31/08/2021

(AU The Guardian) David Pocock Leads 250 High-Profile Australian Athletes In Climate Campaign

The Guardian -  | 
  • The Cool Down includes Pat Cummins, Lance Franklin
  • Group writes urgent open letter to nation’s leaders
Climate advocate and former Wallabies captain David Pocock on Monday launched The Cool Down campaign. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
A who’s who of Australian sport, spearheaded by the former Wallabies captain, David Pocock, have been brought together in a new initiative that aims to use the platforms of high-profile sportsmen and women to tackle the climate crisis.

The campaign, named The Cool Down, was launched on Monday by Pocock who, after retiring from rugby union in 2020, has focused his energies on conservation and climate activism.

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Pocock is joined by more than 250 current and former athletes who have penned an open letter to the nation’s leaders encouraging bold action be taken as extreme weather events become more frequent and “our Australian way of life, including sport at every level” is jeopardised.

The group, which includes Pat Cummins, Cate and Bronte Campbell, Lance Franklin, Rohan Browning, Darcy Vescio, Mick Fanning, Craig Foster, Ian Chappell, Liz Ellis and Mark Webber, hopes to encourage Australians to make their voices heard.

It has backed scientific calls for the country to cut greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by 2030 and reach net zero emissions before 2050.

The campaign highlights the connection between extreme weather events and sport – including how heat has impacted the Australian Open tennis tournament in recent times and how bushfire smoke has affected professional sport – and Pocock called for bold action to be taken.

“The people and places we love, as well as the sports we love so much are threatened by climate change,” Pocock said.

“We have the resources in our own backyard to be a world leader in this field and, as a sporting nation, we’re used to performing on the world stage. It’s time we harness that to focus on strong climate action.”

The latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published earlier this month found human activities were unequivocally heating the planet and causing changes not seen for centuries and in some cases thousands of years.

The world’s leading authority on climate science found greenhouse gas emissions were already affecting weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe, helping cause increased heatwaves, heavier rainfall events and more intense droughts and tropical cyclones, the report found.

In Australia, it found average temperatures above land had already increased by about 1.4C since 1910.

The open letter, which people are invited to sign, says “sport’s future is more uncertain than ever, but its power has never been more important”.

“Australians have always punched above our weight on the world stage and it’s time to do it on climate.”

Professor Mark Howden, the director of the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions, said any delay in addressing Australia’s poor record on emission-reduction would

“If we don’t take rapid and strong global action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the world could well have passed 1.5C by the time of the Brisbane Olympics in 2032, failing to meet the lower of the two Paris Agreement temperature goals,” said Howden, who is also a vice-chair of the IPCC.

“This could come at a time when everyone’s eyes will be on Australia, focusing attention on our contributions to reduce emissions.”

No major sporting organisation in Australia includes climate change in their annual reporting and former Diamonds netball coach Ellis said the campaign was “our stake in the ground to spread this important message”.

David Pocock: 'I've got a lot more comfortable just being a bit weird and different'. Read more
“As sportspeople, we recognise the role we play in our sports-loving country and supporting the generations of athletes to come after us. We have the opportunity to take action within our field and use our platform to accelerate the change we need to see,” Ellis said.

Other sportspeople to lend their names to the campaign include current Wallabies captain Michael Hooper, AFL footballer Nat Fyfe and AFLW star Daisy Pearce, the NRL’s Nathan Cleary, golfer Karrie Webb, cricketer Rachael Haynes and Matildas duo Tameka Yallop and Alanna Kennedy.

The Australian government is facing increasing pressure to increase the 2030 emissions target it set six years ago – a 26-28% cut below 2005 – and join the more than 100 countries that have set a mid-century net zero emissions goal.

Earlier this month, Dr Jonathan Pershing, the deputy to US presidential climate envoy John Kerry, told the Guardian that Australia’s targets were “not sufficient” and the country should be considering a 50% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

The former UN chief Ban Ki-moon said Australia was “out of step” with the rest of the world, and and the former European Union trade commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, warned it was becoming “more and more isolated” at a time when the world was increasingly being hit by floods, fires and droughts.

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(AU SMH) Australia’s Biggest Climate Poll Shows Support For Action In Every Seat

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley | Miki Perkins

Voters in every federal seat in Australia support increased action on climate change and the adoption of renewable technology over the government’s plan for a gas-led recovery, according to the largest poll ever conducted on climate change and politics in the country.

The survey of 15,000 Australians conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Australian Conservation Foundation found 67 per cent of voters believed the government should be doing more to address climate change, including a majority in all 151 national seats.
It found support for increased climate action was similar across states and territories, with the highest being the Northern Territory where 71 per cent supported more action and the lowest being NSW, where 65 per cent wanted more. In Victoria 69 per cent wanted more or much more action.

The results, which were matched against census data by YouGov for a so-called regression analysis, also found there is similar support for climate action among rural and city voters.

It found that regional voters were almost as concerned about climate as those in the city. In NSW 66 per cent of metropolitan voters wanted more action compared with 63 per cent in the regions. In Victoria 42 per cent of metropolitan voters wanted to reach net zero before 2050 compared with 41 per cent in the regions.

Australia’s approach to climate change is coming under increasing pressure. Credit: Getty
In the Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s electorate of Cook, up to 59 per cent of voters wants more done on climate action, but 35 per cent support his plans for new coal and gas-fired power to meet Australia’s future energy needs.

In Cook, 25 per cent of voters said climate change would be the most important issue at the next election and another 41 per cent rated it as among their three most important, with 34 per cent rating it as having low or no importance.

In Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s seat of New England, up to 55 per cent of voters wants more action and the same proportion do not believe coal and gas-fired power stations should be part of Australia’s future energy supply.

As the government prepares for the COP26 United Nations climate talks in Glasgow in November, the survey showed 41 per cent of voters wanted the government to reach net zero before 2050 and 32 per cent believed net zero should be reached by 2050. By contrast, 12 per cent believe 2050 is too fast and 15 per cent believe no goal should be set.
Almost 70 per cent of Victorian voters want the federal government to do more on climate, while in regional areas of the state this figure is slightly lower at 65 per cent.

Not surprisingly, the numbers are lower for Coalition voters: in Greater Melbourne just over half want more to be done, while in regional Victoria it’s 47 per cent.

A third of Labor voters in metropolitan Melbourne said climate change was their number one issue. For Coalition voters this number was about 24 per cent.

In the two most marginal Victorian Coalition-held electorates – Chisholm and Higgins – climate action plans are the number one priority for about one in three voters (29 per cent and 37 per cent).

In Labor’s most marginal Victorian seat of Dunkley, a quarter of all voters (26 per cent) say plans for action on climate change are their priority in the next federal election.

Monash academic and political commentator Zareh Ghazarian said the polling showed there was obvious concern about climate change, but it was impossible to say how this would translate into voting behaviour.

“It’s interesting data because you can see climate change is important to a lot of people,” Dr Ghazarian said.

“I suspect it would be at the top of the political agenda if we weren’t in a pandemic, and there is an appetite in the community for governments to be putting clearer ideas forward.“
“I suspect [climate change] would be at the top of the political agenda if we weren’t in a pandemic.”
Dr Zareh Ghazarian
“But in the last election voters didn’t seem to embrace an opposition that was proposing a range of reforms in this area. There is a sense they wanted to keep policy ideas steady.”

Climate change is the number one federal election issue for 29 per cent of NSW voters and one of
the top three issues for 67 per cent.

It is the most important issue for 31 per cent of Coalition voters in metropolitan areas and for one in five in regional electorates.

In the Coalition’s most marginal NSW seat, Reid, 71 per cent of voters wants the federal government to do more, while in Labor’s most marginal federal seat, Macquarie, 67 per cent want more federal action.

Road To Glasgow

Mr Morrison has said the government intended to get to net zero as soon as possible and preferably by 2050, though critics are calling for a firm target.

The Australian government has a target for reducing emissions by between 26 and 28 per cent by 2030, compared with the United Kingdom’s target of 78 per cent by 2035 and the United States’ goal of 50-52 per cent by 2035.

The government is expected to come under international pressure during the COP26 talks to increase its 2030 goals, though some of its MPs, particularly in the Nationals, are concerned about the economic and political cost of increased action.

ACF chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said the group commissioned the polling because it believes time is running out to stop run away climate warming, and it expects key decisions to be made on Australia’s efforts in the lead up to COP26 and the next election.

“We also wanted to get polling down to an electorate level if we could possibly do it because that was a good way of measuring the diversity of views in Australia, but it’s also a good piece of information for MPs to see whether they are doing what their constituents want done.”

She said she was not surprised by the overwhelming support for renewable energy the survey found, but was that those views were shared in so-called coal seats.

“Even the electorates that have coal and gas communities in them are rejecting the idea of coal and gas being a big part of our energy future going forward,” she said.

The poll found that in the Queensland regional electorates of Flynn, Capricornia, Maranoa and Dawson support for new coal and gas-fired power projects is 40 per cent or less.

One LNP adviser who asked not to be named said that if the poll was correct and held true until the election it suggested that climate could present a political problem in some seats in the next election.

He noted, for example, that the research suggested that in battleground seats like Gilmore, Eden Monaro and Macquarie concern about climate was high. Because all these seats had been hit hard by Black Summer bushfires he expected that concern to be maintained until the election.

But he warned that in other seats voter concerns may shift from climate as the campaign began.

Climate policy
‘We don’t want to be collateral damage’: Coal country concerns grow as climate reality hits
A second Coalition strategist said he was not surprised by the finding that concern about climate change was widespread in rural and regional electorates, and the government was aware that this was the case.

He said the government’s mantra of “technology not taxes” was based on an astute understanding that Australians want to see climate action but did not want some communities unfairly penalised to achieve it.

He said that if the poll asked had asked voters how much they were willing to spend on climate action, or what their communities should sacrifice to act on climate, its results would have been significantly different.

Cristina Talacko, chairwoman of Coalition a pro-climate action group aligned with the Liberal and National parties said the finding about the level of concern about climate change among rural and regional voters was significant.

She said the perceived divide on climate change between rural and urban voters had been used as an argument against taking stronger action was disproved by the poll.

“This has been the major problem [for those in the parties wanting more action]. It has always been the argument that a lot of Nationals utilise,” she said.

“The cities and regions more or less have the support level to support renewables, and they support the transition, they support a target,” she said.

“That’s strategically that’s what [Nationals MPs] have to look at.”

 How the survey was carried out

YouGov surveyed 15,000 people across all 151 Australian seats and then conducted what is known as multilevel regression with post-stratification on the sample using Australian Bureau of Statistics data. The process is based on the principle that people with similar characteristics tend to share common attitudes and attributes. The outcome of such an analysis is a prediction with a range. The numbers presented in the ACF report are mean estimates, which are typically very close to the middle of that range.

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(AU Pearls and Irritations) Solving The Mega-Risks

Pearls and Irritations - Julian Cribb

The world is awash with literature describing the deepening self-inflicted crisis into which humanity is pitching. I am frequently asked how we can solve it, presuming we wish to do so. Here, briefly, are the ten most urgent solutions.


 
Author
Julian Cribb is a science author with a focus on the human existential crisis: food security, climate, extinction, planetary pollution, nukes, resources, population.
His books include Surviving the 21st Century, The Coming Famine, Food or War, Earth Detox, and Poisoned Planet.
Humanity’s capacity to inflict mass harm on itself has been accelerating exponentially since the mid-21st Century.

It is rapidly approaching the point where it can bring down civilization and, quite possibly, eliminate our species.

This is the greatest existential emergency of human history. In the coming decades it will determine whether we survive or fail.

The gravity of the coming together of the ten megarisks is not understood, either by governments in general, corporates or societies at large.

This general ignorance of the ten threats and their deeply interconnected nature is a major barrier to our solving any of them.

However, all of the ten threats are capable of being solved. Humans have the brains, organisational skills and technology to escape the trap we have dug for ourselves. But we lack the institutions, the understanding and the will to do so.

There are two underlying principles for human survival.

First, each of the ten megarisks must be solved in ways that make none of the other risks worse.[1]

Second, we cannot solve these risks one at a time, or according to some arbitrary priority, as they are all connected to one another and must therefore be solved together.

If human civilization, or even humans, are to survive, here are the ten most critical actions to be taken:
  1. Outlaw all nuclear weapons, eliminate their stockpiles and safely recycle their materials. There is no point in solving other risks if we destroy the planet. (Nuclear war)

  2. End all extraction and use of fossil fuels and their byproducts, including pesticides, plastics and toxic petrochemicals by 2030. Replace with renewable, natural-based substances. Reforest half the Earth’s land area. (Climate change)

  3. Convert the entire global economy to a circular model in which every resource is recycled and re-used and nothing is lost, discarded or wasted. (Resource scarcity)

  4. Develop a 3-pillar global food system consisting of:
    • Regenerative agriculture which repairs its environment
    • Urban food systems to recycle water and nutrients to feed megacities, and
    • Deep ocean aquaculture of aquatic plants, fish and marine animals using recycled nutrients. (Food security)

  5. Return half of the world’s current farmed and grazed lands to forest or wilderness to end the 6th Extinction. Create a Stewards of the Earth program to implement it. (Extinction)

  6. Create a Right Not to Be Poisoned and a Clean Up the Earth Alliance (see Earth Detox), to eliminate all forms of toxic pollution in air, food, water and consumer products. Introduce universal safety testing of all manufactured chemicals.

  7. Introduce a global plan to progressively and voluntarily reduce the human population by 75 per cent by 2120. Ie Return it to where it was in the mid-20th Century. Note: the world’s women are already doing this. The issue is whether the fall happens voluntarily or involuntarily.[2]

  8. Prevent future pandemics by ending environmental destruction (5), banning dangerous scientific experiments, restricting global travel, creating global early warning systems and reducing world population (7).

  9. Reform the world economic system by (a) creating an Earth Standard Currency, based on the planet’s natural assets for sustaining life and (b) creating a global circular economy.

  10. Introduce global science-based awareness and education about the megarisks, their consequences and solutions to educate those of the human population willing to learn. (Delusion)
These are just the ‘top ten’ headline solutions. There are many other connected, more detailed solutions and policies that must be adopted to secure our future. Some of these are discussed in Surviving the 21st Century. Others are detailed in books by other writers.

If humans were intelligent, then education and awareness would be sufficient to catalyse global, local and individual action everywhere to save ourselves from ourselves. Alas, the species collectively is not intelligent, though some individuals may be.

However, since a large part of humanity is either ignorant of, or opposed to, any action to save itself, or else finds it more profitable to ruin the Planet and the human future, then the most likely outcome of the present trajectory will be a large-scale collapse in civilization causing the deaths of a significant part of the human population – scientific estimates range from 50 to 90 per cent – mainly  from famine, disease, mass refugeeism and (nuclear) war.

If that is not a sufficient wake-up call for everyone to act, then extinction is pretty much assured.

Optimistically, early action to end pandemics, climate change and food insecurity and restore the earth’s live support systems can generate the resolution and confidence for the other necessary solutions to be adopted collaboratively and universally.

However, this is not yet happening on a level large enough to make a difference. No government on Earth yet has a policy for human survival. Until they all do, our collective chances are grim.

[1] For example: you cannot solve food insecurity by burning more fossil fuels and making the climate worse for food production.

[2] The world’s women are already implementing a reduction in the birthrate. The issue whether the decline in population happens voluntarily or involuntarily.

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