14/12/2020

United Nations Urges World Leaders To Declare A State Of Climate Emergency

ABC News - Reuters

UN chief Antonio Guterres said the world was "facing a dramatic emergency". (ABCMyPhoto: Martin Von Stoll)
Key Points
  • Mr Guterres asks: "Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?"
  • G20 countries are spending 50 per cent more in their rescue packages on sectors linked to fossil fuel production than low-carbon energy
  • Diplomats are watching for stronger pledges from countries like China, India and Japan
World leaders should declare states of "climate emergency" in their countries to spur action to avoid catastrophic global warming, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has told a climate summit.

More than 70 world leaders were due to address the one-day virtual gathering aimed at building momentum for much steeper cuts in planet-warming emissions on the fifth anniversary of the 2015 Paris climate accord.
"Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?" Mr Guterres said via video in his opening remarks.
"That is why today, I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a state of climate emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached."

Mr Guterres said economic recovery packages launched in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic represented an opportunity to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon future — but warned this was not happening fast enough. 

Mr Guterres said economic recovery packages were an opportunity to transition to a low-carbon future. (AP: Bebeto Matthews)
"So far, the members of the G20 are spending 50 per cent more in their stimulus and rescue packages on sectors linked to fossil fuel production and consumption, than on low-carbon energy," Mr Guterres said.

"This is unacceptable. The trillions of dollars needed for COVID recovery is money that we are borrowing from future generations.
"We cannot use these resources to lock in policies that burden future generations with a mountain of debt on a broken planet."
Humanity has been quilting the planet in 'a toxic teacosy'

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the summit that countries could work together to radically cut dependence on fossil fuels.(AP: Francisco Seco)
On Friday, summit co-host Britain announced it would pledge to end direct government support for overseas fossil fuel projects at the summit, aiming to spur similar moves by other countries to accelerate a shift to cleaner energy.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the summit that countries could work together to radically cut dependence on fossil fuels, change agricultural practices, and reverse the process by which for centuries humanity has been quilting the planet in "a toxic teacosy" of greenhouse gases.

"And at the same time, we can create hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions of jobs, across the planet as we collectively recover from coronavirus," Mr Johnson said.

Diplomats are watching summit speeches for any signs of significantly stronger climate pledges from countries including China, India and Japan.

China and India set 2030 goals  

China says it will lower its carbon emissions. (China Daily via Reuters)
China, the world's top global emitter, said it would lower its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by more than 65 per cent from the 2005 level by 2030.

In September China announced it would target net zero carbon emissions by 2060, saying it was raising its ambitions for shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

President Xi Jinping announced that China would aim to have more than 1,200 gigawatts of installed wind and solar capacity by 2030 — more than double the country's existing capacity.

China's National Development and Reform Commission, the state planning body, is aiming to have 240 gigawatts of wind and the same amount of solar capacity installed by the end of this year.

"We will take solid steps to implement the targets just announced and contribute even more to tackling the global climate challenge," Mr Xi said via a video message.

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the country was doubling down on clean energy sources and was on track to achieve the emissions norms set under the 2015 Paris climate change accord.

India, one of the top emitters of greenhouses gases that lead to global warming, is eyeing 450 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, Mr Modi said in an address to the Global Climate Ambition Summit.

Renewable energy capacity would reach 175 gigawatts before 2022, he said.

The Pope has also committed the Vatican to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. 

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"The current pandemic and climate change, which are not only environmentally relevant, but also ethically, socially, economically and politically affect, above all, the lives of the poorest and most fragile," he said in a video message to the summit.
   
"In addition to adopting some measures that cannot be postponed any longer, a strategy is needed to reduce net emissions to zero."

A Vatican statement said the city-state was moving ahead with plans to substitute all its combustion engine cars with electric or hybrid vehicles.

It said the Vatican, which is the world's smallest state, began installing solar panels in 2008 and banned single-use plastic bags last year and was now recycling 65 per cent of its waste and aimed to reach 75 per cent in 2023.

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(AU) Silent Treatment: How Scott Morrison Earned Boris Johnson's Climate Summit Snub

The Guardian - 

The PM will get due credit when he does something substantial to change Coalition brinkmanship on climate

Scott Morrison mistakenly believed Australia was invited to speak at a climate summit. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Author
Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor.
The story is, genuinely, intriguing. Scott Morrison clearly thought Boris Johnson had invited him to speak at a climate ambition summit this weekend, because he told parliament last Thursday that was the plan.

Our prime minister can be fast and loose with what he says in parliament – certainly looser than any of his immediate predecessors. So perhaps this was just a passing declaration minus a fact base, or an ambit claim designed to send a clear diplomatic signal to London (best include me now I’ve said I’m coming – you wouldn’t embarrass a chap would you Boris?)

But it looked simpler. Last Thursday Morrison looked like he believed he was participating.

Consistent with that, there was a messaging plan. Morrison spoke to Johnson on 26 October. Three weeks later the prime minister flagged during a speech to business leaders Australia might not need to deploy carryover credits (a controversial accounting loophole from the Kyoto era) to meet out 2030 target.

This shift was framed by Morrison as a manifestation of the government’s self-evident awesomeness rather than the Coalition bowing to the loud international objections (the word cheating has been used) about Australia substituting accounting for abatement.

Having telegraphed that shift, the next step in the plan was to release new emissions projections showing it was possible for Australia to meet its 2030 target minus the carryover credits.

With the domestic ground duly tilled, Australia’s prime minister would then (probably, assuming no party room implosions) unveil Australia’s (alleged) awesomeness to the rest of the world at Boris’s Zoom soiree.

But hot on the heels of last Thursday’s declaration of attendance came persistent chatter in climate and diplomatic circles. The mail was Australia was not on the list for the summit, and if Australia’s pitch to be on the speakers list was “we’ll do what we said we’d do for 2030 without deploying the loophole that we’ve been roundly blasted for deploying”, that wasn’t going to be good enough.

This really should have been obvious to Morrison and the government, because the organisers of the summit had been clear down to the footnotes: turn up with bold new commitments. There would be no space for general statements.

Johnson (who actually raised a net zero commitment by 2050 during the call in October only to be publicly schooled by Morrison that the Brexit guy should understand a little something about sovereignty) wasn’t the only player on the field. The summit is co-hosted by the UK, France, Chile, Italy and the United Nations.

Now, Marina Hyde (bless her) gives me the distinct impression Johnson isn’t really a detail person, so it’s very plausible the British PM told Morrison he could turn up with a dressed-up status quo commitment for 2030 and a technology roadmap that had been in the public domain for months and land a speaking gig.
The Coalition has spent the critical decade working against the cause of climate action. The record is there for all to see, and the world knows it
If Johnson did that (and it seems likely) Morrison would have some claim to feeling aggrieved.

But only up to a point. Europe and the UN were unlikely to rubber stamp that kind of soft-balling, and officials who have been around this issue for a long time would have known that was a distinct risk.

Assuming Morrison got the right advice, a cautious prime minister would have waited for an official green light before declaring Australia would be speaking at the summit to “correct mistruths”.

In any case, when the summit list was confirmed and circulated on Thursday, Australia wasn’t on it.

There seems to be an undercurrent in some of the reporting that there was something unfair and arbitrary about this ultimate end point: that we’ve been snubbed because of UN chaos, or because China needed to be accommodated. (For the record, China recently complied with the ground rules of the summit by committing to its first long-term emissions reduction target – net zero by 2060).

There’s also a lick of “team Australia” in some of the reaction. How dare these characters snub Morrison when he had a nice announcement all ready to go?

I mean, please. Can we get real for a minute? It’s been a long year, and it’s possible we are all giddy with exhaustion, but could we assess practical actions and desist from the theatre criticism? Please.

Fact: the Coalition has spent the critical decade working against the cause of climate action. The record is there for all to see, and the world knows it.

Fact: to convince the rest of the world we are finally serious about facing up to the existential risks, Australia will have to promise action leading to a specific end point, not just unfurl some caveated hints about crab walking out of pariah corner and wait for the applause track.

Now Morrison is trying to execute a pivot. Since Joe Biden was declared the winner of the American presidential election, Morrison has been working to create some room for the Coalition to move on climate ambition without triggering another bout of internal derangement.

I hope the prime minister succeeds in this enterprise because Australia needs him to succeed. I also make this personal commitment: in the event Morrison shifts the Coalition in Canberra in the way that the New South Wales Liberal energy minister, Matt Kean, has shifted things decisively in his state – if Morrison produces tangible initiatives, specific policies to accelerate the transition to low emissions accompanied by medium-term and mid-century targets consistent with the science – I will be the first to stand and applaud.

Raucously.

But right now, all we have is a prime minister in Canberra trying to calculate, minutely, how far he can move without imperilling seats in Queensland.

Increasingly, while Morrison is trying determine whether he can creep slowly away from the Coalition’s election-winning formula of neutralising climate change in the cities while weaponising it against his opponents in marginal seats in the regions – a formula he deployed as recently as last year’s federal election – the practical transition is happening without him. The change is already on.

Morrison professes frustration with an international climate bureaucracy that favours abstract expressions of ambition over a record of tangible achievement. There’s some truth to the critique and it would be an utterly reasonable point to make if the Coalition had delivered any real action.

A transition is certainly underway in this country, and that transition is resulting in emissions reductions, but the transition is happening in spite of a government that repealed the carbon price, tried to gut the federal renewable energy target and abolish agencies like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation – not because of it.

Morrison likes to get a leave pass. He’s a skilled political operator, so he often gets one. It’s really extraordinary how often he gets one.

But as far as I’m concerned, this prime minister will get due acknowledgement when he earns it – when he does something substantial to change the Coalition’s rancid, partisan, post-truth brinkmanship on climate politics, not when he makes tentative noises about perhaps doing something.

So I can summarise the Ballad of Boris and Scott and The Summit this way: why would the rest of the world reward Australia for signalling tentatively that it might, Coalition party-room derangements willing, be slightly less shit?

Surely the rational thing for the world to do is wait and see whether we are less shit.

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Is News Media Doing Enough To Change The Climate Crisis Narrative?

The Quint - Bahar Dutt

Here’s why the climate story must move beyond ‘rich vs poor’ narrative, writes environmental journalist Bahar Dutt.

Photo: iStockphoto
Author
Bahar Dutt is a conservation biologist and environment journalist and the winner of over ten national and international awards.
The climate crisis will be the biggest story of our times, perhaps even bigger than COVID-19.

And yet, action on climate change is slow and doesn’t always match the urgency with which we responded – for instance – to the pandemic.

There’s a reason why.
The doom and gloom stories on climate change have desensitised the public to the issue instead of mobilising them to put more pressure on their governments.
The Climate Ambition Summit, that begins on Saturday, 12 December, is slated to be a curtain raiser for Glasgow 2021, where nations will announce significant commitments to the health of our planet. Prime Minister Modi is expected to speak of India’s commitments to the climate cause.

 Harjeet Singh, Action Aid International’s Global Climate Lead says: “India cannot afford to be complacent. It can do more to be compatible with the global targets needed to limit warming at below 1.5C. But it needs support from the rich nations who are obligated to help developing countries leapfrog to a greener future.” And he’s right.

Of course, we need to continue to put pressure on rich countries to pay up for healing the planet. But we now must expand our narrative to a world of possibilities. Powerful storytelling can help fix this predictable narrative on climate reporting.

The Traps We Fall Into As Environmental Journalists

As an environmental journalist, I have tracked a couple of UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) summits, I have scaled the walls of the Copenhagen Convention Centre having waited outside in the cold for over 10 hours, reported with glee when the Indian Environment Minister staved off pressure from the rich countries in the final text cleared at the summit, and celebrated when the world came together for an agreement at Paris in 2015.
But my stories – from all the summits I tracked – fell into a predictable cycle of reportage, like a stale Bollywood film.
I can now write the headline coming out of each summit in my sleep: ‘The developing world wards off pressure from the developed world’. Or, ‘India will continue on its path of growth while remaining committed to the Paris agreement’.
As environmental journalists, we have all fallen into this trap. Our reportage is centred on geo-political loyalties that are dictated by the foreign policies of our countries.
We haven’t reported as journalists reporting on the health of our planet or our common future as citizens of one world.

Why Media Narrative On Climate Change Must Change

The media plays a massive role not just in shaping policy, but impacting behavioural change. An international campaign that was launched by UN Environment to discourage the use of plastics, for instance, found countries making pledges to wean out plastics and the beverage industry moving to paper-based straws. It’s obvious that behavioural change can be brought about by nudging people in the direction of right choices for the environment.
For more action on the climate front, we need our media narrative to change as well.
For far too long, stories on climate change have been stuck in the ‘rich vs poor’ or the ‘developed vs developing world’ quagmire. Of course this divide is real, of course the historic emissions of the developed world have brought the planet to this slow-moving catastrophe. But it has also become an excuse for inertia and disengagement of the public with an issue that will affect us all (if it hasn’t already in many ways).
It’s as though no climate action can take place till the ‘rich vs poor nations’ debate is resolved at a fancy UN summit, quite like a squabbling couple expecting a counselor to magically ‘fix’ their marriage.
Dr Jagadish Thaker, senior lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand, in a paper titled ‘Climate Change Communication in India’, rightly points out: “the Indian media portrays climate change as real and human caused and reports its severe impacts; it largely externalises the problem.”

Despite A Stale Narrative, Some Positive Changes – Mainly In Renewable Energy

For much too long we have pitched the ‘economy vs ecology’ narrative as an excuse to continue business as usual. Any policy action that leads to a cap on our emissions is seen as a barrier to economic development. It is not pitched as an opportunity to reduce air pollution or generate jobs in a low carbon economy.

But some positive changes have occurred – particularly in the renewable energy sector – showing us glimpses of what a world that’s not fixated on fossil fuels can be like. The last couple of years have shown us that a a world powered by clean sources of energy isn’t just fairy lights and twinkle toes in a distant promised land; it is now a close reality.
Due to the giant strides made in the renewable sector, solar and wind will power half the globe by 2050, based on BloombergNEF forecasts. We can have access to clean forms of energy, generate livelihoods, and save our biodiversity. But what we have to change is our narrative.
Fact is, even in the midst of a global pandemic, the impacts of climate change have continued to rage on. India has experienced forest fires, unseasonal rains, less rains and two cyclones. More and more sections of our population report changes in weather patterns from farmers experiencing unseasonal rains to the homeless in cities exposed to extreme heat wave conditions. But reporting on climate issues continues to be abysmally poor.

According to a series of studies by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS, 2014), between 2009 and 2014, environmental news comprised only 0.8 percent of all news content during prime time (7–11 PM) on five national English-language and Hindi-language television channels.

Fixing Climate Change Is A Chance To Fix Our Economic Models Of Development

The rhetoric surrounding climate change needs a positive frame. Fixing the planet’s climate change problem is an opportunity to fix our economic models of development. It’s an opportunity to generate livelihoods, to reduce air pollution and to develop cities with cycling paths, better public transportation, and last mile connectivity.

We have to carve our own road to low carbon growth that could heal our lungs, fix our economy without creating infrastructure that locks us into a carbon intensive world.
A better world has to start with a more creative narrative on the climate crisis.
While the number of scientific analyses of climate change in India appears to be increasing, a lack of public understanding and awareness is likely to result in low demand for government action on climate change in a democracy.
At the same time, studies evaluating how Indian businesses communicate about climate change are lacking, which can provide an important impetus to understand the drivers of change.
Why Aren’t We Doing More To Turn The Climate Change Story Around?

What if we turned the story of climate change around? What if we gave it a positive frame. Of a world that is powered by renewables, that is generating livelihoods while at the same benefitting the environment. If it sounds so simple, why are we not changing the narrative? Very simply, because it’s convenient not to.
We don’t want to change the narrative, as that would require us to genuinely work towards these goals.
There’s going to be a lot of scope to play out the ‘rich vs poor’ debate over the next one year. But how about ground reports on towns powered by renewable energy, the achievement to scale of.

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