14/09/2021

(AU SMH) News Corp About-Turn On Emissions Too Little, Too Late, Scientists Say

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley | Amelia McGuire

Well before news broke that News Corp tabloids were to start promoting carbon emission reductions, rumours were spreading in the delicate ecosystem of Australian climate scientists, policy wonks and advocates.

Emails bounced around sharing titbits. Some reported fielding questions from unlikely quarters about 2050 net zero targets. Some were delighted, some sceptical and others downright distrustful.

Will not be muzzled: Sky News presenters Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Peta Credlin and Chris Kenny.

When The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age reported that News Corp papers were planning a climate push, it made news around the world.

Vanity Fair asked if the apparent shift in the Australian mastheads might be reflected in the Murdoch empire’s US outlets such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times described to its readers News Corp’s Australian newspapers as places where “solid journalism often sits beside unrelenting ideology in articles that often do not carry an ‘opinion’ label”.

One of the Journal’s own former editors tweeted of the paper’s climate coverage, “No group has been more clueless, duplicitous or irresponsible on climate change than the WSJ edit and op-ed crew.”

He attached a string of climate sceptic headlines from the past six weeks.

It is hard to exaggerate how News Corp’s coverage of climate change – and of climate scientists themselves – have scarred the sector.

In his recent book The New Climate Wars, leading climatologist Michael Mann wrote that the company’s amplification of a false conspiracy known as “climategate” helped derail the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, setting back global efforts to rein in warming by crucial years.

In Australia critics say the coverage has contributed to decades of policy inertia on the issue.

The headlines in the Murdoch papers were often brutal and sometimes brilliant.

 In February 2010, then climate change minister Penny Wong said Australia’s beaches could be eroded away over the coming century at a National Climate Change Forum. In response, the front page of The Australian read “Wong wipeout doesn’t wash with locals”.

It quoted Bondi local Lee Boman who said he hadn’t noticed any sea level rise. It also featured Bondi regular Patrick Doab who said no one could predict how sea levels would change because it was “like the stock market”.

In 2011, Cate Blanchett was dubbed “Carbon Cate” on the front page of The Sunday Telegraph after fronting a TV campaign urging Australians to promote the Gillard government’s carbon tax. It positioned Blanchett as an out-of-touch millionaire and said then opposition leader Tony Abbott would “save” Australia from the tax. The tax was scrapped in July 2014.
In the lead-up to the 2019 federal election The Australian ran the headline “Carbon cut apocalypse: cost of the ALP energy plan”. The story quoted modelling by Brian Fisher that asserted Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target would wipe $472 billion from the economy and drive electricity prices up by 50 per cent.
According to the Australia Institute, the modelling was a “complete outlier” compared to analysis of more than 20 other modelling exercises and Treasury models that found the economic impacts of high ambition targets small or negligible.

In December 2020, Wendy Bacon and Arunn Jegan analysed all news, features, opinion pieces, letters and editorials discussing climate change that appeared in The Daily Telegraph, Herald-Sun, Courier Mail and The Australian between April 2019 and March 2020.

They found 45 per cent of all coverage either rejected or cast doubt on consensus scientific findings. Their research asserted that most News Corp reporters do not promote sceptical views, but of 55 per cent of stories that accepted climate science, misunderstandings about that science were almost always promoted rather than explained, and the reporting on the effects of climate change was negligible.

It has been revealed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has bowed to pressure from the Morrison Government over climate change targets.

Half of the news and feature stories either had no source or one source.

Nearly two thirds of published opinion pieces were sceptical of climate science. The top five climate sceptics were Sky News presenters Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Peta Credlin, Peter Gleeson and Chris Kenny.

In a staff email obtained by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, News Corp Australia’s executive chairman Michael Miller told local staff that the company’s columnists and commentators would not be “muzzled” as part of their editorial campaign on climate change.

One media adviser at a leading environmental group this week said she believed slanted news coverage in News Corp was more dangerous than the commentary. “At least you know what you are getting in the opinion pages.”

One of the hallmarks of the coverage was that it was as willing to discredit the scientists as it was the science itself.

In one infamous instance the Daily Telegraph, the Herald-Sun and The Australian published stories attacking author and environmentalist Tim Flannery for buying a property near the waterfront north of Sydney.
It did not matter that the house in question sat above the level of predicted sea-level rise, the coverage suggested that it proved climate change was a hoax and Flannery a hypocrite.

After one of the mastheads ran a story showing the home’s location Flannery was forced to take on extra security. He eventually won a retraction, an apology and legal costs.

Climate policy

It’s worth noting that the News Corp mastheads picked up the story from a segment on Ray Hadley’s show on 2GB, now a stablemate of this masthead.

According to Marian Wilkinson, whose recent book The Carbon Club is a forensic analysis of the interplay between the political, media and industry actors who have stalled action on climate in Australia for decades, News Corp’s coverage influenced other media in the country.

She believes even the ABC “pulled its punches” on climate coverage for fear it would look soft when compared with the Murdoch press’s hardline climate denialism.

Wilkinson is one of many who believe that Australian climate and energy policy has been rudderless for decades, but she does not blame News alone.

Rather she says the Murdoch empire helped derail climate action along with well-connected fossil fuel industry lobbyists and complicit politicians from both parties.

The result is the nation is now slowly engaging in the process of decarbonising its energy system, but years have been lost and billions of dollars of public money wasted, she says.

So far News Corp has not commented on – or denied – the coverage and its silence is being met with speculation. They did not respond to a request for comment about this article.

Wilkinson notes that if News Corp does shift its editorial stance it would be falling in line with the corporate and financial sectors and with major advertisers such as Woolworths and Coles.

Mann is one of many who note that such a move would also help solve a problem for Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who wants to announce a net zero target before or at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow but faces trenchant opposition from some Nationals MPs.

“This may be more about giving Morrison cover going into an election year, by establishing the pathetically low bar of ‘net zero carbon by 2050’ as somehow constituting meaningful action, particularly given that he is being roundly criticised by the world community for his meager climate commitments going into COP26,” Mann said on Friday.

“‘Inactivists’ – polluters and politicians and media outlets such as News Corp that have enabled them – are moving away from outright denial because it’s no longer tenable.

“This is particularly true in Australia after having lived through the climate change-fuelled devastation of the Black Summer of 2019-20. Instead, as I describe in the book, they’ve turned to other tactics – delay, distraction, deflection, division, etc – in their effort to maintain the fossil fuel status quo.

“Focusing on a target of 2050, three decades away, kicks the can so far down the road that it’s largely meaningless.”

Though he welcomes the apparent shift in editorial direction, Flannery says the impact of its coverage extends beyond the politics of climate change.

He recalls meeting James Murdoch, who recently quit the company in part due to its climate coverage, at an awards dinner a decade or so ago.

“What you’ve done,” he told him, “is destroyed people’s faith in science, and that will play out in many ways and it will take many decades to undo that damage.”

Murdoch, he says, looked sheepish.

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(AU The Age) Australia Can Up Its 2030 Climate Change Target, But Will It Be Enough

The Age - Mike Foley

Australia could exceed the carbon emission cuts required by the Paris Agreement, experts say, but it remains to been seen if the federal government’s climate action is ambitious enough to avoid dangerous global warming and international controversy.

Australia’s major trading partners are pressuring the federal government to match their goals ahead of the international climate change summit in Glasgow in November.

Australia is expected to increase its emissions reduction goals ahead of the Glasgow climate summit, but questions remain over whether it will be enough. Credit: Gareth Fuller/PA
Most wealthy nations have committed to cut emissions by about 50 per cent or more by 2030 and to reach net zero by 2050 at the latest. Australia has committed to a cut of 26 to 28 per cent by 2030, based on 2005 levels, with no deadline on net zero.

Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor says Australia is on track to “meet and beat” the Paris target. The government will release an updated emissions reduction projection before the United Nations’ summit in Scotland.

Energy
Taylor adds carbon capture and storage to clean energy agency’s plans
Climate scientist and physicist Bill Hare, the director of policy analyst group Climate Action Tracker, said the federal government could release emissions reduction projections exceeding its goals.

“Australia could claim it was on track to reduce emissions by 28-30 per cent or slightly more by 2030,” Mr Hare said.

It could do so by raising the volume of renewable energy entering the power sector, along with the COVID-19 induced declines in industrial emissions, he said.

Renewable electricity gains would likely result from state government policies and businesses making new investments in the sector, he said.

Australian National University Climate Change Institute Professor Mark Howden said “emissions reduction targets are just the means to achieve the Paris goal”.

Australia would need to significantly increase its goals to be consistent with the global action required to limit warming to avoid the worst of climate change’s impacts.

Professor Howden said global emissions must fall 50 per cent by 2030 and reach net zero by about 2045 to limit warming to between 1.5 degrees and under 2 degrees.

“At a global level emissions have to reach net zero most likely by 2045, and we have to start reducing emissions very quickly right now,” Professor Howden said.

If global emissions continued to rise until 2050 and the world then miraculously went to net zero overnight, the build up of greenhouse gases would cause the temperature to rise for decades to come.

“Global emissions would need to fall by about 50 per cent by 2030 to limit a global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees,” Professor Howden said.

Coal
‘We’ll keep mining’: Australia resists climate policy pressure
Richie Merzian, climate and energy program director at the Australia Institute think tank and a former federal government international negotiator on climate policy, said “Australia will be called out at Glasgow” if it doesn’t match the commitments of countries like the US, UK, Japan and South Korea.

“Net zero is not even the bare minimum, it’s the entry fee,” he said. “All eyes will be on what countries are doing in the decisive decade, now, for 2030.”

The federal government’s “technology not taxes” is focused on investments in new technology to lower the cost of cleaner options including hydrogen, energy storage and green steel. The clean energy investment agency recently added soil carbon sequestration and carbon capture and storage to its priorities.

Mr Hare said there are no federal government policies mandating emissions reduction to spur speedy action, but a “comprehensive set of policies”, fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles, more stringent building efficiency standards, phasing out the diesel rebate for mining companies and industry energy efficiency program could deliver big results, quickly.

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(AU SMH) Climate Damage Starting To Hit Us Where It Hurts - On The Beach

Sydney Morning Herald - Miki Perkins | Chloe Booker

Iain Harrison remembers clambering up the sandy dunes at the Inverloch surf beach when he was a toddler, more than 50 years ago. They were covered in spinifex and coastal daisies and when he made it to the top, there was a view of the sea.

When the Inverloch Surf Lifesaving Club was built a decade ago the dunes were still there, but now they have disappeared. In the eight years to 2020, the coastline in front of the club has moved landwards by about 50 metres, an average of about seven metres per year.

Inverloch Surf Lifesaving club President Warren Cook, pictured here with his daughter Jasmine. When the surf lifesaving club was built 10 years ago, it had no view of the sea but now the water is 30 metres from the door. Credit: Jason South

Mr Harrison is a member of the club and has always holidayed at Inverloch, 140 kilometres south-east of Melbourne.

He’s a horticulturist and has been aware of the scientific reality of global warming, and the accompanying sea level rise and intense weather, since the 1980s.

“I always thought I’d be outlived by the changes, but now they are accelerating and will have a major impact in the next 10 years,” he says.

“My greatest concern is how it will affect my two children, and what they are going to have to face.”



The club has lost two patrol towers to storms over the past few years and now uses a mobile tower that is towed onto the sand, says club president Warren Cook.

“We never used to have a view of the sea, but we’re now 30 metres from water’s edge at high tide.”

At nearby Anderson Inlet, also in Inverloch, the coastline has crept landwards by about 85 metres between 2006 and 2020.

Bass Coast Shire Council is part of a coalition of local councils in Melbourne’s south-east and regional areas urging the state government to take stronger action on climate action and sea level rise after experiencing significant erosion and storm damage.

Erosion next to the Kilcunda rail trail bike path

All this upheaval is expensive. In this financial year, Bass Coast Shire Council will spend $100,000 and pour 3000 cubic metres of sand onto a single area of beach at Inverloch. Next year, they’re budgeting for 4000 cubic metres.

And this is not limited to Inverloch, says the council, which is calling for greater state and federal support.

In a single year the coastline in front of the popular rail trail at Kilcunda, about 25 kilometres from Inverloch, has moved landwards by 14 metres, and the council has had to temporarily relocate this section of the trail further inland.

At Cowes East, on Phillip Island’s north shore, the sea has been kept at bay by regular top-ups of sand.



This year the council will build a 300-metre rock wall and eight timber barriers to secure the shoreline.

It has contributed $1.7 million and secured federal funding of $1.1 million, but it’s still about $1.6 million short and wants the state government to step in.

Simon Woodland, Bass Council’s manager for sustainable environment, says the area’s 40 kilometres of sandy coastline have always been dynamic, but climate change is ratcheting up the storm intensity that drives sand movement and the baseline sea level that underpins it.

“We often talk about climate change in terms of impacts on future generations but what we need to get our heads around is that we are the future generations, dealing with the consequences of decisions that were made for us decades ago,” he said.



“We’ve developed to the coastline in so many places and local councils are on the front line, facing ever-escalating challenges with the least resources of any tier of government.”

The sea level is projected to rise about 24 centimetres across Victoria by the 2050s. Geomorphologist David Kennedy, from the University of Melbourne, says climate change is also causing more intense storms, ocean surges and wind.

Victoria has also experienced a change in wind direction, meaning waves are, on average, travelling 2 or 3 degrees in a more westerly direction, which is starting to shift the sand on the state’s beaches, he says.

Planning for sea level rise needs an integrated, statewide approach or Victoria will end up with a highly-engineered coastline like Japan, Associate Professor Kennedy says. “We live in a dynamic zone, and it will become more dynamic in the future.”

Erosion at Cowes East

Bayside, which takes in Black Rock, Hampton and Sandringham, has one of the more thorough plans for addressing climate change. It plans to build a sea wall at Brighton and use fencing, sandbags and path closures to address erosion along its coastline, including protecting its iconic beachboxes.

“In the absence of broader leadership, councils, and the communities they represent, are at the frontline of dealing with climate change impacts,” says Bayside mayor Laurence Evans.

Mr Woodland says coastal councils across Victoria will be forced to have difficult conversations with residents about which developments are “defendable” against inevitable sea level change over decades.

“A lot of focus goes to protecting the built assets like roads and buildings behind the foreshore, but the foreshore itself holds all sorts of values, from wildlife habitat to culturally significant sites that date back thousands of years.”

Beach erosion locations on the Bass Coast


A spokesperson for the Victorian government said it had invested more than $60 million in marine and coastal projects since 2014.

“We continue to work with local councils on coastal adaptation plans which help protect Crown land and critical infrastructure from the impacts of storm surge, wave attack and rising sea levels.”

The state government is developing a Cape to Cape Resilience Project, which will study the impact of rising sea levels and changing wind and wave climates on the coastal area between Cape Paterson and Cape Liptrap.

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