08/02/2021

(AU) Wealthy Victorians Least Likely To Support Climate Action: Poll

The Age - Miki Perkins

When former Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon quit the opposition shadow cabinet last year, he said his party needed to reduce its ambition on climate change to win back blue-collar workers.

“Demonising and blaming blue-collar workers will not stabilise our climate,” he tweeted at the time.

But it’s wealthy Victorians, rather than blue-collar workers, who are least likely to support climate action and the transition to renewable energy, according to new polling commissioned by the Victorian Trades Hall Council, which represents 43 trade unions and eight regional trades hall councils.

Construction worker Tom Shiels with Filamena Bruce and their children Charlie (3 years old) and Hattie (1 month). Credit: Joe Armao

The large poll of 3000 Victorian adults found while those who called themselves working class were not as enthusiastic about climate action as those who described themselves as middle or upper middle class, it was wealthy people who were the most unsupportive.

About 35 per cent of wealthy respondents said they were unconcerned about climate change, compared with about 30 per cent of those who described themselves as working class.

Almost 40 per cent of wealthy Victorians said they didn’t think the government should take action on climate change, compared with about 30 per cent of working class.

Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

And 45 per cent of wealthy respondents believed that investing in renewable energy will cost jobs, compared with 33 per cent of working class people, 20 per cent of middle class and 29 per cent of upper middle class.

Attitudes to climate change were also deeply partisan: with 62 per cent of Labor voters concerned about climate change, compared with 13 per cent of Liberal voters.

Trades hall council secretary Luke Hilakari acknowledged there were sectors where “big conversations” needed to take place, including with the one-third of blue-collar workers concerned that investment in renewables would cost jobs.

But he said the views of politicians like Joel Fitzgibbon were “totally out of touch” with working people.

Governments should throw more support behind new industries like green hydrogen and large scale wind to provide future jobs, he said. “The people in the Latrobe Valley are not stupid, they know everything is changing.”

In response, Mr Fitzgibbon said working people cared about climate change and renewable energy but didn’t like government policies like a carbon tax, or equivalent, which they saw as a threat to job security.

Mr Fitzgibbon said his electoral area, the Hunter region in NSW, was close to securing a huge solar farm on the site of the former hydro aluminium smelter and was also hoping for a pumped hydro project.

“I don’t know what’s happened to these trade union leaders who once focused on the rights, interests and aspirations of working people but now spend their time obsessing about climate change and renewable energy,” he said.

Conducted last November, the poll is part of the trades hall council’s landmark Transitions from Crisis report, released late last year. Supported by Environment Victoria, it has policy suggestions on responding to climate change in a way that puts affected workers first.

The poll showed that, broadly, about 60 per cent of Victorians want more investment in renewable energy and 75 per cent are concerned about climate.

The response was noticeably gendered, with women more likely to urge greater action. For example, 45 per cent of women were “extremely concerned” about climate change, compared with 36 per cent of men.

These findings are similar to other polling including that done by Australian think tank the Lowy Institute, which has been surveying Australians about their views on global warming and climate change for the past 14 years.

Since 2012, concern about global warming has been rising steadily and in 2020 60 per cent of Australians surveyed said climate change was a risk to Australia’s vital interests, and 77 per cent felt the same way about drought and water storages.

Builder’s labourer Tom Shiels, who lives with his young family in Carlton, has worked on large construction projects in Melbourne’s central business district for the past six years.

Some high-rise projects are incredibly wasteful and energy inefficient, he says, but developers are unlikely to change without a financial incentive.

A long-time Labor voter, but not a member, he has become increasingly disenchanted and feels the party has “lost its way” on climate, failing to advocate strongly enough for blue-collar workers during the economic transition. He said this was a view shared amongst his colleagues.

“Climate change is real and so are workers’ rights. If we can tackle both at the same time we’ll all be better off,” he said.

Last year, faced with public urging from Joel Fitzgibbon to move Labor’s long-time climate spokesperson Mark Butler, opposition leader Anthony Albanese refused to do so. But last week Mr Albanese shifted Butler in favour of the more conservative Chris Bowen.

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Melting Glaciers, Rising Seas: Approaching Climate Tipping Points

Al Jazeera - Nick Clark

Glaciers have shrunk at high speed during the last 30 years, raising fears of future land loss and more climate refugees.

Osama Al Saadi/Al Jazeera

There are some extraordinary ‘then and now’ photos appearing in news feeds, alarming pictures revealing the extent of glacier recession in Iceland.

Photographs taken in 1989 and 2020 give a very visual demonstration of how serious our planet’s ice loss is.

Side-by-side comparisons of the images show how dramatically the outlet glaciers of the Vatnajökull ice cap have receded.

Then: vast reaches of ice and snow. Now: bare rock.

“On surface appearances, the extent of the climate crisis often remains largely invisible,” said Kieran Baxter from the University of Dundee, who documented the glaciers in 2020. “But here we can clearly see the gravity of the situation that is affecting the whole globe.” Elemental power

I spent a week filming in Iceland for Planet SOS in 2019, perpetually awed by a landscape forged by the supercharged geology, shaped and reshaped by the effects of the elemental power of natural forces.

Basalt rock pinnacles hewn out by erosion stood sentinel on the shore with craggy mountains towering in the distance. Glaciers swept over active volcanoes, ash from previous eruptions carpeting the ice.

Through the millennia the glaciers have advanced and retreated but never has the withdrawal been as drastic as it is now. And it is happening to nearly all the world’s glaciers – from the Alps to the Andes, from Greenland to Antarctica.

I spoke to geologist Oddur Sigurðsson who has been charting glacier loss for decades and is well aware of the global implications.

“Glaciers will melt,” he told me. “The meltwater runs into the ocean and the ocean surface rises. I told my friends in the United States, that the refugees would not only be coming from Mexico and Central America but also from Florida and the Atlantic coast.”

Think of that. Refugees from the Atlantic coast, refugees from Florida.

LARGE IMAGE

Tipping points

The first global ice-loss survey released recently found that melting of the ice sheets accelerated so much during the past 30 years that it is now in line with the worst-case scenarios outlined by scientists.

There was a stunning exchange on the recent Outrage and Optimism podcast which rendered host Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, speechless.

She was told by leading climate scientist Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, that we have already gone beyond some key tipping points. Losing the resilience of the planet was the nightmare that is keeping scientists awake at night, Rockström said.

“The number one is the canary in the coalmine – the Arctic summer sea ice. We have passed the point of no return, affecting weather systems in the Northern Hemisphere with heatwaves and drought and forest fires. It is impacting the Gulf Stream and causing warm surface temperatures that are accelerating the melting of the west Antarctic ice shelf.”

Rockström went on to say that a number of glaciers in west Antarctica are starting to irrevocably slide into the ocean, crossing another tipping point. “This would likely commit ourselves to one or two metres of sea-level rise.”

Land becomes sea

What does that physically mean? That by the century’s end, a huge proportion of our coastal populations would have had to move. Hundreds of millions of people would be going inland. And what is now perhaps an efficient subway transport system would become the domain of fish and sea squirts. Cities deluged, land becomes sea.

A recent report by Climate Risk Management says that 100 of the world’s airports could be below mean sea level by 2100. Of those, 20 airports handled more than 800 million passengers in 2018, approaching a fifth of the world’s passenger traffic that year.

Like we have said before, you think this pandemic bad? We ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Careful caretakers

“It is a last warning system from science,” Rockström said. “Science is saying we have learned so much, here are the red flags. We can deviate away but that requires cutting emissions by half every decade and reaching a net-zero world economy in 30 years time.”

And crucially, Rockström added, we need to keep all remaining natural ecosystems intact.

“We need to become very, very careful caretakers of oceans and all the natural ecosystems on land. Then we can still avoid the most catastrophic outcomes.”

These are warnings we hear time and time again, only they’re becoming louder and more urgent as science reveals reality, just as surely as the glaciers reveal bare rock.

Your environment round-up

1. UK PM risks ‘humiliation’ over coal mine: A leading climate scientist has urged Boris Johnson to halt production at a new coal mine in Cumbria. “You have a chance to change the course of our climate trajectory … Or you can stick with business-almost-as-usual and be vilified around the world,” James Hansen, the former top global warming researcher at NASA, wrote in a letter.

2. Meat and politics between Tibet and China: Tibetan Buddhist monks are urging former nomadic yak herders to embrace vegetarianism, while local authorities hope to bolster the industrial production of yak meat for a Chinese public that is consuming more meat than ever before.

3. Our unnatural disasters: Thanks to climate change, the world is seeing more wildfires, storms, and new viruses than it did in the recent past. Although we name them “natural” disasters, some say we should call them out for the man-made catastrophes they really are.

4. A freshwater Arctic Ocean?: During the Ice Ages, the Arctic basin was isolated from the world ocean, and may have swung between being filled with salt water and fresh water at different times, according to a recent geochemical study of marine sediments.

The final word
Tipping points are so dangerous because if you pass them, the climate is out of humanity's control: if an ice sheet disintegrates and starts to slide into the ocean there's nothing we can do about that.
James Hansen, leading climate scientist
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(AU) Documents Show Scott Morrison Has 'Bungled' Environment Law Reform, Labor Says

The Guardian - 

Papers reveal federal environment department officials warned against preemptively handing approval powers to states 

Aerial shot of Kangaroo Valley. New FOI documents reveal the federal environment department worried rushing a transfer of approval powers could ‘fundamentally undermine’ an independent review of Australia’s national environment laws. Photograph: Tetra Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Federal officials warned against transferring environmental approval powers to state governments before a major review of conservation laws was complete, saying it could undermine hopes of substantial reform.

Despite the warning, the Morrison and Western Australian governments pushed ahead with plans to give the states greater authority in approving developments before the formal review by former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel was finished.

Samuel ultimately recommended the change should only happen alongside the introduction of strong national environmental standards and the establishment of independent bodies to ensure they were enforced – two initiatives the government is yet to move on.

Documents obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws detail meetings between senior federal environment department officials and the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia in late 2019 and early 2020.

The documents show the chamber lobbied for a handover of federal decision-making powers to Western Australia before the once-in-a-decade review of national environmental laws was complete.

Legislation to give states more responsibility for decision-making under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity (EPBC) Act has been before the parliament since August and is due to be debated by the Senate in February or March.

As Guardian Australia has reported, the government began drafting its bill before receiving the interim findings of the Samuel review. The final report, released last week, called for an overhaul of the laws and the establishment of several independent bodies to oversee them.

The government has not responded to Samuel’s 38 recommendations, but is pushing ahead with its bid to transfer approval powers.

The new documents include talking points that department officials prepared for a meeting between its secretary, Andrew Metcalfe and the state minerals chamber on 12 February 2020, during the early stages of the review.

The talking points state the chamber and companies including Rio Tinto wanted a bilateral approval agreement that would give the McGowan government responsibility for decisions under national laws.

They said the department was opposed “because of its potential to undermine the outcomes of the EPBC Act review, its limited scope of coverage and legal risk unless legislative amendments to the EPBC Act can be secured”.

Early pursuit of an agreement could derail the chance for substantial reform of environmental laws, the document states. “The department is not supportive at this time,” it concluded.

Officials said the department did not believe a transfer of approval powers was the best way to make the environmental assessment process more efficient.

They instead recommended making improvements to streamlined assessment processes – known as bilateral assessment agreements, under which the commonwealth retains its decision-making powers.

In a briefing to Metcalfe, officials said a renewed bilateral assessment agreement with WA would benefit about half of the projects proposed in the state.

As previous documents have shown, the Morrison government was under pressure from both the McGowan government and Rio Tinto to transfer approval powers to WA. It ultimately pushed ahead and the department drew up a timeline for reaching such an agreement shortly after the government received the interim Samuel review in June.

James Trezise, a policy analyst at the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the new documents confirmed that rushing a transfer of approval powers through the parliament would “fundamentally undermine” Samuel’s independent review.

He said the department’s warnings had not been heeded.

“It is deeply concerning that a select group of industry players, including Rio Tinto, have been actively undermining the capacity for any win-win reforms put forward by the review,” he said.

A spokesperson for the federal environment department said the documents were internal briefings written in the early stages of the Samuel review and had not been provided as advice to the government. The spokesperson said the department’s position at the time was “prudent” and sought not to preempt the EPBC review.

They added the documents acknowledged that transferring approval powers would require legislative reform and when Samuel met with state and territory officials in June he had indicated his interim report would support streamlined decision-making.

A spokesperson for the environment minister, Sussan Ley, said the documents pre-dated the review. He said departmental discussions “by nature canvass a variety of options” and were not advice to a minister, and that all states and territories now supported a transfer of approval powers.

Labor’s environment spokeswoman, Terri Butler, said the FOI showed the prime minister, Scott Morrison, had “politicised, compromised and bungled the environment law reform process”.

Suzanne Milthrope, of The Wilderness Society, said the final Samuel report emphasised that the handover of approval powers should not occur before other reforms were made, including the establishment of an independent office of environmental compliance.

“If the Morrison plan to forge ahead with a bilateral agreement with the WA state government was bad in 2020, when their environment department said it shouldn’t happen, it’s even worse in 2021 now that their own independent review says it not the right path,” she said.

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