though firefighters couldn't stop the understory burning, because most of the Wollemi Pines' upper canopy is intact. However, there had been "quite a bit of mortality" among the 200 juvenile trees, but since the fires "many of them are actually re-sprouting now so we're just going to have to wait and see what the long-term impacts are and if those individual plants... survive", he said.

Melbourne University ornithologist Rohan Clarke told the commission about the "successful" rescue mission to save the endangered eastern bristlebird as fires bore down on its habitat near the NSW and Victorian border.

About 2000 birds are left in the wild, and just 150 in Victoria. A team of scientists and Victorian Department of Environment staff captured and relocated 15 birds and relocated them to Melbourne Zoo, to be held as an insurance population in case the wild population was wiped out.

Luckily, the fires only licked the edges of the bristlebird' Victorian habitat. Unfortunately, six of the birds dies from a stress-related fungal disease while in captivity. Seven birds have been returned to the wild and two remain at the zoo.

Dr Clarke said fires did hit bristlebird habitat on the NSW side of the border, and "we don't know yet how many of those birds... survived".

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(AU) Australia Stalls On Emissions Target Update As UN Urges Deeper Cuts

The Guardian - 

Angus Taylor responds to question from Labor saying Australia is not due to update target until 2025

Australia’s energy and emissions reduction minister has said he does not intend to increase the international climate change commitment this year. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

The Australian government has told parliament it does not intend to increase its climate change commitment before the next major international meeting, and is not due to set a new target until 2025.

The statement was made after the British host of the meeting, Boris Johnson, and United Nations secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, urged all countries to lift their targets to include net zero emissions by 2050, noting 121 nations had already done so.

Labor’s Pat Conroy asked Angus Taylor, the energy and emissions reduction minister, in February whether Australia was due under the Paris agreement to submit a new or updated commitment this year and, if not, when it was expected.

In a written response on May 12, Taylor said the government planned to “recommunicate” its current commitment – known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC) – before a UN climate conference in Glasgow, which has been postponed until next year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Taylor said Australia’s next commitment, including a target for 2035 or 2040, was not due until 2025.

Analyses have found Australia’s commitment – a 26% to 28% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with 2005 levels – is not enough to play its part in meeting the goals of the Paris agreement. The government received advice in 2015 from the Climate Change Authority that its fair share under a meaningful global deal over that time would be a 45% to 63% cut.

Mark Butler, Labor’s climate change and energy spokesman, said the answer showed the Morrison government was not serious about the Paris agreement or protecting Australians from the dangerous impacts of climate change.

“Their climate policy is still centred around funnelling billions of taxpayers dollars to big polluters and they are still arguing for the construction of a new coal-fired power station,” he said.

“If they were serious about action on climate change, they would take the advice of scientists, the international community, experts, industry and business, who have called for a target of net zero emissions by 2050. Having a target would frame policy decisions and give investors confidence.”

In a statement on Monday night, a spokesman for Taylor said the government was working on its “re-communication” of its current commitment. “This will outline the real and meaningful action Australia is taking to reduce emissions. It won’t change our 2030 target, which is set,” he said.

The spokesman said to date only four countries had formally submitted a net zero emissions target to the UN.

The government has promised a long-term emissions reduction strategy, which it says will be released before the Glasgow meeting and build on a technology investment roadmap.

While the prime minister, Scott Morrison, last year agreed at the Pacific Island Forum that Australia’s plans may include commitments and strategies to reach net zero by 2050, Taylor now says that is not the government’s policy.

In response to other questions from Labor, Taylor conceded Australia was expected to emit more between 2021 and 2030 than would be expected to meet its Paris target. He said it was estimated the country would emit 5,169m tonnes of carbon dioxide over that time, when under the target it could emit only between 4,710m and 4,777m tonnes.

He said this did not take into account Australia’s “overachievement against previous targets” – a reference to the government’s controversial plan to count carbon credits from a different climate agreement against its Paris goal – or cuts from policies still being developed, including a promised electric vehicle strategy.

Labor has supports net zero emissions for Australia by 2050, but said it would review its mid-term target – which had been a 45% cut by 2030 – after losing last year’s election.

What the Paris deal says

The Paris agreement says countries will put forward a commitment every five years. A related agreement asks countries that initially set targets for 2025 to submit a new one by 2020, and those that used a 2030 timeframe to “communicate or update” their commitment by 2020.

The agreement also “notes with concern” that existing commitments for 2025 and 2030 are not enough to limit average global heating to less than 2C, a headline goal of the Paris agreement, and that much deeper cuts will be needed to avoid that mark. It commits countries to act in accordance with “best available science”.

The meeting asked the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to report on what would be needed to limit heating to 1.5C. The IPCC found it demanded a global 45% cut between 2010 and 2030, and carbon dioxide emissions to reach net zero by about 2050.

Despite this, Taylor and other government MPs have described the Paris agreement as requiring net zero emissions “in the second half of the century”.

Bill Hare, head of science and policy thinktank Climate Analytics and a long-term adviser to developing countries at UN climate negotiations, said he believed there was a legal obligation on all countries to increase their ambition.

He said the term “recommunicate” did not appear anywhere in the Paris agreement or related documents, and Australia’s current target was “transparently inadequate”.

“This represents a very legalistic cherry-picking of language that ignores the ultimate purpose of the agreement and its enabling decisions, and in effect sets aside scientific knowledge and advice about the increasing urgency of action,” Hare said.

Dean Bialek, a former Australian diplomat to the UN, now working with the Mission 2020 campaign led by ex-UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, said the confirmation that Australia intended to submit the same “very weak” target it took to Paris revealed two things.

“First, the government remains deaf to the widespread calls from business, banks and bushfire-ravaged communities that we need to be heading for a much safer climate future,” he said.

“Second, despite the crystal clear science, and the green energy bonanza on the horizon, there is no real government plan to reduce emissions, rather an obsession with a gas-led recovery and a CCS [carbon capture and storage] lifeline to a coal industry in steep decline.”

John Connor, the executive director of the team that ran a 2017 UN climate conference hosted by Fiji, now head of the Carbon Market Institute, said the expectation of the global community, and particularly Pacific nations, was that countries would review and update their commitments before Glasgow.

He said climate targets for 2035 would be an issue at the next election, which was likely to roughly coincide with the conference in Scotland.

“It will rightly be a focus, and the government elected then will essentially determine the next commitment,” Connor said.

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(NZ) The Climate Case For The Four-Day Work Week

Gizmodo - Brian Kahn

Photo: Getty

Jacinda Ardern has won a lot of rightful praise for New Zealand’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

 The nation has stood as an outlier with cases that have stayed low, and the country is beginning to reopen in what it hopes is a safe way. So maybe we should also be paying attention to what their ideas are for a recovery plan.

Last week, Ardern suggested switching to a four-day work week. Yes, the reasons she listed were largely focused on stimulating the New Zealand economy, particularly its hard-hit tourism sector. But a four-day work week — like the one Americans will enjoy this week thanks to Memorial Day — would do more than juice the economy and make workers happy. It could also help lower emissions and protect the climate.

Less work is a dream that’s been kicking around for a while if you, like me, are a fan of things like “free time,” “chilling,” and “bettering oneself.” History is ripe with examples of workers and even companies pushing for fewer working hours. That includes economist John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of a 15-hour work week in 1930 and Kellogg’s shift to a 30-hour work week during the Great Depression. The U.S. Senate even went so far as to pass a bill codifying a 30-hour week in 1933 (the House never took it up).

With a similar economic crisis gripping the world today and Ardern putting the idea of a four-day week front and centre as a possible recovery measure, it’s worth reconsidering just why it has potential to be such a good idea.

Giving people an extra day of time to do their own thing doesn’t seem to have the negative impact on work life that you might expect. There’s ample proof that even under a four-day week, productivity doesn’t drop (in fact, it can go up). Really, what’s standing between us and doing less work is a fetishization of putting in the time, rising inequality that keeps people struggling, and, as University of Iowa historian Benjamin Hunnicutt put it in a 2014 piece for Politico, “a failure of imagination.”


 Four-day weeks could be key to New Zealand's Covid-19 recovery, says Prime Minister Ardern. The Guardian

Ardern’s idea is pretty straightforward. Tourism accounts for 5.8 per cent of New Zealand’s GDP, and the sector has basically come to a standstill. With coronavirus cases extremely low and the pandemic seemingly under control, cutting the work week by a day would mean folks can spend time travelling and helping the sector pick back up.

But even leaving out the coronavirus recovery part, the four-day work week would also set us on a pathway to a safer climate. A white paper published in 2006 made the case clearly: If the U.S. adopted European work hours, American carbon emissions in 2000 would have been 7 per cent below its actual 1990 levels. That would have been enough for the U.S. to meet the targets set forth in the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 climate treaty the country failed to ratify.

Working longer hours means heating and cooling offices, more electricity use, and more energy spent commuting. In places without public transit, that means more local air pollution as well. Reducing commuting could be a huge benefit in the U.S. in particular, where transportation accounts for the biggest chunk of carbon pollution.

Prior to the pandemic, there was a relatively small portion of telecommuters in the U.S. Yet these 3.9 million people working from home reduced emissions as much as taking 600,000 cars off the road each year. The impact of more work-from-homers due to the pandemic is likely to have an even bigger impact.

The effects aren’t limited to work-related commutes and office energy use. A 2011 study found that longer hours worked are also associated with “energy-intensive consumptions and favour conspicuous expenditure and non-sustainable lifestyles.”

While the four-day work week could offer a way to reduce environmental harm, it’s not necessarily a slam dunk absent major government intervention. For one, there’s the state of the economy in the year of our Lord, 2020. In the U.S., in particular, there are huge issues around inequality, gig work, and private health care tied to employers and working a set number of hours.

David Rosnick, an economist at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research who authored the 2006 white paper, told Gizmodo that in the U.S., “there are serious problems with inequality once we impose effective policies toward hours reduction. Many of these low-end workers already scramble with unpredictable schedules and side-gigs to make up for short hours and even shorter incomes. At the higher end, there’s the question of employer-provided health coverage: Are employees going to have to cover an additional 20 per cent of those costs?”

Rosnick also raised concerns that some employers would just end up asking employees to cram more hours into fewer days, and asked what it would mean for those who don’t work Monday through Friday. Cutting down to a four-day work week without wage and benefits protections isn’t going to fly. For Ardern’s plan to be equitable, let alone implemented elsewhere, everyone has to be taken care of.

The U.S. and elsewhere could also do a hell of a lot to improve access to low-carbon leisure, or else people could end up just burning through carbon in other ways, like cruising. In cities, that could mean opening streets (lots of them) to pedestrians and bikes and providing outdoor dining that can allow people to social distance while enjoying downtime. And for travel beyond city limits, it means building out affordable mass transit. None of this will be enough to completely stave off the climate crisis, but overlooking at as a solution would be a huge folly.

All of which is to say we need big structural changes to take place in order for working less to work. That may sound like a tall order, but then it’s worth stepping back to remember what we’re fighting for in the first place, something that’s easy to do in even the most normal of times when we’re all just trying to make ends meet.

“We’ve forgotten that the purpose of life is to be happy, and to pass that happiness on to future generations,” Hunnicutt wrote in Politico.

To have a chance at passing on the good life, we need to address the climate crisis. And the time to do it is now.

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