22/12/2020

(USA) Biden Calls Climate Change ‘Existential Threat of Our Time’

Bloomberg Green | 

▸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.

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(AU) Australians Fed Up With News Corp’s Climate Scepticism

Al Jazeera -  Kate Walton

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.” 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.”

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(AU) Energy Giant Loses Bylong Coal Mine Appeal In Win For Anti-Coal Groups

Sydney Morning HeraldPeter Hannam

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.

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