10/07/2021

(AU The Guardian) Australian Government Must Protect Young People From Climate Crisis Harm, Court Declares

The Guardian - 

Environment minister has 28 days to appeal historic ruling that carbon emissions from coalmine should not cause young people ‘personal injury or death’

Climate campaigners say there should be ‘no moral, legal or rational way’ Australian environment minister, Sussan Ley, can approve coalmine expansion after historic court ruling. Photograph: Rob Griffith/AP

Climate campaigners said there should be “no moral, legal or rational way” environment minister Sussan Ley could now approve the project.

Bromberg declared that when the minister makes her decision over the coalmine, she has a duty “to take reasonable care” to “avoid causing personal injury or death” to Australian residents under 18 “arising from emissions of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere”.

“We are delighted that the law of the land now states that the government has a duty to avoid causing harm to young people,” said Anj Sharma, a 16-year-old Melbourne student and one of the eight children supported in court by Sister Brigid Arthur.

Australian court finds government has duty to protect young people from climate crisis.  Read more
Sharma said the “historic ruling” would make it harder for politicians “to continue to approve large-scale fossil fuel projects that will only fast-track the climate crisis.”

In his May judgment, Bromberg said the potential harm to children from climate change “may fairly be described as catastrophic, particularly should global average surface temperatures rise to and exceed 3C beyond the pre-industrial level”.

Lawyer David Barnden, who represented the children, said: “For young people this decision brings hope and anticipation of a better, and responsible decision making by government. The ramifications for the minister are clear.”

The judge’s declaration was made in relation to the Vickery Extension project, which gained approval from the NSW Independent Planning Commission in August last year. Ley has still to approve the project.

Whitehaven has said about 60% of the coal from the extension will be used for making steel, with the rest for burning in power stations.

Barnden said it was conceivable the duty of care would extend to other fossil fuel projects that came before the minister for approval. He said the minister would have 28 days to appeal against the case.

A spokesperson for the minister said: “The Morrison government will review the judgment closely and assess all available options.”

A spokesperson for Whitehaven Coal said it had nothing to add to its previous statement made after the May court decision, “since today’s orders really just formalise that outcome”.

That statement said the company “looks forward” to being given approval under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

Whitehaven argued the project would dig up “high quality coal” that would contribute to “global CO2 emissions reduction efforts”.

Georgina Woods, of the climate campaign group Lock the Gate Alliance NSW, said: “There is no moral, legal or rational way now that Sussan Ley can approve this project. To do so would add momentum to catastrophic climate change which will harm every Australian child living today.
  
We are passionate climate warriors.
Our legal battle is not over but my heart is a bit lighter.
 - Ava Princi
Ava Princi (left), Liv Heaton, Izzy Raj-Seppings and Laura Kirwin outside Australia’s federal court on Thursday. The court found the government has a duty to protect young people from the climate crisis. Photograph: James Gourley/AAP
Chris McGrath, a barrister and expert in climate litigation, said Thursday’s decision was significant and would have implications for future decisions made by the minister.

“Now the ball is back in the minister’s court,” he said. “My expectation is the minister and the department will come up with a sneaky way to skirt around this until either there’s a successful appeal or they can change the law.”

 He said as long as the declaration remained in force, the minister would have to find a way to acknowledge it before she made a decision on the Vickery plan.

He said the minister could decide to refer to the duty of care in any conditions put on an approval, such as the purchase of environmental assets.

He added: “This is also relevant for other big coal and gas projects – anything with fossil fuels – the minister and the department are now conscious of potential challenges to their decisions so they’d be foolish not to take this into account for future decisions.”

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(Yes! Magazine) Why The Shift From “Climate Change” To “Climate Emergency” Matters

Yes! Magazine - Sarah Lazarovic


Media drama is the very best kind, isn’t it? The absolutely excellent organization Covering Climate Now recently asked a bunch of publications to sign a pledge to call the climate crisis a climate emergency. Many balked. Writes CCN: 
More than 30 newsrooms have now signed the statement (an updated list is here), but some major outlets told us privately they won’t sign. The phrase “climate emergency” sounded like activism, they said; endorsing it might make them look biased. Instead, they added, they would let their climate coverage speak for itself.
But CCN points out that the whole point is that the coverage doesn’t speak for itself. We are in an emergency! Would you know that from today’s news? CCN goes on:
We’re not obsessed with whether a news outlet does or doesn’t use the term “climate emergency.” What matters is whether the outlet’s overall coverage treats climate change like an emergency.
And yet, the parameters of the language convey the gravity of the sitch. The Guardian realized this in 2019 and adjusted its stylebook to use climate breakdown or emergency. Two years later, the world is catching up, and what once seemed ahead of the climate curve now reads like baseline accuracy. Which is why it’s so important to default to the right language. 

One of my fave climate writers suggested that refusing to sign this pledge was no biggie, because (a) reporters don’t need to wear their emergencies on their sleeves, and (b) the outlets mostly refused because they were in lefty company. (Signatories include The Guardian and Al Jazeera). 


Let’s unpack this. Shifting their terminology is something publications do all the time to reflect new learnings and new realities (hello b to the B in Black!). Acknowledging the truth of a planet on fire isn’t wearing an XR badge on your sleeve—it’s ree-al-it-y. And cutting mainstream publications slack because they don’t want to be in gauche company is weak sauce: Who are they afraid of? It’s naive to think that outlets aren’t accountable to their readers and funders, but would this tiny shift in nomenclature cause said stakeholders to rise up? I just don’t think so. Unless, perhaps, you’re Fox News and ol’ Rupert is holding you out the window of a tall skyscraper.

Default to accuracy

Defaults simplify our lives. And if climate change is the default, anything beyond those words will seem over-the-top. But anything less than an accurate definition of what is happening (breakdown, crisis, emergency) undermines the severity of our situation. If we make climate crisis the default, then we diffuse its activistyness. Exactly the opposite effect of what is intended by the editorial grandees who refuse to commit to these new words.

Which is not to say there aren’t reasons you wouldn’t use the words climate emergency. If, say, you’re communicating to more conservative audiences, you would want to speak in terms that don’t alienate before you’ve finished your first sentence. But meeting people where they are in a persuasive context is very different from covering the crisis in the news. However diminished we may feel the media’s power is, we still very much take our cues from the language they use. And the prominence they give the stories of the day. I see you, New York Times, with your excellent above the fold climate coverage yesterday:

 
As Wolfgang Blau says, “calling for reducing emissions during a climate emergency is no more ‘activism’ than telling people to wear a mask during a pandemic.” (h/t Akshat Rathi!). Blau also makes this excellent point: Just as this is the decade for everyone and their mother to step up to the reality of climate, we need our media to shift their coverage, language, tools, and priorities. Some certainly are, but they’re being eclipsed by the breadth of the climate emergency. I get that outlets move slowly when it comes to these shifts, careful to maintain a perceived objectivity, but the objective truth is that things are much worse than they present them, and that is, objectively, a collective moral failing.

Normalize emergency

If we normalize an emergency, then what’s the point? What does it mean if a country declares a climate emergency and then goes back to eating its lunch? Well, it means that facts are on the books. A wonderful colleague who has worked in dozens of war-torn countries put it this way: Apocalypse on Monday, then the market on Tuesday, and then back to apocalypse on Wednesday. Life goes on. It’s a realistic way of neutralizing the fear we have of allowing the language of emergency to scare the bejeebus out of us. But the sooner we lean into the reality of it, the better equipped we’ll be to fight, to mitigate, to adapt. The trajectory can be changed, but it requires veracity and courage on the part of our media.

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(USA Grist) Scientists Have Long Warned Climate Change Threatens Our Food Security. Now They’re Finding Solutions.

Grist - Nathanael Johnson

We've barely scratched the surface on the potential of plants.

Photo by Str / Xinhua / Getty Images

For years, scientists have been warning that higher temperatures will reduce the bounty of farms around the globe: The National Climate Assessment forecasts smaller harvests in the United States.

One model suggests that world corn yields could fall 24 percent by 2050. And a study that came out in April suggests that climate change has already slashed agricultural yields by 21 percent. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that as many as 183 million additional people will be at risk of going hungry by 2050 if carbon dioxide levels keep rising.

These findings conjure apocalyptic visions of famine and hunger wars. But scientists say the body of research into the impacts of climate change on the world’s food systems also has another major takeaway: that we have a tremendous capacity to adapt.

One critical way, they say, would be to figure out exactly what makes plants susceptible to heat, so breeders know what to look for as they develop hardier crops for the future. 

Research on plant heat stress is blooming as techniques improve and as scientists map the genomes of major crops. Colleen Doherty, an associate professor of biochemistry at North Carolina State University, is one of the researchers working to figure out how we can feed ourselves, while using less land, and allowing forests and habitats to regrow.

“And we can do it, we’ve barely touched the potential of plants,” Doherty said.

Ten years ago, Doherty read an economics paper seeking to understand why rice harvests kept rising year-over-year in some places, while they had begun to plateau in others. What was different about those areas where rice yields were suffering?

The economists found that the places where yields were struggling all had warm nighttime temperatures. When Doherty read this, the metaphorical lightbulb went on over her head: She was pretty sure she knew what was going on.

Doherty studies the way plants tell time. Just like us, plants become groggy and inefficient when their internal clocks are misaligned. “If you switch a plant from North Carolina time to Pacific time, they will get jet lag,” she told Grist.

Plants use light and temperature to tell time — for millennia they have set their clocks to the reliable cooling of nighttime. When nights stay warm, it throws the delicate work of plants — spinning atoms from the atmosphere into sugars — into disarray.

Because Doherty studies the mechanics of this plant clockwork, she had some ideas about which switches might be turning on daytime processes at night. Sure enough, she and a team of scientists found a couple dozen of these cellular switches, and thousands of genes triggering action at the wrong time in rice suffering through hot nights.

The researchers published their findings last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The next step: Zero in on the most important of these genes, and figure out how they work. Then crop breeders can look for those genes when developing the crops of the future.

Scientists are making discoveries like this all the time. Just last week, another paper showed a way plant breeders might develop barley plants able to produce more grain as temperatures rise.

Krishna Jagadish, a crop scientist at Kansas State University who worked with Doherty on the rice research is also digging into the way warm nights throw off the internal clocks for wheat and corn. But, he said, university scientists almost never have the funding to turn these discoveries into new strains of crops that farmers could plant.

Private corporations usually do that work, which can often take up to a decade. “We get to explore, we get to innovate, and then give leads to industry who pick it up,” Jagadish said.

In other areas — from medical research to clean energy development — government funding helps push the processes of innovation beyond exploratory research, assisting with subsequent investigations and providing subsidies to help new technologies get a foothold. Perhaps we should be doing that with plants as well, because when it comes down to it, Doherty said, food is not optional.

“Every person on the planet faces the problem of eating every single day and climate change is going to make that problem harder,” she said. “People will fight if there’s not enough food to feed their kids — I know I would.”

The possibilities, from understanding the inner workings of crop staples, to pioneering new forms of farming, to benefiting from the wild diversity of plants, are huge, said Crispin Taylor, president of the American Society of Plant Biologists. But the country has never treated it as essential work — the United States spends at least an order of magnitude more money researching cancer, than researching crops.

“Not everyone gets cancer, but everybody eats,” Doherty said. “If you really want to save the world, plants are the place to be.”

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