17/07/2021

(AU The Guardian) ‘Fossil Fuel Friends’: Saudi Arabia And Bahrain Back Australia’s Lobbying On Great Barrier Reef

The Guardian - 

Exclusive: oil rich nations back push against Unesco recommendation to have reef placed on world heritage ‘in danger’ list

The Unesco world heritage committee’s decision on the Great Barrier Reef’s ‘in danger’ status is currently scheduled for 23 July. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket/Getty Images

Australia has gained the support of oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in its lobbying effort to keep the Great Barrier Reef off a list of world heritage sites in danger.

The two nations, both members of the 21-country committee, are co-sponsoring amendments seen by the Guardian that back Australia and ask the world heritage committee to push back a key decision until at least 2023.

In a meeting on Tuesday night, Australian time, a senior official from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) told Australia’s environment minister, Sussan Ley, during a face-to-face meeting in Paris the organisation had followed all necessary steps before recommending the reef be listed as in danger.

The Morrison government is in the middle of an all-out lobbying effort, hosting ambassadors at the reef while deploying Ley to Europe for a week of meetings.

The Australian government briefed conservation groups on Wednesday about the amendments, saying they were co-sponsored by the two Middle Eastern countries.

The world heritage committee will begin a 15-day meeting on Friday with a decision on the Great Barrier Reef currently scheduled for 23 July.

In the amendments, the committee is being asked to reject Unesco’s official finding the reef was facing “ascertained danger” – a trigger for entry onto the “in danger” list.

A Unesco mission would be held to “develop a set of corrective measures” before Australia sends a report to the UN organisation by December 2022, rather than the original February 2022 date.


Australia to host ambassadors at Great Barrier Reef ahead of ‘in danger’ list vote.  Read more

Instead of asking the committee to decide next week on the “in danger” inscription, the amendments state that should not be considered until 2023 at the earliest.

Diplomats from 16 countries and the EU are flying to far north Queensland on Wednesday ahead of a snorkelling trip to be hosted by the government’s reef ambassador, MP Warren Entsch, on Thursday.

David Cazzulino, the Great Barrier Reef campaigner at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said Australia was being forced “to find friends with other fossil fuel polluters”.

“I hope when the ambassadors go to the reef, they get to see its wonderful beauty,” Cazzulino said. “But I hope they also hear the true scientific understanding as we know it.”

Unesco’s recommendation for the danger listing was due to a lack of progress on cutting pollution from the land and the impact of three mass coral bleaching events in 2016, 2017 and 2020 – all happening since the world heritage committee last voted on the state of the reef in 2015.

Climate and reef scientists have long warned of the threat to coral reefs from fossil fuel burning, causing ocean temperatures to rise and the water to become less alkaline.

The amendments retain a request from Unesco that a new version of Australia’s main reef conservation policy – the Reef 2050 plan – “fully incorporates” recommendations from the reef’s management authority “that accelerated action at all possible levels is required to address the threat from climate change”.

Australian environment groups urge UN to put Great Barrier Reef on ‘in danger’ list.  Read more
Entsch has said he would be accompanied on the snorkelling trip by officials and scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

Ambassadors were paying their own airfares, he said on Wednesday.

Ley met with Ernesto Ottone, an assistant director general at the Unesco headquarters in Paris, on Tuesday night.

“The questions were mainly on procedural matters,” Unesco said in a statement. “The meeting was an opportunity to reiterate that all steps had been taken according to the rules and to reiterate the different scientific elements that were used to conclude that the reef is in danger.”

Richard Leck, head of oceans at WWF-Australia, was in the briefing delivered by the Australian government on Wednesday. He said the amendments “kick the can down the road on climate action” and would delay improvements to water quality.

Leck said the Reef 2050 plan had still not been finalised despite it being due in 2020 “and the amendments suggest there won’t be a plan for another 18 months”. “Australians expect much stronger and more urgent progress in protecting the reef, which is why WWF supports the draft decision as it currently stands,” he said.

The campaigner said it was “concerning” Australia had joined with other fossil fuel dependant countries to “work together to push back action on climate change”.

The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, wrote to the prime minister, Scott Morrison, on Tuesday asking him to match more than $2bn of funding for renewable energy and water quality projects along the 2,300km reef.

A federal government spokesperson said Ley was “conducting a number of meetings which reflect Australia’s ongoing concern about the draft world heritage listing”.

“Australia’s position remains that the draft listing process did not include the proper consultation with the relevant ‘state party’ (Australia), was not made on the basis of the latest information and did not follow the proper process,” they said.

“The minister has had productive discussions with a number of country representatives during the trip to date. Minister Ley is keeping the Queensland government informed of her campaign regarding the listing process.”

The spokesperson said the Morrison government would work constructively with Queensland “to ensure that our joint efforts under the Reef 2050 plan, along with the latest reef science, are properly considered in any determination the World Heritage Committee makes on the status of the reef”.

The commonwealth was providing $2.08bn of the $3.05bn funding under the Reef 2050 plan and was “committed to ongoing funding strategies to protect the reef and its world heritage status”.

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(AU SMH) Coalition Fighting To Stop Great Barrier Reef Being Declared ‘In Danger’

Sydney Morning Herald - Lesley Hughes

Author
Professor Lesley Hughes is a Climate Council spokeswoman and Distinguished Professor of Biology at Macquarie University.
It is well known that the Great Barrier Reef is seriously threatened, with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation releasing a draft recommendation to list the reef as “in danger” last month.

Next week, the UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee will decide whether to make this official at its upcoming annual meeting.

UNESCO will decide next week if the Great Barrier Reef will be officially declared “in danger”. Credit: AP
This is a high-stakes decision – if the factors endangering the reef aren’t addressed, it could eventually be removed from the World Heritage list all together, which would be both humiliating and economically devastating for Australia.

The livelihoods of more than 64,000 Queenslanders rely on the reef, which two million visitors come to see each year, adding $6.4 billion to Australia’s economy.

So it’s no surprise that the government has moved swiftly – but not to help the reef. Immediately after the draft decision came out, Sussan Ley declared herself “blindsided”.

Given that the last Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) Outlook report in 2019 declared the reef’s health to be “very poor”, and that UNESCO mooted a similar draft recommendation back in 2015 only to have the Australian government lobby aggressively against it, the minister’s claim doesn’t stack up.
Great Barrier Reef
Australia criticises United Nations warning that Great Barrier Reef is in danger

Minister Ley is in Europe, personally lobbying the foreign ambassadors who will vote at the UNESCO meeting. Back home, government officials are taking Australia-based ambassadors to visit the reef.

As well,the government has persuaded 11 countries into co-signing an open letter questioning UNESCO’s decision-making process.

In short, the government is sparing no effort, or expense, trying to conceal the dire situation faced by the Great Barrier Reef.

Imagine if the federal government displayed the same zeal and urgency in trying to fix the root cause of the reef’s poor health: climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Already, at global warming of 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the reef has suffered three catastrophic marine heatwaves in the past five years, resulting in the loss of more than half its coral.

Add to this the risks from ocean acidification, rising sea levels and increased intensity of tropical cyclones and no one should be surprised that the reef is in serious trouble.

Global temperature rise continues to accelerate, and scientists warn that coral reefs worldwide are likely to be wiped out if temperatures breach 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.

Scientists warn that coral reefs worldwide are likely to be wiped out if temperatures breach 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Credit: AP

The only chance these natural treasures have is for the world to rapidly cut global emissions this decade.

The Australian government’s contribution to this global effort can be described, at best, as pathetic, with our elected representatives choosing instead to actively worsen climate change by locking in more emissions.

For instance, the government recently committed $600 million of taxpayers’ money to building a new gas-fired power station in New South Wales, that energy experts say isn’t needed, and has also promised $50 million to gas fracking companies in the Northern Territory.

Meanwhile, our Minister for Energy and Emissions Reductions recently tried to amend the rules for the national renewable energy agency, ARENA, so that money earmarked for renewable energy development could be used to fund fossil fuel-linked technologies such as carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen made using gas. Fortunately this attempt failed.

The list doesn’t stop there. Minister Ley is also appealing a Federal Court ruling that she has an obligation to the next generation to consider the harm caused by climate change when approving the expansion of a new coal mine in NSW.

It’s embarrassing enough that a federal Environment Minister needs to be told by a court to care about the safety and wellbeing of our children. Indeed, it’s hard to find the right words to describe her decision to fight children through the court system to avoid doing so.

More broadly, the federal government continues to refuse to formally commit to a net zero target or to increase its level of ambition for emissions reduction by 2030 – currently standing as one of the weakest Paris pledges in the world.

Great Barrier Reef
‘UNESCO was right’: Global experts back Barrier Reef danger warning


In a recent report, the Climate Council recommended that Australia needs to reduce its emissions 75 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, and reach net zero by 2035, to do its global fair share.

We are miles away from this goal, and stubbornly standing still while the world moves ahead.

Every country needs to play a role in the global effort to rapidly bring down greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change, so as to ensure a safe future for people, flora and fauna, and precious places like the Great Barrier Reef. The world is noticing that Australia is not.

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(Gizmodo) Why TV Is So Bad At Covering Climate Change

Gizmodo - Molly Taft

Screenshot: CNN

On Saturday, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, tweeted that she’d be appearing on CNN to talk to Fareed Zakaria about the record-breaking heat wave gripping the West. The next day, she announced her segment had been cut. “Bumped, due to billionaire going to space,” she wrote.

Hayhoe was slated to appear on CNN as Death Valley was clocking the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on the planet, on the heels of another heat wave that killed hundreds of people across the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

Meanwhile, Richard Branson spent 3 or 4 minutes weightless to advertise a spaceship that will offer seats for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop — and earned wall-to-wall coverage on broadcast networks this weekend, many of which aired footage of his “brief joyride.”

Juxtaposing the amount of public alarm and loss of life tied to these record-breaking heat waves versus the importance (or lack thereof) of Branson’s little trip to space makes Hayhoe getting bumped particularly enraging. 
These past few weeks have been so dire that it has felt like a breakthrough moment culturally on climate change — that networks like CNN then decided to throw away by filming a billionaire floating around in zero gravity.

And Branson’s stunt taking precedence on primetime over our rapidly unfolding climate crisis isn’t an exception, but rather the norm. It shows that cable news, and TV news as a whole, still largely continues to fail at grasping the climate crisis as the existential threat it is. Instead, coverage prioritises entertainment and sensationalism that keeps people watching the commercial breaks.

Reading Hayhoe’s tweets, I was brought back to a really specific period in my life when trying to get scientists like her on TV was my actual job. Before I was a reporter, in my mid-20s, I worked first at a PR agency and then at a nonprofit science communications organisation. At both places, I was the hamster spinning the wheel trying to make climate happen on TV, emailing and calling cable producers to try and make them talk to the scientists and experts I was working with.

Booking someone as a guest on cable TV for a big show is a nightmare process. You had to make sure that the person could get to a big city with a broadcast studio on a quick turnaround to film their segment, which often rules out basically every scientist or activist living in rural areas (or those who have, you know, lives and can’t drop everything to go film at 11 p.m.).

Producers also tend to prefer people with previous TV experience, meaning experts in their field who could really give the best insight on the topic or activists doing amazing work were often passed over for someone more well-known or someone with more stage presence or experience.

Then there’s the unforgiving news cycle, which is uniquely hellish for cable TV in a way that it isn’t for other kinds of news. I can’t tell you how many times situations like Hayhoe’s unfolded on my end, where a guest was told last-minute that the segment wasn’t going to happen.

Getting a scientist or expert actually on TV, even when they were qualified and ready, happened so rarely that every time I made a broadcast booking, I mentally prepared myself to tell the expert in question that they weren’t actually going to be on TV because something else had happened that producers had deemed more important. 

A firefighter sprays water while trying to stop the Sugar Fire, part of the Beckwourth Complex Fire, from spreading. (Photo: Noah Berger, AP)
Even when networks were covering the climate crisis, they often did so on their own terms.

A climate scientist I was working with was bumped three separate times from MSNBC during the weekend Hurricane Harvey hit. He’d been slated to appear to explain how climate change amps up hurricanes, crucial context to understand the disaster unfolding and inform policy discussions on how to protect people from future storms.

I remember watching one segment in a slot he’d been taken out of last minute, where the reporter covering the weather on the ground in Houston narrated how heavy the rain was and the force of the wind gusts — with zero mention of climate change.

That anecdote illustrates a pretty important point: a lot of broadcast media is a form of news and entertainment. Having an expert explain how climate change made Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall worse is important for the future of our planet; showing a reporter struggle in tough winds is entertaining.

The way MSNBC reported the storm was, in essence, extreme weather eye candy. (To their credit, they included at least one climate change segment that weekend, and several postmortems afterward — but it was interspersed with wall-to-wall coverage of reporters in the storm.)

I sensed that it had been perhaps so hard for me to get scientists on TV partially because hearing about science can be a little dry — bran flakes, not candy. Branson’s flight was kind of like putting a reporter in a storm: modelling arguably irresponsible behaviour (do reporters need to struggle in fierce winds when they should be evacuating? Do we need to send billionaires to space?) while providing some fun eye candy (look at the rich man float!).

This isn’t just an anecdotal issue. Media Matters, which tracks how often TV networks cover climate change, reported earlier this year that nightly news and Sunday morning shows on ABC, CNN, NBC, and Fox covered climate change-related topics for just 112 total minutes in 2020.

A lot of the absolutely shameful lack of coverage can, of course, be attributed to the intensity of last year, where we faced a global pandemic and a national reckoning over racial justice, not to mention the whole election and Republican attempt to undermine it thing.

But even before 2020, TV networks weren’t doing so hot on climate: Media Matters reported that 2019 was one of the biggest years of coverage, when evening and Sunday morning shows covered climate 68% more than they had the year before, increasing their coverage to… a whopping 238 minutes for the entire year.

I wanted to better understand both my own experience and how the sausage is made when it comes to climate segments on big cable shows. I reached out to a producer at a big cable TV show for some insights. (They asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely with us.)

The producer explained that daily segments on their show are usually pitched at the beginning of the workday or the night before by producers; the executive producers will usually sign off on a topic and ask the booking producers to reach out to possible guests. But, they explained, there’s always room for “breaking news” to take precedent over a carefully planned climate segment.

“When breaking news happens, that often leads to at least one originally-planned segment getting killed — which can happen a lot to climate segments that aren’t the most pressing topic of the day,” the producer told me over text message.

The producer said that TV journalists, in their estimation, “are far more concerned with climate change today than they were a few years ago,” but there’s still a limit to how much that interest manifests on air.

“I’d say way more stories are pitched than make it on the air,” they wrote. “That applies to every topic, since there’s only so much that can go in a show. But I do think there are far more climate stories that are pitched and then never make air, compared to something more pressing like gun violence or police reform — which are just as important to cover — or the latest outrage segment over something happening in the White House or Congress.”

A firefighting tanker making a retardant drop over the Grandview Fire near Sisters, Oregon. (Photo: Oregon Department of Forestry via AP, AP) 
Unsurprisingly, TV as a visual medium also dictates how cable news chooses to cover climate — and explains why big disasters often get the most pickup.

“Wildfires are the easiest to cover because the video is usually incredible,” the producer said. “Something like a heat wave is slightly harder to show, though scary map graphics with temperature highs are pretty effective. It’s much harder to cover policy, however, whether that’s an explanation of what the Green New Deal does or the latest IPCC report.”

MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted in 2018 that climate was a “ratings killer,” and that “incentives are not great” for covering more climate stories. I brought that tweet up and asked if it was true that climate indeed hurts ratings. The producer said that’s definitely an issue when it comes to doing a climate segment, and because of that, it’s hard to justify covering climate more than the network already does.

But I couldn’t find any hard data on how climate segments have performed on average on broadcast TV, and lots of climate journalists have pushed back on Hayes’s assertion that no one wants climate segments. It’s true that climate stories do, by and large, really well online. On this very site, our piece about the sky-high temperatures in Death Valley outperformed the writeup of Branson’s flight by about 10 to 1.

“The trick to covering climate change regularly is figuring out how to do climate change segments that people will watch — and convincing them that the issue is actually important to their lives,” the producer said.

This gets at a classic, age-old problem in climate communications: How do you get people to care about the slow death of our planet when there’s a bunch of other stuff happening rapid-fire right in front of our eyes? “As a society it’s as if we have a collective cat brain: fixated on the latest shiny toy that’s waving in front of our eyes while in the meantime our tail is on fire,” Hayhoe wrote in her tweet thread.
“It’s definitely frustrating to have conversations about ratings because it may be too late to address climate change by the time the industry starts covering it regularly.”
Honestly, I don’t know how to solve it. Sometimes, it feels a little like climate reporters are like Chicken Little, yelling constantly that the sky is falling — but at an incremental pace that you sort of have to squint to notice, and can probably ignore for a couple more years, depending on where you live.

In a way, I don’t totally blame cable news for picking Branson over the climate crisis — a short clip of a billionaire floating around in zero gravity is probably a lot more fun to show on TV than footage of a bone-dry desert.

Of course, this is also because the incentive structure is there to do so; journalists are generally hardwired to find sensational stories that will attract eyeballs. Our jobs, at least in ad-dependent media, actually require it. Climate disasters like the raging wildfires, crippling drought, and punishing heat waves out West can certainly do that.

While more big outlets are putting resources into climate reporting (CNN started a whole climate desk for its website) there’s still more work to be done. This weekend, the fact that networks by and large chose to do PR for a billionaire rather than cover the most pressing story of our time is evidence of that. The producer had a little bit more hope than I do for the future of climate reporting on TV. But even that’s tempered just a bit.

“It’s definitely frustrating to have conversations about ratings because it may be too late to address climate change by the time the industry starts covering it regularly,” the producer told me. “That being said, I definitely think it’s being covered more and more because we’re at a point where it’s impossible to ignore — and think TV execs are definitely aware that this is going to be the top story someday.”

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