31/10/2021

(AU The Guardian) Podcasts: Australia v The Climate

The Guardian Podcasts - Australia v The Climate


Billed as the world’s “best, last chance” to get global heating under control, Cop26 has a big goal: to secure global net-zero emissions by 2050 and keep 1.5C within reach.

Australia’s climate report card is poor, following decades of political squabbling, policy failures, leadership coups, climate scepticism and poor planning. And yet most Australians have a lived experience of the worsening climate crisis - devastating bushfires, floods, extreme weather and loss of species and habitat.

Australia v the climate looks at how we got here, what’s gone wrong, and what can be done to change course.
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Australia v The Climate part 1: Kyoto 00:50:03

This is the story of how Australia’s behaviour across decades has made it a climate change outcast. In the first episode we hear how Australia managed to increase its emissions under a climate deal that was supposed to cut them
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Australia v the climate part 2: Copenhagen 00:46:08
After Kevin Rudd becomes prime minister in 2007 he decides to turn his full attention to helping the world tackle the climate crisis. But for all the work Australia puts in, the world takes a turn for the worst at the climate summit in Copenhagen. In the second episode in the series, we ask: what could happen if Australia decides to be a good global citizen on climate?


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Australia v the climate part 3: Paris and the fall 00:58:29

Six years after the devastation of the Copenhagen meetings, the Paris conference became a hopeful moment for action on climate change. It looked for a moment that a truly global deal would be made. Hope was short-lived for Australia, as the reins of power changed quickly from Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison, a pro-coal prime minister with no real commitment to climate policy.

You’ll hear the story first-hand from the people who were there, including: former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull; former prime minister of Tuvalu Enele Sopoaga; Guardian Australia editor, Lenore Taylor; Guardian Australia’s political editor, Katharine Murphy; climate campaigner Erwin Jackson; climate scientist Lesley Hughes; chief negotiator on climate for Tuvalu, Ian Fry; and head of Greenpeace International, Jennifer Morgan


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Australia v the climate part four: fossil fuels 00:46:42

Year after year, parts of our country are destroyed by floods and bushfires made worse by global heating. And yet multiple prime ministers have lost their jobs when they tried to do something about it. What’s behind Australia’s weak climate targets and its lack of ambition?

In part four, we explore the powerful fossil fuel lobbies and how have they influenced Australia’s climate policy over the decades.

Including: author Clive Hamilton, former Australian Greens leader Christine Milne, former minister for climate change Greg Combet, Guardian editor Lenore Taylor, director of policy at the Investor Group on Climate Change Erwin Jackson, scientist Graeme Pearman, and Union of Concerned Scientists member Alden Meyer.


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Australia v the climate part 5: a plan for net zero? 00:32:51

This week Scott Morrison finally released what he said was a plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050. But is it? In this final episode of the series, editor Lenore Taylor, political editor Katharine Murphy, climate and environment editor Adam Morton and reporter Graham Readfearn discuss the implications of ‘the Australian way’ plan and what it means for Cop26 in Glasgow


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(AU The Age) How To Talk About Climate Change

The Age - Gay Alcorn


 
Author
Gay Alcorn is the Editor of The Age.
To say The Age is committed to excellent and thorough coverage of climate change is self-evident.

COVID-19 has occupied much of our resources and energy since the start of last year, but climate change is one of, if not the most critical challenge of our times. It will affect all of us.

Across The Age and our sister publication, The Sydney Morning Herald, we have four specialist journalists covering climate change and the environment, and our political journalists in Canberra and Melbourne focus on it too, as do our foreign correspondents. In Melbourne, senior journalist Miki Perkins covers the environment.

As Australians know, the politics of climate change has crippled our federal governments for more than a decade, and seen our political system fail in its duty to act in the interests of citizens, again and again. Our environment and climate editor, Nick O’Malley, will be in Glasgow for the critical COP26 summit starting October 31, as will chief political correspondent, David Crowe, Europe correspondent Bevan Shields and photographer Alex Ellinghausen.
Glasgow summit
How the world ran out of time

The challenge for The Age is not about our commitment to the issue, but about how we cover climate change. Since reading Rebecca Huntley’s excellent book, How to Talk about Climate Change in a Way that Makes a Difference, I have thought about this a great deal.

The news about what is happening to our planet, and what the evidence shows will happen if we don’t act quickly to slash emissions, is bleak.

I worry it can overwhelm our readers, who may feel helpless and hopeless. As the President of COP26, Alok Sharma, said in a recent speech.

“At 1.5 degrees warming, 700 million people would be at risk of extreme heat waves. At 2 degrees, it would be 2 billion.

“At 1.5 degrees, 70 per cent of the world’s coral reefs die. At 2 degrees, they are all gone.”

These are hard things to contemplate. There are few out-and-out climate change deniers now, even if they contributed to decades of inaction in Australia and across the world. Even News Corp, a media organisation that did more than any to confuse Australians about whether climate change was real or urgent, has flipped, almost comically, and now campaigns for net zero.

Our federal government has also changed its approach after years of bitter internal division, and will take a target of net zero emissions by 2050 to Glasgow, a big and welcome step politically, even if its plan has been widely criticised as lacking detail or serious policy.

The tension now is not about deniers, but between people and countries who are wholeheartedly committed, and those who have been dragged to act on climate change because of political and business pressure but have little genuine interest in it.

What Huntley does so well is to explain the psychology of discussing climate change, which made me think about how The Age could frame our coverage. She points out that surveys have shown that few of us talk about climate change with even family or close friends, and to discuss our worries and doubts is crucial.
Glasgow summit
COP26 newsletter

To argue about the science is mostly pointless because disagreement is not about the science; it’s about people’s identity, values and worldview, about how people see the past and the future.

To get angry about what is not being done can be useful sometimes, but it won’t convince a single person to change their mind because being told your lifestyle or values are wrong only leads to defensiveness. Relentless negative coverage is likely to cause many of our readers to disengage.

Opinion polling reveals that most of us believe in climate change and think it needs to be more seriously addressed, but most of us don’t spring to action to defend our environment. One reason, writes Huntley, is because climate change is so nebulous, has happened over many years and because of the human tendency towards “optimism bias”. Our instinct is to assume things will work out.

The idea of “technology not taxes”, which our federal government espouses, goes to this instinct that something will come along to save us, rather than having to act now on what the science is telling us we need to do, especially over the next decade, to keep warming below 2 degrees and preferably 1.5 degrees. It is an entirely human instinct.

Climate change action and mitigation will cost us, and the price of acting on climate change now is off-putting. “Put simply, we’re highly sensitive to losses in the present which feel more certain, than losses in the future, which feel less certain,” writes Huntley.

So what does this mean for our coverage? If you want a backgrounder on COP26, I recommend this explainer by Nick O’Malley. If you are interested in analysis of the federal government’s plan, try this by the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood. This is a revealing piece by David Crowe about how ‘small l’ liberals lobbied for a 2050 target.

If you want to know what you can do as an individual, Henrietta Cook ranked the most useful actions we can take. And this multimedia piece shows graphically how the world is warming, and the catastrophic results. During the summit, we’ll be taking questions from our readers on climate change, and getting our reporters and analysts to answer them. You can see the start of that here. And there is lots more here, and do sign up for our environment newsletter.

Towards the end of her book, Huntley suggests tips for how to talk about climate change that are as relevant for a news organisation like The Age as it is for individuals.

They include focusing on local issues to make it personal for people (the Great Barrier Reef, Victoria’s coastline); highlighting what we have to gain from action and not just what we’ll lose; getting rid of the language of blame; being honest about the threat but avoiding catastrophic or extreme language and encouraging “active hope” no matter what the science tells us.

She writes that when we say we care about climate change, we are not really talking about the science. We are talking about the things we love and the fear of losing them. If we start from there, we’ll get somewhere.

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(AU The Guardian) The Coalition’s Net Zero Policy Is Merely A Plan To Freeload Off The Rest Of The World

The Guardian - 

Scott Morrison’s government is counting on businesses and households to reduce emissions almost entirely as a result of their own voluntary initiative

The minister for energy and emissions reduction, Angus Taylor, and the prime minister, Scott Morrison, discuss the net-zero emissions target during a press conference at Parliament House. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
Author
Tristan Edis is the director of analysis and advisory at Green Energy Markets.
The Morrison government has now confirmed that it will target net zero emissions for Australia by 2050.

But, unlike Europe, the US and China, the Morrison government believes we’ll manage to reduce emissions to zero without implementing any legislation that either requires businesses to reduce their emissions or that of their products; or provides funding to pay these businesses to reduce their emissions at mass scale.

Instead the government has a plan for “technology not taxes”. Underpinning this three-word slogan is the argument that Australian businesses and households will reduce emissions almost entirely as a result of their own voluntary initiative.

The government simply doesn’t need to legislate things like renewable energy targets, or emission limits applying to car exhausts or smoke stacks, or even provide rebates to install batteries or buy electric vehicles.

In the government’s favour is that a range of carbon abatement technologies are managing to achieve substantial reductions in costs.

As a result both business and household demand for these products has been expanding. One in four Australian homes now have a solar system installed.

In addition, we’ve seen a range of a big corporates over the past two years make commitments to offset a substantial proportion, if not all, of their electricity consumption through the purchase of renewable energy certificates.

More recently we’ve also seen the price of Australian carbon credits traded above $30, which is far higher than the price the government has been offering to pay via its abatement purchasing auctions of around $16 to $17. Also, some of the world’s biggest motor vehicle manufacturers have indicated their intentions to move most or all of their models to be fully electric over the next 10 to 15 years.

So does this mean the government is off the hook?

Solar headwinds

While solar is now on a fifth of homes, landlords have proven to be utterly uninterested in installing solar or any other energy efficiency upgrades to their rental properties. These represent a third of all households and their share is growing.

Also by 2025 solar generation will approach the point where it will regularly exceed overall grid demand during the midday period. This will lead to increasing solar spillage and deteriorating interest in solar systems unless government can spur greater uptake of batteries.

Voluntary offset demand from the private sector remains tiny relative to overall emissions

Green Energy Markets estimates demand for renewable energy outside the legislated renewable energy target is expected to dramatically expand from 688GWh in 2018 to reach 12,662GWh by 2025, after which it stalls.

Although 3,600GWh of this is actually as a result of government policies, leaving about 9,000GWh that is driven by private sector voluntary action. That is equal to under 4% of Australia’s total electricity consumption.

Now it’s likely that further voluntary commitments to purchase renewable energy will come, but even if we doubled demand it would still be comfortably less than 10% of Australian electricity consumption.

Meanwhile total voluntary demand for Australian carbon credits in 2021 was less than 2 million tonnes according to analysts Market Advisory Group. By 2030 they expect it to grow to roughly about 4 million tonnes which is less than 1% of Australia’s total emissions.

Dramatic reductions are being achieved in Australia’s electricity emissions, but what’s really driving change isn’t so much voluntary demand as government policy.

It’s just that policy is coming from state governments. But it would be so much more efficient if this could be done nationally.

Does Australia want to be lumped with the next Betamax video tape?

Given the plans of the world’s major motor vehicle manufacturers Australia will inevitably move to electric vehicles.

However, if the Morrison government does little to expand the availability of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and refuses to upgrade our vehicle emissions standards in line with those overseas, we run the risk of becoming a dumping ground for obsolete oil-fuelled vehicles over this decade.

Consumers will initially think this is great as they get cut-price cars. But after 2030 they could find themselves with a vehicle that is the equivalent of a Betamax video tape player in a world of Netflix.

That could make keeping that car on the road increasingly expensive, while also leaving Australia with a long-term emissions legacy given how long cars last.

Don’t get too excited about cheap hydrogen

While the Morrison government doesn’t believe it needs to do much to drive adoption of renewable energy or electric vehicles, it has indicated that it will help fund technological research and development of things like hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, low emission metal production and measurement of soil carbon.

Yet even if the government was spectacularly successful in achieving its stated cost targets for these technologies, they would still remain financially unattractive. So these will remain left on the shelf without legislation that bridges this cost premium.

Freeloading off the rest of the world

The Morrison government is correct that even if they do nothing, Australia will still significantly reduce emissions from electricity and transport thanks to technological advancements driven by other nations. But for these technological advancements to transpire will require substantial investments and policies that will impose additional costs on these nations, at least in the short term.

While it might seem like it’s worth a try to see if we can get away with it through the government’s technology not taxes plan, do we really want to simply freeload off these other nations when it comes to climate change?

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