Lethal Heating: 11/07/21

07/11/2021

(SMH) Thunberg Calls COP26 A ‘Failure’ As Summit Chief Warns Of A Long Week Ahead

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

Glasgow: On what was billed as youth day at COP26, some of the old men of the movement took to centre stage inside the United Nations “blue zone” to consider the week that had passed and call for more action and haste in the climate effort.

Most notable was the former US vice-president Al Gore, who quoted Winston Churchill, saying: “The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close.

“In its place, we are now entering a period of consequences.”

Mr Gore said a political tipping point had been reached, and that a green revolution larger in scale than the industrial revolution and in pace with the digital revolution was now under way.

Greta Thunberg addresses protesters outside the climate summit in Glasgow on Friday, local time. Credit: PA

Outside the wire, Greta Thunberg dismissed the rhetoric of older generations at COP as she addressed thousands of young people who rallied in central Glasgow.

“It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure,” she said. “It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.

“We need immediate drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen.

“The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that.

“All this while the world is literally burning, on fire, and while the people living on the front lines are still bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.”

Al Gore told the conference the world was entering a “period of consequences”. Credit: Getty Images

Back in the blue zone, the success – or failure – of the first week of COP is still a matter of live debate.

Another old man of the movement, US climate envoy John Kerry, told reporters he detected a great sense of urgency at the meeting compared to previous UN climate talks, but warned that the “the job is not done yet”.

Climate demonstrators gather in Glasgow during COP26 on Friday. Credit: AP

The COP’s organisers have been relieved that outside analysts have projected that, if all the commitments so far made as part of the UN negotiations and in the so-called “Glasgow package” of side-deals that the UK has been pursuing for months in the lead-up to this meeting are kept, warming will peak at less than 2 degrees this century.

Before the COP, that figure was 2.7 degrees, and before the Paris talks it was 6 degrees, COP president Alok Sharma reminded a press conference.

A brief history of climate science and global climate negotiations. By Tom Compagnoni.

But echoing the message of the protesters outside the wire, Mr Sharma said he did not believe “populations would accept it” if leaders returned from the meeting at the end of next week and their pledges and agreements did not bring those projections down to 1.5 degrees, and demonstrate how such new ambitions might be met.

Delegates and negotiators have focused on hammering out the fine print of what is hoped will become a document some are already calling the “Glasgow pact”.

Though Mr Sharma would not say what the sticking points were in tens of different negotiating tracks, there is no secret that some states, like China, do not want 1.5 degrees locked in as the target.

Others are resisting calls from blocs of nations such as the so-called High Ambition Coalition – a caucus of both small island states and powerhouses such as the United States – to make the reporting of new reductions targets annual rather than a five-yearly responsibility for signatories of the Paris Agreement.

The arduous work of negotiating so-called article 6 – the rules governing a future global carbon market – grinds on, as it has now for six years.

Glasgow summit

How the world ran out of time

Without proper transparency, the positive projections celebrated this week could retreat into fantasy.

In the coming days, ministers will begin to return to the blue zone to check on the progress of their negotiators.

Mr Sharma is already demanding more from them, issuing a statement to the teams saying he expected work to start early and move quickly on Monday, and that he did not want COP to bleed on into its second weekend as it has in the past.

Glasgow Climate Summit

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(AU ABC) Morrison's Glasgow Trip Raises Troubling Questions About Climate Change, National Security And How The Government Should Be Judged

ABC News - Laura Tingle

Scott Morrison's disastrous overseas trip has seen him portrayed as a significantly reduced figure on both the domestic and international stages. (ABC News: Adam Kennedy)

Author

Laura Tingle is ABC 7.30's chief political correspondent.

Scott Morrison believes in miracles.

This is perhaps why he expected us all to ignore what we had seen with our own eyes this week and instead believe him when he quivered with outrage that French President Emmanuel Macron had questioned "Australia's integrity".

It was the Prime Minister, of course, who was in Macron's sights in Rome this week — not the Australian nation — when he was questioned about the cancellation of a $90 billion submarine contract — the largest in Australia's history.

Did he think Scott Morrison had lied to him about the future of the deal, Macron was asked by reporters in Rome. "I don't think, I know," he had replied.

By the time Morrison got to Glasgow, the PM's dander was in full dudgeon mode, on a scale that only someone who had once been an amateur musical theatre thespian could muster.

"I must say that I think the statements that were made questioning Australia's integrity, and the slurs that have been placed on Australia, not me, I've got broad shoulders, I can deal with that," he said. "But those slurs, I'm not going to cop sledging at Australia. I'm not going to cop that on behalf of Australians."

Emmanuel Macron calls Scott Morrison a liar following nuclear submarines spat. Youtube

This unedifying spectacle, along with the PM's apparently approved leaking of text messages from another national leader, have this week been analysed in two very different ways which reflect two strands of national conversation about politics that have perhaps never seemed to diverge quite as much as they do right now.

On the one hand, there is the strand of discourse about what are Australia's underlying national interests. On the other is the strand shaped by politics, character tests, pragmatism, spin and popularity.

A spotlight on two important issues

Morrison's disastrous overseas trip has seen him portrayed as a significantly reduced figure on both the domestic and international stages. There were two important issues under the spotlight on this trip: climate change and the credibility of our national security strategy.

On climate change, the UN conference in Glasgow — like the ones that have preceded it — was seen as a test against which all governments would be judged in terms of what they are doing to reduce greenhouse emissions.

A lot of governments scored very mediocre results in those tests, none more so than Australia.

But something that has changed since the Paris conference in 2015 is that it is not just Australia's failure to meet the targets set down for the Glasgow conference that has been on display this time around, but that government policy isn't even meeting the targets set down by the broader Australian leadership: everyone from our scientists to now even the business and financial communities.

Scott Morrison puts faith in technology for decarbonisation

Instead of making an assessment of where Australia's national interest might lie — not just in terms of reduced emissions but in helping the transition which is being forced upon us by markets and the rest of the world — the government took a policy position to Glasgow completely framed by wedge politics and internal government political problems.

On national security, what we have witnessed is even more troubling.

In announcing in September the decision to dump the French submarine contract, and instead pursue nuclear submarines in a new pact with the United Kingdom and the United States, Australia was realigning its strategic view, we were told.

This view meant we needed to have nuclear submarine capability, as well as a range of different forms of technology and armaments that only the US and the UK could provide.

The bushfire survivor taking on Scott Morrison at the Glasgow climate summit

Jo Dodds wants Scott Morrison to do more about climate change, so she went to Glasgow. Read more

Bolstering this case was a campaign to portray the French as a partner that was not delivering on time or on budget, and that we would be "safer" with the US, firmly entrenched in a partnership in the region.

Yet evidence to Senate committee hearings in the past fortnight have emphasised the French were indeed delivering what they had promised.

Meanwhile, the Australian mishandling of the relationship with the French saw the US President publicly disowning the process; the Prime Minister was not able to have a meeting with Joe Biden at two major international summits; and Australia leaked an American national security document in an effort to try to prove the US was "in" on the deceit of the French.

This was all in addition to the PM apparently leaking a text message from Macron which will do little to make other world leaders trust him in future.

A seriously alarming development

All this is of particular concern when the passage of just of a couple of months has left grave doubts about the outlook for our strategic capability in the wake of the decision to so significantly rewrite our strategic policy.

Not only do we now have a widely acknowledged "capability gap" in our submarine fleet until 2040 — on the off chance that we ever actually see these nuclear submarines.

But no analyst will put up their hand to say these submarines will be built in Australia, and too many doubt whether there is the capacity to actually build them anywhere else, given the demands of other nations to build their own submarines.

Can the submarines even be built in Adelaide? (AP: Jack Sauer)

This should be a seriously alarming development. Yet instead, submarines and security strategy, like climate change, are fought out in that other strand of the national discourse, a strand where some of our most senior journalists say that "of course" Morrison had to lie to the French, and senior ministers say it is journalists' fault that the relationship with the French has gone downhill because they "pressured" Macron by asking him questions.

The 18-month review of the plan to go nuclear puts the answer to the question on the other side of the election, including an answer we know already but which the government won't admit to until then because of what it means for seats in Adelaide: submarines will not, cannot, be built there.

Why aren't the disturbing aspects of both the climate change and strategic positions of the government under more intense pressure?

Biden says AUKUS pact was 'clumsy'

Mr Biden said his impression was the French had been informed long before the deal was announced. Read more

Labor is keeping itself purely in the political strand of the conversations here: it doesn't want to challenge the government on national security, or find itself exposed by making a major point of difference on emissions reduction policies.

It attacks the Prime Minister on character grounds over the debacle over the submarine strategy, revelling in claims on the international stage that he is a liar, rather than raising the alarm about how his actions have exposed our national security and that, just maybe, the Opposition should be rethinking its original endorsement of the change of strategy.

So many threads of the Prime Minister's political strategy — as well as the national interest — have started to fray in recent times: a campaign fought on national security grounds; a "who do you trust" campaign. That's just for starters.

But somewhere along the way, the idea that he and his government should be judged in terms of how they are protecting the national interest, rather than playing the political game, seems to have been well and truly lost.

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(AU Canberra Times) Climate Warriors Counting Their Legal Wins

Canberra Times - Greta Stonehouse | AAP

Legal cases are mounting as climate change devastation is felt in places like the NSW south coast.

As far as Jan Harris is concerned, the Australian government's perceived brochure-waving in lieu of real climate action feels like "an absolute slap in the face" after losing her home in a 2018 bushfire.

She was again forced to evacuate by last year's catastrophic Black Summer fires that tore through her beloved Tathra, on the NSW south coast.

In the aftermath, Harris looked on in dismay as a cavalcade of "car after car, after car" hit town.

"I just assumed it was a major drugs bust," she says. "There were dudes with guns all over the place".

She later found out it was Scott Morrison's security detail, out in force during the prime minister's ill-fated trip to Cobargo.

"Platitudes, that's all we get from him," she says.

"That 2050 target is just an absolute slap in the face to everything that this community has gone through."

The frustration of Harris and others who have witnessed firsthand the devastation of natural disasters made worse by climate change, is naturally palpable.

Because of it, she joined the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action.

The group recently had a monumental win in the NSW Land and Environment Court, with the help of the Environmental Defenders Office.

It was determined the NSW Environment Protection Authority had a duty to take serious action on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

"I was absolutely ecstatic," Harris says.

EDO Legal Strategy Director Elaine Johnson says many people like Harris are turning to the courts for redress as governments and corporations repeatedly fail to take proper action.

The body is fast gaining traction in this space since opening its doors in 1985 to assist those advocating for the environment.

She asserts the recent bushfire survivors' success on behalf of farmers, residents and firefighters was a significant moment.

"It's the first time an Australian court has ordered a government to take meaningful action on climate change," she says.

"What we're seeing around the world and in Australia is an explosion of climate litigation."

The caseload numbers continually grow as people experience in real-time, the impacts of severe bushfires, coastal erosion, loss of land and culture, Johnson says.

The EDO has come a long way since its first climate action case in 1994 on behalf of GreenPeace, challenging the approval of a Hunter Valley power station.

The court held that the law back then did not restrict the building of new power stations.

This week the EDO represented The Environment Centre NT against Federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt, over his granting of public money for gas exploration in the Northern Territory's Betaloo Basin.

While the extraction and consumption of gas from the precinct would equate to a 13 per cent increase on Australia's 2020 greenhouse gas emissions, according to one expert report, the minister made no inquiries into the project's climate change impact.

The Federal Court was told of accusations the contract was expedited to stymie the legal challenge and lock it in before it could be ruled unlawful.

Justice John Griffiths described the outcome as "a very dark day for the Commonwealth," with its lawyers accepting it represented "a departure from model litigant standards".

The first case to challenge government funding of a new gas and fossil fuel project is also a test case for public expenditure on the Morrison government's "gas-led recovery" from the pandemic.

Acting chief executive Rachel Walmsley, who has been with the EDO for more than 18 years, says climate change litigation requires stamina.

"Climate change debate in Australia at the moment is unfortunately 98 per cent about politics instead of 98 per cent about the science and innovative solutions," she says.

In 2008 when she headed off for maternity leave while the emissions trading scheme got underway, she couldn't have envisaged there would still be "squabbling over the details of legislation" in 2021.

In so many countries where there is real climate action and has been for years "the sky doesn't fall down," Walmsley adds.

She blames short-term election cycles thinking and political self-preservation.

But with environmental law lagging and "not fit for purpose," the EDO continues to bring successful cases against fossil fuel projects.

Johnson says a challenge of the Gloucester Valley's Rocky Hill coal mine, on the NSW mid north coast, was a watershed.

The EDO argued that if the state allowed a new greenfield coal mine to be developed in this day and age, the emissions that would arise from the burning of that coal would contribute unacceptably to global emissions.

"It was the first time really that on climate change that evidence and argument broke through, leading to a judgment that stopped that coalmine going ahead," Johnson says.

The seminal decision sits alongside another recent Federal Court ruling the EDO did not have a hand in - that federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley has a duty of care to protect children from future personal injury caused by climate change.

Eight children took action against Ley in 2020, challenging an expansion of NSW's Vickery coal mine project. She is appealing the historic decision.

This week Australia prominently positioned fossil fuel company Santos on its pavilion at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

The federal government's "hollow and empty" climate rhetoric was criticised by France and at home following confirmation it would not join some 90 countries in backing a pledge to reduce emissions of methane by 30 per cent by 2030.

As Harris meanwhile rebuilds while living in her fourth rental, she continues to rail against climate inaction and the "mood orientated" language leaders use.

"'Rebuilding', 'we're moving forward', 'you're recovering'. You know what? I was never sick," she says.

Through time Harris has realised her "small and personal" voice is what it's all about.

"It's pretty f***ing personal when your house burns down," she says.

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