(AU) Morrison Says You're Either For Gas Or Against It. Of Course It's Not As Simple As That

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

Shifting from coal to gas would reduce emissions, but shifting from coal to renewables would reduce them much faster

‘Is picking losers, and foisting the costs of stranded assets onto taxpayers, the undeclared footnotes of Scott Morrison’s gas-led recovery manifesto?’ Photograph: Dean Lewins/EPA>

We are not going to linger excessively with politics, for reasons I’ll make clear in a minute, but we do need to step through Scott Morrison’s political calculations now he is gradually unspooling the government’s much telegraphed “gas-led” recovery.

I mentioned earlier in the week that Morrison needs to pilot the Coalition away from coal to a safe transit point that won’t generate a fresh war in the party room. That transit point is gas, a polluting fossil fuel that Liberals in the city can deal with so long as Morrison markets this exercise as “gas is the pathway to renewables”.

That message doesn’t work in the regions, so it will be a different story there. In the regions, the Coalition will be the guardians of traditional industries, the builders of pipes and hubs, because that positioning peels blue collar votes away from Labor.

What Australia desperately needs is not more of this but a peace treaty to end the climate and energy wars. Morrison could deliver that if he chose to. He could use his internal authority to craft some sensible policy.

Because political journalism is sometimes a triumph of hope over experience, I remain hopeful that this prime minister, the self-declared miracle worker, can get there. But the problem is the Coalition has won elections by prolonging this poisonous fight, not by looking to settle.

Let me repeat my hope that Morrison is capable of doing something constructive. But what we saw this week was a Liberal leader limbering up for the next phase of the fight that he hopes will help keep Labor out of office for another election cycle.

His political calculation is gas will cause Labor as much trouble as coal caused Labor in 2019. Based on his positioning this week, Morrison wants a binary conversation, not because the binary conversation is in the national interest, but because the binary conversation is the bedrock of the Coalition’s formula for holding power.

Again, based on the positioning this week, Morrison intends to set up a message frame where his combatants in politics will either be for gas or against it, and anybody who is deemed arbitrarily to be in the “against” column will be badged an ideologue, or a fanatic.

“There are no good and bad emissions reductions,” the prime minister said this week in the lulling tone of a travelling hypnotist. “There are only emissions reductions. Emissions reductions by different means have no greater or lesser moral qualities.”

To be clear: the only person talking about the moral dimensions of emissions was the prime minister, because that language suits his framing.

Granted, some environmentalists (and Kevin Rudd) have made it easier for the Coalition since the Abbott era to polarise the country on this issue by characterising climate change action in the language of religion rather than science – “great moral challenges” and all that. People need to understand if they keep doing that they are eroding their own fact-case and setting back the cause of climate action – but let’s not digress.

To summarise, the politics are simple: the “gas-led recovery” is shaping up as the latest “carbon tax”. Labor was punished for imposing a carbon tax (that wasn’t a tax) and Labor will be punished if it deviates from Morrison’s proselytising for the gas-led recovery (that may or may not be a tangible thing, because right now all the prime minister has bowled up is a plan for a plan).

They’re the rules the prime minister wants to set, and he’d be very pleased if the media following the circus would comply with these terms of engagement.

The problem with that is the rules are stupid. Here’s why they are stupid. This isn’t a football match, where you barrack for a team. This issue isn’t about tribal allegiance. Most sentient people are not for or against gas, they don’t think emissions have moral qualities. If they can find the facts, they look at them, and make rational decisions based on the evidence.

Here are the facts. This Coalition government signed Australia up to the Paris agreement. Australia has voluntarily agreed to reduce emissions. That’s Australia’s policy. Shifting from coal to gas will reduce emissions in relative terms, but shifting from coal to renewables will reduce emissions significantly faster.

The climate science tells us we need to move quickly, reduce emissions, and begin the process of adaptation. If we take the advice of experts, something we’ve become good at during the coronavirus, we need to decarbonise as quickly as possible. So rather than the binary proposition where you are either for gas or you are a sloganeering climate cultist or religious fanatic, the current weight of evidence actually points to a more complex set of propositions.

Let’s lay those out. It is possible that some gas will be required as we move from carbon intensive energy sources to renewables. Gas might be required for what’s called “firming”. If the balance of evidence points to some gas as the best approach, that’s what should happen.

But as my colleague Adam Morton has pointed out, the competent crew who run Australia’s energy market point out there are less polluting firming alternatives to new gas power and they are likely to be cheaper: batteries, pumped hydro, virtual power plants and demand response programs.

Gas should not be presented by Morrison or anyone else in this debate as if there are no viable alternatives – there are alternatives.

If we cut through the politicking, and ignore the assembly line of straw men the government appears to be setting up, we can distill Morrison’s “gas-led recovery” down to two possibilities. There is a version of this plan that sees no profound harm done, and perhaps some incremental progress made, and there’s another version that sees gas baked into the domestic economy for three or four decades, with Australian taxpayers expected to subsidise the last hurrah of the fossil fuel industry.

I don’t know yet whether it will be the former or the latter, because there’s not enough evidence in the public domain to reach a considered conclusion.

It really is kind of incredible that Morrison could bowl up a set of sweeping propositions, as he did this week, ranging from taxpayers being involved in a new gas-fired power plant in New South Wales, to a Henry Hub-style LNG behemoth in Queensland, possibly with new infrastructure that the commonwealth might be involved with somehow – a “vision thing” with no modelling, no costings, no measure of the climate change impacts – and be feted in many quarters for doing it.

Now, I raised the “carbon tax” history a moment ago because that history is salient. It is branded on my consciousness forever, not only because short-term corporate self-interest and hyper-partisan politics triumphed over the interests of the Australian people, but because large sections of the Australian media allowed that to happen.

“Allowed” is probably too passive, actually. During the carbon wars, large sections of the Australian media were enablers and disseminators of outright nonsense; content to be players, or to get played.

The media becomes enablers of nonsense when it passively accepts the terms of engagement set by the government of the day; when a policy issue as important as climate change and energy policy is not substance but fuel for the daily theatre criticism.

Because of the excruciating history of the last decade or so, reporters have been wired to hear the words climate, energy, or emissions reduction and then leap straight to political intrigue, or default instantly to moustache twirling punditry about who is the genius, who is about to be flattened by the genius.

I mean seriously. What a debacle. Perhaps we could twirl our collective moustaches while also getting to the substance? Perhaps we could atone for past failure by asking a bunch of questions, like what exactly is this gas plan? Who influenced it, and do they have any conflicts? How much will this cost taxpayers? How is this plan consistent with the government’s climate commitments?

What is the case for constant government intervention in energy rather than creating a coherent policy framework and letting the market decide which approach is best for the transition?

One bright spark from my Canberra team mused at one point during the week that maybe governments had now moved from picking winners to picking losers. Is picking losers, and foisting the costs of stranded assets onto taxpayers, the undeclared footnotes of this gas-led recovery manifesto?

Perhaps if we do that, dive deep as well as pontificate mightily across the rip, we will be worthy of the trust of our readers.

Links

• Advice to government contradicts Coalition claim over Liddell coal plant closure
• Angus Taylor's gas plan is an astoundingly bad idea, on so many levels
• Scott Morrison's power plan is nothing but a gas-fuelled calamity
• Gas industry donates millions to Australian political parties
• Scott Morrison’s ‘gas-led recovery’: what is it and will it really make energy cheaper?
• Katharine Murphy and Adam Morton on the government's gas plan 
• Morrison casts dark shadow over energy transition with massive gas intervention
• Why Morrison is stepping on the gas

World Failed To Meet A Single Goal To Save Nature: UN Biodiversity Report

EcoWatch - Olivia Rosane

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. JOAO LAET / AFP via Getty Images

In 2010, representatives of 196 countries met in Japan and agreed to 20 targets to protect Earth's imperiled biodiversity by 2020.

That year has come, and not a single target has been met, according to a major UN assessment released Tuesday, as CNN reported.

"Many good things are happening around the world and these should be celebrated and encouraged," UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) Executive Secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema said in a press release.

"Nevertheless, the rate of biodiversity loss is unprecedented in human history and pressures are intensifying. Earth's living systems as a whole are being compromised.

And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own wellbeing, security and prosperity."



The report comes amidst a growing awareness that biodiversity loss threatens human well-being as much as the climate crisis.

A major study published last week found that human activity had led to a 68 percent drop in wildlife populations in the last 50 years.

And both the coronavirus pandemic and the wildfires devastating the Western U.S. are examples of what happens when humans develop without taking nature into consideration.

"These things are a sign of what is to come," report author and CBD Deputy Executive Secretary David Cooper told The New York Times. "These things will only get worse if we don't change course."

Tuesday's report, the Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, tracked the world's progress on the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. It found that the signatories had failed to make progress in several key areas. (The U.S. was not included in the assessment because it did not sign the initial agreement.)

Among the many failures, countries did not halve the loss of natural habitats like rainforests, halve the money spent subsidizing harmful industries like fossil fuels, find a way to manage fish stocks sustainably or reduce plastic pollution to levels that don't harm the environment, The Guardian reported.

On the bright side, six targets were partially achieved. Governments increased the percentage of biodiversity hotspots under protection from 29 percent in 2000 to 44 percent today and successfully eradicated around 200 invasive species on remote islands.

Included in the report were findings from a study last week concluding conservation efforts had saved 28 to 48 birds and mammals from extinction since 1993.

"If you put in place the policies, they do work," Cooper told The New York Times.

Countries are now in the process of negotiating new targets, The Guardian reported. The next meeting of the CBD was supposed to take place in Kunming, China next month, but was delayed because of the coronavirus until May of 2021.

To set humanity on the right track, the report recommended eight transitions to improve our relationship with nature and protect Earth's and our own wellbeing.

They are:

1. Protecting forests and other undisturbed ecosystems
2. Making agriculture sustainable
3. Making the food system sustainable by, among other things, shifting from meat and fish to plant-based foods and reducing waste
4. Protecting oceans and fish populations
5. Making cities and infrastructure greener and more sustainable
6. Protecting freshwater ecosystems and drinking water
7. Acting on climate change by preserving natural carbon sinks and phasing out fossil-fuel use
8. Managing ecosystems to improve human and nonhuman health

"As we emerge from the immediate impacts of the pandemic, we have an unprecedented opportunity to 'build back better,' incorporating the transitions outlined in this Outlook and embodied in an ambitious plan to put the world on track to achieve the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity," UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in the press release.

Links

• Humans Are Destroying Wildlife at an Unprecedented Rate, New Report Warns
• Scientists Warn Worse Pandemics Are on the Way if We Don’t Protect Nature
• UN Biodiversity Chief: Humans Risk Living in an 'Empty World' With 'Catastrophic' Consequences
• Coronavirus Pandemic Linked to Destruction of Wildlife and World's Ecosystems
• Why Biodiversity Loss Hurts Humans as Much as Climate Change Does
• Sir David Attenborough Delivers Stark Warning In BBC Doc 'Extinction: The Facts'
• The World Lost Two-Thirds Of Its Wildlife In 50 Years. We Are To Blame
• World’s Largest Falcon Faces A Threat It Can’t Flee: Climate Change
• (AU) Climate Change Threat To Tropical Plants
• Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss And Other Global Ills Share Root Causes
• The Internet Of Wild Things: Technology And The Battle Against Biodiversity Loss And Climate Change

Briefs: Scientists Find New Way Climate Change Can Ruin Life As We Know It

Haaretz - Ruth Schuster

T-Rex would have liked having the heat return to dinosaur territory, and other ironies of global warming in this week’s Haaretz climate change briefs

Tibetan prayer flags Credit: Ng Han Guan / AP

The canary in the phosphorus mine

Violent shrieking storms, record-breaking wildfires, floods, mega-droughts, heatstroke – and phosphorus depletion? Accelerating climate change is changing life as we know it and now scientists warn of another potentially worrying aspect. Phosphorus is 100 percent necessary to 100 percent of plants, and Tibet – which is warming up to 4 times faster than elsewhere – is a good place to study how warming is affecting it.

So: After meticulously analyzing the phosphorus cycle along a 2,300-meter-high gradient from Tibet’s plateau (cold because it’s high) to the (warmer) lowlands, scientists from China’s Lanzhou University and colleagues conclude that over time, global warming can deplete soil phosphorus of the type plants can use.

The 'Great Nutrient Collapse'

This follows on the 2017 Harvard paper “The Great Nutrient Collapse,” explaining that rising CO2 levels are depleting protein levels in crops. By 2050, barley protein will decrease by over 14 percent and in wheat and rice by nearly 8 percent, they predict. Why? Because with more CO2 the plants make more sugars. Yum? Maybe. Good? Not good: their protein manufacturing and therefore their nutritional value to us decreases, as Politico explains.

Much of the world gets its protein from crops, not animals. Apropos, cows also become sicker and less productive the hotter it gets and dairy farmers for one have known this forever. Anyway much of the world gets its protein from crops, not animals. Israeli dairy farmers counsel cooling the cows, which is more sustainably done using mist and fans than by air conditioning.

T-Rex might like it: Heat returning to dinosaur territory

Over the last 50 million years the global temperature has trended downward, as a pretty graph from the University of California, Santa Cruz shows in Science. The pretty graph also projects the future if we do nothing – and behold: In one violent swing, we may return to the dinosaur age. Assuming greenhouse gas emissions don’t diminish (they’re still growing, coronavirus be damned) and assuming they are not stabilized before 2250, Earth could revert to the hothouse world of the early Eocene (about 50 million years ago) by 2300.

Carbon dioxide in atmosphere over 66 million years: Returning to dinosaur territory. Credit: Westerhold et al. / CENOGRID

Man in T-Rex costume plying a paddle board during Italian heat wave.Credit: GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE/REUTERS

Europeans are getting sicker

Pollution and climate change are making Europeans sicker, the European Environment Agency warns: One in eight deaths there these days are due to climate vagaries and pollution. In the year 2012 alone, the agency counts 630,000 deaths in the 27 EU member states (and Britain) because of pollution and climate. At this point the leading environmental threat is pollution, which is causing more than 400,000 premature deaths a year in Europe. It bears adding that atrocious environmental conditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina jack up the statistics, with a 27 percent death rate due to environmental factors. In short, the coronavirus is less of a killer than environmental destruction, the agency concludes.

The great pyramids of Sudan in danger – from flooding

Okay now this is the planet saying: Hold my beer. Ancient pyramids, palaces and sundry precious ruins in the Sudan from the time of the Meroitic Empire over 2,300 years ago are in danger of water damage. Why? The Nile flooding – a seasonal event on which northeast Africa depends – is breaking records. Over 100 people in Sudan have drowned and tens of thousands lost their homes as flooding followed unusually torrential rains. With the rains scheduled to continue to the end of September, Sudan has declared a three-month state of emergency.

Yay, parasitic wasps and flies are adapting

In another episode of the planet handing you its beer while it frolics, wouldn’t you know that one of the most horrifying life forms of all is adapting just fine to climate change. So far. We refer of course to parasitic wasps and flies, notorious for laying their eggs, typically, in another insect which they then paralyze – not kill. God forbid the wasp/fly hatchlings eat rotting cockroach. Nobody wants that.


Parasitic wasps. Credit: National Geographic

The Arctic climate is warming twice as fast as elsewhere (other than Tibet…) and what are the parasitic wasps/flies doing? They’re moving with their meals. As warmth-loving butterflies creep northward, so do their pests. “We have found that the proportion of parasitoids preying on warmth-loving butterflies is especially in areas where summer temperatures in particular have risen in recent decades. By contrast, winter-time warming is reflected in a large representation of parasitoid species feeding on Diptera” – i.e., flies, says Tuomas Kankaanpää, of the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki.

Before you hate on parasitoid wasps and flies, and we admit they are pretty heart-stopping, note that the dearly beloved Alien franchise monster does exactly the same thing. Also, without these parasites, the vast team involved here notes, we’d hardly have any green plants because the insects would have eaten them.

Links

• Climate Change: How Do We Know?
• Soil phosphorus accumulation changes with decreasing temperature along a 2300 m altitude gradient
• The Great Nutrient Collapse
• Tackling pollution and climate change in Europe will improve health and well-being, especially for the most vulnerable
• Record Flooding Threatens Millennia-Old Pyramids in Sudan
• Climate change recasts the insect communities of the Arctic
• Hot in the Holy City: Jerusalem Breaks 120-year Record
• When Earth Warmed Between Ice Ages, Mastodons Migrated North
• How Cold Was the Last Ice Age? The Answer May Surprise You