▸Introduces nominees for Energy, Interior, EPA at event ▸Promises to
rejoin Paris climate accord, restore EPA
President-elect Joe Biden.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
President-elect Joe Biden introduced on Saturday key members of the team he is
assembling to fulfill his pledge to combat climate change, calling them
brilliant and qualified.
Climate change is “the existential threat of our time,” Biden said, and the
people he was nominating to lead the
Environmental Protection Agency, the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the departments of
Energy, and Interior will be “ready on day one.”
“We need a
unified national response to climate change. We need to meet the moment with
the urgency it demands, as we would with any national emergency, ” Biden
said at an event in Wilmington, Delaware.
With Republicans set to hold at least 50 seats in the
Senate, likely dooming the chances for sweeping climate and environmental
legislation, Biden will be relying heavily on the officials to advance his
clean-energy agenda through federal regulation. He has proposed a sweeping
$2 trillion climate plan to promote clean energy, called for an
emissions-free electric grid in 15 years and and promised to pare oil
drilling on federal lands.
“We need to get to work and we’ve got
to get to work right away,” Biden said.
He vowed to promote the use of electric vehicles by having the federal
government purchase more of them, and to get 500,000 charging stations
installed. He also called for 1.5 million energy-efficient homes and public
housing units to be built, and 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells to be
plugged.
He said the U.S. would rejoin the Paris climate accord
and establish a climate-focused civilian conservation corps to put people to
work.
The nominees he presented represent veteran government
leaders and regulators as well as environmentalists that progressives had
demanded.
They include former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to lead
the Energy Department, North Carolina environmental regulator
Michael Regan
to be EPA administrator and Democratic Representative Deb Haaland to head
the Interior Department.
Biden has also tapped lawyer
Brenda Mallory
to be chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, Gina McCarthy as
national climate adviser and Ali Zaidi as her deputy.
If
confirmed, Haaland would be the first Native American in a U.S. cabinet
post, Mallory would be the first African American to lead the
White House
Council on Environmental Quality and Regan would be the first Black man to
serve as
Environmental Protection Agency
administrator. Lisa Jackson was the agency’s first African American
administrator, under former President Barack Obama.
Neither
McCarthy nor Zaidi will need Senate approval to become climate advisers, and
the others are widely expected to be confirmed.
However, Republicans have
already signaled they will sharply scrutinize the records of Haaland and
Regan, including their past opposition to fossil fuel projects. Haaland, for
instance, has supported a ban on the fracking process that has propelled
U.S. oil and gas production -- a stance that gives oil industry leaders
concern but has been heralded by environmentalists.
Senator Kevin
Cramer, a Republican from oil- and coal-rich North Dakota, warned the
candidates could see “a bit of a brawl,” during a Fox Business Network
interview Friday.
The Independent Petroleum Association of New
Mexico said Thursday it had “serious concerns” about Haaland’s nomination,
adding that she “has repeatedly demonstrated contempt toward our
industry.”
The Interior Department runs the national park system
and oversees grazing, recreation, energy development and other activities on
about a fifth of U.S. land. The department holds trust title to more than 56
million acres for tribal nations and its Bureau of Indian Affairs works
directly with 578 federally recognized Native American tribes.
Haaland,
60, and a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, a 7,700-member tribe west of
Albuquerque, New Mexico, has drawn widespread praise from environmental
groups and tribal leaders. They say she would bring a deep commitment to
protect the land to an agency in charge of 500 million acres of it. She was
just elected to her second term in the House of Representatives.
Appearing
to fight back tears as she accepted Biden’s nomination, she
noted that one prior
Interior secretary had pledged to “to civilize or exterminate” American
Indians.
“We will ensure that the decisions at Interior will once again be driven by
science,” she said.
McCarthy, 66, who now leads the
Natural Resources Defense Council,
pioneered the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants
during her nearly four years leading the EPA during the Obama
administration.
“I’m here today because climate change is not
only a threat to the planet -- it is a threat to our health and our
well-being,” McCarthy said. “Defeating this threat is the fight of our
lifetimes and our success will require the engagement of every community,
every sector in our nation and every country in the world.”
Mallory,
63, previously served as the Council on Environmental Quality’s general
counsel under former President Barack Obama. Most recently, she has been the
director of regulatory policy for the
Southern Environmental Law Center, a group that uses litigation to promote clean air, safe water and
wildlife conservation.
“It is essential that we deploy smart and
humane policy to help communities pull themselves back from the edge and
improve the health, security and prosperity of all people,” Mallory said.
Regan,
44, already worked at the EPA for roughly a decade, though he’s currently
secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality. He has
guided initiatives to combat environmental inequities and climate change,
and he’s been at the center of disputes over new gas pipelines and pollution
cleanup that are playing out nationwide.
Invoking Biden’s
campaign motto to “build back better,” Regan said on Saturday that “we need
an all-hands-on-deck approach from industry and individuals, finding common
ground to build back better.”
Granholm, 61, served as energy
adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and has been credited with
expanding Michigan’s clean energy industry during her two terms as governor.
She served as Michigan’s attorney general from 1999 to 2003, has been an
adviser to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ clean energy program and is a
professor at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Granholm said Saturday that the Energy Department
would take steps to assure that a transition to clean energy would result in
jobs for Americans.
“We can win those jobs for American workers
with the right policy,” she said.
Zaidi, New York Governor Andrew
Cuomo’s deputy secretary for energy and environment, is a longtime adviser
to Biden who helped negotiate the Paris Climate accord. He is a native of
Pakistan.
Anger comes as new research shows almost half of News Corp’s output in
Australia rejects or doubts scientific findings on climate change.
Criticism of News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has increased
substantially since devastating bushfires earlier this year.
[File: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters]
Canberra, Australia – The skies were dark red with smoke over
much of southeastern Australia on January 1, 2020, yet News Corp’s The
Australian published photographs of New Year’s Day picnics on its front page.
Even as the papers went to print, tens of thousands of people were
being evacuated as massive fire fronts approached regional towns across Victoria
and New South Wales (NSW).
On television and social media, the public’s outrage was palpable.
Affected residents and volunteer bush firefighters in Cobargo, NSW, refused to
shake Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s hand, furious about the lack of bushfire
preparation by the Australian government. Online, individuals rallied to raise
funds for the Rural Fire Service.
By mid-January, the Black Summer bushfires had burned more than 24 million
hectares (59.3 million acres) of land, destroyed more than 3,000 homes, and
killed 26 people and more than three billion animals.
For Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, meanwhile, it was business as usual.
As the fires raged, News Corp’s The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun
and Courier Mail newspapers, along with its Sky News television channel,
continued to cast doubt on the reality of climate change.
All summer, News Corp’s massive misinformation campaign defended fossil fuel
interests, accused arsonists of being the major cause of the fires – a false
claim echoed by legislators of the governing Liberal-National coalition – and
repeatedly attacked individuals who advocated urgent action on climate change.
Murdoch’s British and American news assets, notably Fox News in the United
States, frequently take similar positions. Major inquiries about the company’s
ethics have been held in the past, including the Leveson inquiry into the
British press in 2011-12 following the phone-hacking scandal involving the
Murdoch paper News of the World.
New research from independent Australian activist group GetUp explores how News
Corp Australia pushes its anti-climate change agenda.
The report, launched on Thursday, shows that between April 2019 and March 2020,
News Corp’s four newspapers published 8,612 news and commentary pieces on
climate change.
GetUp found that 45 percent of these items either rejected or cast doubt on
climate science. Commentary pieces from opinion writers such as Andrew Bolt were
the most sceptical, with 65 percent of commentary doubting or outright denying
climate change.
Interestingly, News Corp reporters were not found to be actively promoting
sceptical views on climate change, with 89 percent of news and features
accepting scientific findings.
‘Murdochracy’
Criticism of News Corp’s climate denial has increased substantially since Black
Summer.
The company’s continued refusal to acknowledge climate change as a man-made
threat has sparked anger among many Australians, most of whom support action on
climate change. Some 64 percent agree Australia should have a national target
for net-zero emissions by 2050.
Not that you would know this by reading News Corp publications, experts argued.
“No one else is publishing work like News Corp,” journalism professor Susan
Forde told Al Jazeera in January this year. “They argue that it’s under the
guise of ‘we’re the only ones who are balancing the reporting.’”
Even former prime ministers have had enough of News Corp’s domination of
Australian media.
Former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd initiated an online petition in October
calling for a royal commission into media diversity. It quickly became
Australia’s largest-ever online petition and third-largest petition overall,
gaining more than 500,000 signatures including that of former Liberal Prime
Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
“[News Corp’s] power is routinely used to attack opponents in business and
politics by blending editorial opinion with news reporting,” the petition
stated. “These facts chill free speech and undermine public debate.”
Australians have watched with growing anger at what the Murdoch media monopoly
is doing to our country. A cancer on democracy.
Rudd has previously described News Corp as “a cancer on democracy”.
News Corp publications make up 60 percent of Australia’s newspaper sales. In
addition to the national broadsheet The Australian and tabloids in most cities,
News Corp owns the major newspapers in the Northern Territory and Tasmania.
It also owns one of Australia’s largest news websites, news.com.au, and the
24-hour television channel Sky News. Sky News’ YouTube channel has more than one
million subscribers, second only to the national broadcaster ABC News.
Approximately 6.6 million Australians read a News Corp newspaper in May 2020
according to data from Roy Morgan. Circulation is falling, however, particularly
among the company’s tabloids. Readership of The Daily Telegraph fell from
444,000 to 394,000 between September 2019 and September 2020, while The Courier
Mail’s readership plummeted from 293,000 to just 239,000.
Despite their decreasing sway over the average Australian, News Corp’s
newspapers remain highly influential on politicians. The company has a close
relationship with the Liberal-National coalition, who have been in government at
the federal level since 2013.
“News Corp has no influence with the public but an acute influence with
politicians,” former News Corp executive Kim Williams has previously said.
Pressure from all sides
University of Canberra governance expert Chris Wallace says it is
rare to see politicians like Rudd standing up to the Murdoch family.
“No politician has individually stood up to them,” she said. “Rupert Murdoch has
been able to divide and rule politics across Anglophone countries, and it’s
culminated in him effectively underwriting the Trump regime and taking Western
democracies to a dire place.”
When politicians do stand up to News Corp, they often pay a significant personal
and political price.
“If you don’t play Murdoch’s game policy-wise, you can expect to see the
transaction costs in the form of hostile coverage,” Wallace explained, pointing
to former opposition leader Bill Shorten as one example. Shorten resigned as
leader after Labor unexpectedly lost the 2019 federal election.
Labor politician Andrew Leigh agreed that Rudd’s move against News Corp was
unusual. Leigh tabled Rudd’s petition in Parliament and said the public
enthusiasm for the petition is unprecedented.
“I’ve never seen a petition like this, especially with two former PMs from both
Liberal and Labor parties,” Leigh told Al Jazeera.
The Senate accepted Leigh’s proposal and will now hold a Senate inquiry into
media ownership and bias in Australia.
Leigh said he tabled the petition because “media diversity is fundamental to a
strong democracy. I can’t identify any great democracies with lousy media.”
For Leigh, Australian media needs to have a plurality of voices, not just to
ensure that governments are held to account, but to support communities to take
action on important issues such as climate change.
“We know that places where the local newspaper dies, there tends to be less
community trust and local problems are more likely to persist,” he said.
“Climate change is a big collective action problem where we need to work
together … but the progress on climate has been stymied by a well-funded
denialist movement.”
One-sided coverage of climate change
The views expressed in News Corps publications remain largely one-dimensional,
emphasising conservative voices who tirade against progressive policies on
everything from climate change and migration to transgender individuals and the
anti-bullying “safe schools” programme.
In fact, GetUp’s research shows that more than half the news produced by News
Corp’s four largest newspapers had no source or just one source. Contrasting
views are unusual, with many news and feature articles featuring only political
sources (47 percent of the total) or business sources (18 percent).
Just four percent of sources interviewed by News Corp publications between April
2019 and March 2020 were scientists.
Of science and environment stories, 32 percent featured political sources, while
just 13 percent featured scientists, reinforcing the deeply politicised nature
of News Corp’s reticence towards scientific findings.
Rodney Tiffen, emeritus professor of governance and politics at the University
of Sydney, said the time is right to take action on News Corp.
“In the early 1990s, News Corp was at least somewhat sensitive to both sides of
Australian politics,” noted Tiffen. “But over the last quarter century, there
has been a long and deep decline, which we could dub the Foxification of News
Corp.”
News Corp’s power and readership was now declining, Tiffin said, with “people
starting to remember more and more of News Corp’s one-sided coverage of events
like the Black Summer fires”.
He added: “The situation was just waiting for a catalyst like Rudd.”
The NSW Land and Environment Court has upheld a decision by the state’s
Independent Planning Commission to reject a controversial coal mine
planned for rich farmland north-west of Sydney.
Korean energy giant KEPCO had been seeking to overturn the decision in
September 2019 to reject a proposed coal mine for the Bylong Valley
because of “long-lasting environmental, agricultural and heritage
impacts”.
Third-generation farmer Peter Grieve, whose farm is in the
Bylong Valley, is among those opposed to plans for a coal mine
in his region. Credit: Peter Rae
The court’s decision to dismiss the appeal was welcomed by farmers and
other groups opposed to a new open-cut mine in the farming region near
Mudgee.
The Bylong Valley Protection Alliance – set up by the local community –
had to step in to defend the decision in court after the commission opted
not to back its own verdict.
“This court decision reaffirms what we locals always knew – that the IPC
was right when it ruled the agricultural values of this valley are too
precious to sacrifice for the sake of a temporary, destructive coal
mine,” Phillip Kennedy, the alliance’s president, said.
“The soils in this valley are classed as the top 3.5 per cent in the
state. There’s no way it should ever have been made available for mining
by the government.”
A spokesman for KEPCO Bylong said the company was “very disappointed
that the court did not find in favour of the project and the strong case
it made for overturning the refusal by the [IPC].”
“KEPCO will now take some time to review the decision of the court and
decide the future direction of the project,” he said.
The IPC rejected the mine despite the prospect of $290 million in
royalties and an even larger economic impact on the region.
“The project is not in the public interest because it is contrary to the
principles of ESD [ecologically sustainable development] - namely
intergenerational equity because the predicted economic benefits would
accrue to the present generation but the long-term environmental,
heritage and agricultural costs will be borne by the future
generations,” the commission said in a statement in September 2019.
The
commission’s detailed reasons also
cited the likelihood of “long-term declines in groundwater over
prolonged dry periods”, with a drawdown in groundwater reaching as much
as nine metres in one area.
Rana Koroglu, managing lawyer for the Environmental Defenders Office in
NSW which acted for the alliance, said the local community had fought
for five years to save their valley.
“The community provided robust scientific evidence to the IPC on the
detrimental environmental, social and economic impacts of the proposal
to build a new coal mine in a highly productive agricultural area,” she
said.
Mr Kennedy said the NSW Berejiklian should permanently bar mining in the
Bylong Valley, and protect its farming through legislation.
“We also call on KEPCO to sell the 30,000 acres it bought in the valley
back to the people so this region can once again be the strong farming
community it used to be,” he said.