Lethal Heating: 11/13/20

13/11/2020

(AU) Editorial: Labor's Battle Over Climate Change Action

For more than a decade, climate change has been the focus of fierce political debate in Canberra. Much of the wrangling has been par for the course between the two major parties.

Particularly for the Coalition, it has also exposed deep internal party divisions. Malcolm Turnbull's downfall first time around as opposition leader came swiftly after he supported then prime minister Kevin Rudd's cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme in 2009. It sent a sharp warning to the moderate wing of the Liberal Party that any future support of a more progressive approach to global warming would be met head-on.

Joel Fitzgibbon stood down this week from his shadow ministerial role. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

While Labor has in most part gravitated towards advocating for a more activist climate policy, Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon's resignation from the opposition shadow cabinet this week has put on full display the ALP's own bitter debates over the issue.

For some months now, Mr Fitzgibbon has been forcefully putting the case that, while he supported meaningful action on climate change, any new move from within Labor for deeper and quicker emissions cuts would be "just a recipe for another election loss". He believes aggressive climate policies are turning off Labor's traditional blue-collar voters and were a big factor in its defeat at the last election.

Mr Fitzgibbon has a point. For Labor to regain power it does need to do a much better job attracting voters in regional areas, particularly in mining regions – many of which are in Queensland. The question is, as Mr Fitzgibbon would argue, whether pulling back on its climate change credentials is the right way to go.

The Age would argue that having a strong climate policy and capturing a larger share of blue-collar voters should not be mutually exclusive.

Labor's own election review admitted that while its climate policies won votes with young and affluent older voters in urban areas, they "did not effectively discuss the cost of not acting on climate change or the job opportunities a transition to a renewable energy future could bring".

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has recently shown one way to do it, rolling out an ambitious energy plan that will support the transition to renewable energy by attracting $32 billion of private investment in infrastructure to replace coal-fired power generation. She got the backing of her National coalition partner by promising to create more than 6000 construction jobs and 2800 ongoing jobs, mostly in regional areas, and, to top it off, cut the price of electricity.

It's a compelling case for change. Labor should take note. It does need to look after its blue-collar base, but it won't do that by offering false hope that mining jobs are going to be around for decades to come. They are not. Australia needs to urgently move on climate change. That won't happen until federal politicians on both sides of the aisle lift their game in making the case.

US president-elect Joe Biden has made it clear combating a warming planet is at the top of his policy agenda. When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who recently told Prime Minister Scott Morrison to take "bold action" on climate change, called to congratulate Mr Biden on his win, he expressed his hope the two nations would work closely on tackling global warming. Australia is being left behind on the global stage among Western liberal democracies.

The Australian Labor Party needs to stay the course in taking climate change seriously. But if it wants to get into government, it also needs to vastly improve its ability to make the case for change.

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The One Climate Fix You Can Definitely Stomach

Grist - Nathanael Johnson

Grist / ATU Images / Getty Images

Most efforts to take on climate change have focused on power plants, cars, and factories. Food has always been an afterthought.

Sure, food is important, wonks will say, because agriculture accounts for more than a quarter of all our greenhouse gas emissions. But then they look at the other 60 percent of emissions billowing off flaming fossil fuels and their focus settles on ridding the planet of oil, gas, and coal, the biggest culprits.

The danger of ignoring agriculture is real. A new paper published Thursday calculates that, if humans keep up their eating habits, they’ll be chewing up any chance of keeping temperatures below 1.5, or even 2 degrees Celsius of warming over pre-industrial levels.

“We realized, my goodness, even if we subtract all the fossil fuels, we’ll overshoot our goals for 2050 and 2100 with emissions from the food system,” said Jason Hill, one of the authors of the paper, who studies the climate effects of agriculture at the University of Minnesota.

Recently, scientists have argued that the world has veered away from the most apocalyptic climate change scenarios thanks to the decline of coal power. But that is only true if people stop cutting down the world’s forests:

Most climate models assume that by 2050 the world will have reversed its long history of deforestation. Up to this point, people have continued to burn more forests than grow back, making room for more farms and pastures.

“Look, food matters,” Hill said. “It has by far the largest footprint of anything we do on this planet.”

The good news is that there is a way to clean up the world’s chow machine. It requires reducing food waste, moderating our lust for meat, and adopting something more like the Mediterranean diet.

At the same time, we could increase the supply of food coming off each farm by improving the genetics of crops, giving poor farmers better access to water and fertilizer, and by spreading environmentally friendly techniques like covering the soil with a protective blanket of grass during the winter to keep the earth from washing away.

Do it all, and the world could feed itself without emitting any greenhouse gases — and perhaps farms would even absorb a little more carbon dioxide than they produced.

The research paper suggests that even getting half way with these efforts — say half of America manages to slim its meat intake down from jumbo porterhouse to salami size — the planet could remain on track for just 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

These conclusions fall into line with the findings Richard Waite, a researcher at the World Resources Institute, came to when working on a major report on the world’s food systems.

“It reinforces the main messages of our report,” he said. “If we don’t make big changes to our food system starting today there’s no way we can stay under 2 degrees. And we’ve got to make all the changes, not just the ones we like best.”

When it comes to changing the food system, he said, people tend to divide into teams. There’s the demand-side team focused on getting people to eat mainly veggies and reducing food waste. There’s the big-ag team focused on maximizing farm yields with better technology. And there’s the natural farming team, focused on ways of working with nature to produce more food.

Rather than finding ways of working together, they often fight.

“We need to get past that conflict because we are not going to get to where we need to be if we each insist on our own silver bullet,” Waite said.

Hill puts a positive spin on it.

“Yes we need to do it all, but if we do it all, we can achieve our goals.”

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(USA) Trump Administration Removes Scientist In Charge Of Assessing Climate Change

New York Times - Christopher Flavelle | Lisa Friedman | Coral Davenport

Michael Kuperberg was told he would no longer oversee the National Climate Assessment. The job is expected to go to a climate-change skeptic, according to people familiar with the changes.

The dismissal is a setback for the National Climate Assessment, a report that the government is required by law to produce every four years. Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The White House has removed the scientist responsible for the National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s premier contribution to climate knowledge and the foundation for regulations to combat global warming, in what critics interpreted as the latest sign that the Trump administration intends to use its remaining months in office to continue impeding climate science and policy.

Michael Kuperberg, executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces the climate assessment, was told Friday that he would no longer lead that organization, people with knowledge of the situation said.

According to two people close to the administration, he is expected to be replaced by David Legates, a deputy assistant secretary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who previously worked closely with climate change denial groups.

Dr. Kuperberg’s departure comes amid a broader effort, in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s defeat last week by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., to remove officials who have fallen afoul of the White House. Also on Friday, Neil Chatterjee, head of the agency that regulates the nation’s utility markets, was demoted by the White House, after he publicly supported the use of renewable power.

In a message to colleagues, Dr. Kuperberg said he was returning to his previous job at the Department of Energy. He was removed from the list of staff on the research program’s website on Monday.

Dr. Kuperberg did not respond to requests for comment. The Global Change Research Program reports to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Asked why Dr. Kuperberg had been removed from the role, Kristina Baum, a spokeswoman for that office, said on Monday that “we do not comment on personnel matters.”

Dr. Kuperberg’s dismissal appears to be the latest setback in the Trump administration for the National Climate Assessment, a report from 13 federal agencies and outside scientists that the government is required by law to produce every four years. The most recent report, in 2018, found that climate change poses an imminent and dire threat to the United States and its economy.

Dr. Michael Kuperberg

A biased or diminished climate assessment would have wide-ranging implications.

It could be used in court to bolster the positions of fossil fuel companies being sued for climate damages. It could counter congressional efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming.

And, ultimately, it could weaken what is known as the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that said carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to human health and therefore are subject to government regulation. Undercutting that finding could make it more difficult to fight climate change under the terms of the Clean Air Act.

The agency most involved in that report is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the country’s premier climate science agency. In September, the White House installed at NOAA new political staff who have questioned the science of climate change. People familiar with the administration’s strategy said the aim was to use NOAA’s influence to undercut the National Climate Assessment.

“They’re trying to just do a takeover of all this stuff so they can control the National Climate Assessment thinking,” said Judith Curry, a former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in an interview Monday.

One of the new political hires was Dr. Legates, a professor at the University of Delaware’s geography department and now a deputy administrator at NOAA who has worked closely for years with climate denial groups and has argued that carbon dioxide “is plant food and not a pollutant.” Dr. Legates is now being considered to take Dr. Kuperberg’s position as head of the Global Change Research Program, according to two people including Myron Ebell, a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former member of Mr. Trump’s transition team.

Credit...Kevin Dietsch/UPI Photo, via Alamy

Mr. Ebell, whose organization has championed the appointment of Dr. Legates and others who question the established science of climate change, said the intention is for him to lead the program while continuing to hold his position at NOAA. “It might be a short-term appointment,” Mr. Ebell said, given the election of President-elect Biden, who has said he will embrace aggressive efforts to tackle climate change.

“If he only directs it for two months and a week, then he may not get very far, but let’s see what can get done in two months. Maybe the next administration will throw it all away, but maybe some changes will be adopted, who knows,” Mr. Ebell said.

Marc Morano, a prominent denier of established climate change science, cheered the departure of Mr. Kuperberg and said he expects Mr. Legates to be named. “The Trump administration is ‘listening to the science’ by clearing out the anti-science promoters of extreme climate scenarios. These moves are long, long overdue,” he said.

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Dr. Legates did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal employees, who asked not be identified because they were concerned about retaliation from the White House, said they worried that the administration’s goal in removing Dr. Kuperberg was to make it easier to pick authors for the report who also question the severity of climate change. Those who have publicly attacked climate science, like Mr. Ebell and Mr. Morano, said that is the goal.

While the incoming Biden administration could reverse those decisions, doing so would slow down the production of the climate assessment. The next edition, which was supposed to be released by 2022, has already been pushed back to 2023.

Dr. Kuperberg’s removal isn’t the only example of the Trump administration taking steps that could impede climate policy in its final months.

Mr. Chatterjee, a Republican who was demoted Friday as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, had recently drawn White House ire. He had supported a series of proposals that would expand use of large-scale battery storage in the power grid, thus encouraging the use of wind and solar power, while allowing electric utilities to charge a user fee for power generated from coal and natural gas, which would discourage the use of those fossil fuels.

Like the findings of the National Climate Assessment, the moves by Mr. Chatterjee were at odds with Mr. Trump’s policies, which have been aimed at aggressively increasing the use of coal and other fossil fuels, chiefly by reducing regulations. The White House replaced Mr. Chatterjee as chairman of the panel with another member of the commission, James Danly, who has opposed efforts to promote renewable power.

“It is 100 percent retribution,” said Mr. Chatterjee in a telephone interview, of the White House move to demote him from his chairmanship. “This validates my independence and integrity. I’m going to hold my head up high.”

A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said that the White House would not comment on personnel matters. Mr. Chatterjee will remain on the five-member commission, and said he intends to serve out his current term, which ends in June.

Rachel Licker, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, criticized the actions of Trump administration officials. “Even in their final days, they are continuing to attempt to bury the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.”

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