Lethal Heating: 11/08/21

08/11/2021

(AU SMH) ‘Indigenous People Feel The Climate Crisis. Our Land Is A Part Of Us’

Sydney Morning Herald - Tishiko King

Author

Tishiko King is the campaigns director at Seed Mob and community organiser for Our Islands Our Home.

While world leaders met behind closed doors at COP26, it’s been the relentless leadership of First Nations people that gives me strength and ignites a fire in my belly.

This global climate conference, labelled the one to save humanity, has been frustrating to say the least. Yet again, we’ve seen political power holders together with their fossil fuel donors, turn a blind eye to the consequences of their poor leadership and decision-making.

Protestors dressed as US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who were among the world leaders to attend the summit. Credit: Getty Images

But as the oceans are rising, so too are First Nations people. We are the first scientists, the first innovators, and we have cared for our lands and waters for thousands of generations.

It was the words of India Logan-Riley, a young Māori activist, who said what many of us have been thinking, “in the face of mediocre leadership Indigenous people shine through … This COP, learn our histories, listen to our stories, honour our knowledge and get in line, or get out of the way.”

What many people don’t realise is that Indigenous people have been paving the way since before world leaders started these global gatherings to address the climate crisis.

It was Eriel Deranger, Dënesųłiné woman and the Executive Director at Indigenous Climate Action Canada, who reminded the conference again of the leading role Indigenous leadership has played in making space for civil society contributions at COP negotiations, which at its core, is a forum designed for state leaders.

Indigenous leaders from the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities meet the Prince of Wales at the Glasgow summit. Credit: Getty Images

Deranger shared how world leaders came together in 1992 to talk about the climate crisis, but preceding this was a gathering of Indigenous peoples who wrote the Kari-Oca Declaration, a submission to the United Nations demanding that civil society and Indigenous leaders had a say in these spaces.

It was Indigenous peoples that demanded a place, lobbied, and brought perspectives from the world to the official negotiations.

Across the world, Indigenous people make up less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, yet we protect 80 per cent of global biodiversity. We have looked after our land sustainably for over 60,000 years.

As a proud Torres Strait Islander woman, already in my lifetime I have seen the impacts of climate change on our islands.

I travelled to COP26 in Glasgow for my people and to stand up for First Nations people, as a representative of both Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network and Our Islands Our Home, a campaign calling on the Australian Government to do more to protect the Torres Strait Islands.

A fisherman, whose livelihood relies on his catch, casts his net from a boat off Hammond Island in the Torres Strait. Credit: Kate Geraghty

As Indigenous people, we don’t just see the climate crisis, we feel it. Our land is a part of who we are, a part of our identity. This connection to our land and one another stems far and wide, across the oceans and seas.

It’s these connections and knowledge of our homelands that is absolutely critical in the collective fight for climate justice.

But while world leaders sit on their hands, going round and round in circles, making empty and misleading commitments, it was a young Samoan woman, Brianna Fruean of the Pacific Climate Warriors, who issued a caution of the power of the words, noting there is no place for pity in the fight against climate change.

Glasgow summit

Thunberg calls COP26 a ‘failure’ as summit chief warns of a long week ahead

Brianna pointed out, “...how climate action can be vastly different to climate justice, how two degrees could mean the end, and 1.5 could mean a fighting chance.”

She shared a chilling message with world leaders that, “in your words, you wield the weapons that can save us or sell us out.”

When I return to Australia, I return with a message I have delivered many times, but now I’m further fuelled by the many First Nations communities I know are fighting with me.

What I say to Australia is this: get behind First Nations communities. Stand alongside us in our fight for climate justice, for land rights, and for self-determination. These are critical pieces in our fight against the climate crisis. Because colonialism and capitalism have caused the climate crisis, but Indigenous leadership can solve it.

For now, the state leaders have left Glasgow, but we will stay and fight. There is an Indigenous people’s action planned over the weekend, and make no mistake, we are rising.

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(ABC) Big Crowds Rally In Rainy Glasgow For Cop26 Climate Action

ABC - Reuters

A final pact will be announced after further COP26 negotiations next week. (AP: Andrew Milligan/PA)

Tens of thousands of protesters have marched through rainy downtown Glasgow, and in many other cities around the world, to demand bolder action at the UN climate conference.

Students, activists and climate-concerned citizens linked arms as they moved slowly through the streets of the Scottish city, host of the COP26 meeting that began on Monday.

Some pushed children in strollers, some danced to stay warm. Police watched the procession from the flanks.

"It's good to have your voice heard," said Kim Travers of Edinburgh.

"Even with the rain, I think it makes it a bit more dramatic."

Some countries, not including Australia, have agreed to phase out coal. (Reuters: Yves Herman)

Just a few blocks from the procession, back-room negotiations continued at the COP26 meeting. On stage, speakers sounded the alarm over the threat of global warming to food security.

Since the climate talks began, national delegations have been working to agree on technical details for the final pact, to be announced at the end of the conference after more negotiations this week.

The first week also saw countries make a slew of promises to phase out coal, slash emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane and reduce deforestation.

Business leaders and financiers, meanwhile, pledged to invest more in climate solutions.

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But activists have demanded that the meeting make more progress.Ros Cadoux, a grandmother from Edinburgh, said she came to march for future generations.

"If you've got kids and grandkids, my God, what else could you do?"

Colourful banners bore slogans ranging from earnest calls for "Climate Justice Now", to the more comical: "No planet = no beer".One group bounced along to the sound of a drum and chanted: "Get up, get down, keep that carbon in the ground."

"The climate crisis is about the survival of humanity as we know it," said Philipp Chmel, who traveled from Germany for the march.

"It's up to the youth and the workers, the working class, to bring about the change that is necessary."

Tens of thousands braved Glasgow rain to send a message on climate change. (AP: Andrew Milligan/PA)

One group of young people — some with bullhorns — blamed companies for the climate crisis and chanted calls in favour of socialism while punching their fists in the air.

Around midday, the rain cleared for a few hours, and an enormous rainbow streaked across the sky.

"If ever there was a time for activism, and if ever there was a time for the people to come out onto the streets, then it is today," said University of Glasgow student Theo Lockett, 20.

Protesters 'want more' from Morrison government

Climate activists held rallies in many other cities, including Seoul, Copenhagen and London.

Blinky, the smoking, screaming four-metre high koala puppet, is seen with Extinction Rebellion activists in Melbourne.(Reuters: Extinction Rebellion)

More than 1,000 people demonstrated on Saturday in Sydney and Melbourne to protest against the government's climate policies and the strategies it offered at COP26.

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Sydney's first legal protest after a months-long COVID-19 lockdown saw about 1,000 people march in support of global action day for climate justice, a worldwide movement mobilised during the COP26 meeting.

"We're all out here to show that we want more from our government," said protester Georgia, who gave only her first name.

"The COP 26 agreements were happening and it's not turning out the best for Australia at the moment."

Marchers carried signs reading, "We need human change, not climate change" and "Code Red for Humanity".

Australia has rejected a global pledge to slash emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane. Campaigners and pressure groups have not been impressed by the commitments of other world leaders.

Rallies were held around Australia. (Reuters: Extinction Rebellion)

Melbourne's protest was smaller than Sydney's, with just a few hundred people turning out for a rally that featured a giant koala bear emitting plumes of smoke, and protesters dressed as skeletons on bikes.

Several smaller events were held elsewhere in Australia.

'Not a secret that COP26 is a failure': Greta Thunberg attacks world leaders' inaction

'Obituary of our planet'

During a panel of speeches on Saturday (local time), Democratic US senator Sheldon Whitehouse urged companies to rein in groups lobbying politicians to block climate action.

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"Corporate members who made big promises here at this COP have got to get their trade associations under control so they're not undercutting our work in Congress," said Mr Whitehouse, who was at COP26 with a bipartisan group of Congress members.

He also told journalists that it was crucial to resolve a carbon price for carbon markets — one of the key sticking points in the negotiations.

As with the COVID-19 pandemic, "it won't be long before the entire population of the world is affected, directly or indirectly" by climate change, said former prime minister Julia Gillard, now head of UK health charity the Wellcome Trust.

Earlier at the conference, actor Idris Elba acknowledged that he had few credentials to speak on climate change, but said he was at COP26 to amplify the climate threat to global food security.

COP26 has seen high-profile speakers including Idris Elba. (AP: Alastair Grant)

Sitting on the same panel, climate justice campaigner Vanessa Nakate of Uganda implored the world to stop burning fossil fuels, the main cause of rising global temperatures.

"We are watching farms collapse and livelihoods lost due to floods, droughts and swarms of locusts," she said — all of which scientists say are being exacerbated by climate change.

"The climate crisis means hunger and death for many people in my country and across Africa."

Civil society leaders and representatives from companies like Unilever and PepsiCo spoke about corporate responsibility in making trade and commerce less of a burden on nature.

Speaking about using satellite technology to monitor global landscapes, the director and founder of Google Earth Outreach urged better stewardship of the world's forests.

"We don't want to be writing the obituary of our planet in high resolution," Rebecca Moore said.

Dozens of countries commit to phasing out coal, except Australia

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(Grist) Report: Climate Misinformation On Facebook Viewed 1.4 Million Times Daily

Grist - Joseph Winters

AP Photo / Jeff Chiu

Facebook may be changing its corporate name, but it’s still peddling climate misinformation.

According to a new report from the advocacy organization Stop Funding Heat and the ad hoc group of activists called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, the platform’s existing mechanisms don’t go nearly far enough to rein in false or misleading content about climate change.

The groups analyzed 48,700 posts published between January and August 2021, covering 196 Facebook groups and pages that are known to publish false climate claims.

They identified 38,925 instances of climate misinformation — only 3.6 percent of which had been evaluated by Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers. Eighty-five percent of the content bore no link to the platform’s Climate Science Center, a tool the company launched ostensibly to provide Facebook users with “factual resources from the world’s leading climate organizations.”

“The extent of climate misinformation on Facebook’s platform is a lot more than they are giving away,” said Sean Buchan, Stop Funding Heat’s research and partnerships manager and a lead author of the report.

According to the report, this mostly unfiltered climate misinformation was viewed up to 1.36 million times daily over the past eight months — nearly 14 times the alleged daily user traffic to Facebook’s climate science information hub.

These findings build on the scientific community’s growing antipathy toward the social network and its role in proliferating misinformation. Thanks, in part, to Facebook’s recommendation algorithms, conspiracy theories have reverberated rapidly throughout the platform — whether it’s QAnon nonsense or baseless claims about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.

Facebook’s parent company, now called Meta, has taken some steps to address their misinformation problem, including the launch of a third-party fact-checking program in 2016, as well as creating topical information centers meant to connect users with reputable news and information sources. There’s one for COVID-19, for example, and another for voting and election information.

Demonstrators in London protest climate misinformation on Facebook, Google, and YouTube. Ollie Millington / Getty Images

However, critics say that these efforts still don’t go far enough.

Reflecting on the shortcomings of the company’s Climate Science Center — launched in September 2020 — Buchan did not mince words. “Either they don’t care or they don’t know how to fix it,” he said in a statement tied to the new report.

Granted, climate misinformation is not coming from Meta/Facebook itself. The report by Stop Funding Heat and the Real Facebook Oversight Board found that one-fifth of the groups and pages they analyzed could be classified as “full-time” or “dedicated” misinformers which regularly posted overtly false content. Not even one-tenth of these groups’ posts had a fact-checking label applied, and only 10.6 percent had a link to the Climate Science Center.

The report also identified “subtler” forms of climate information that were able to bypass Facebook’s fact checks. This content, which accounted for the vast majority of misinformation in the analysis, included posts containing links to far-right news sites like Breitbart, or flawed reasoning from media personalities.

For example: “Better start saving up for your electric car,” read one post from the conservative commentator Glenn Beck, linking to an article claiming that U.S. efforts to slash emissions would be economically burdensome. (In reality, failure to act on climate change is projected to cost the global economy up to $23 trillion annually by 2050.)

Another post from Australian senator Malcolm Roberts incorrectly suggested that snowy weather disproved global warming. (Weather is not the same as climate; even though it still snows, global average temperatures have already risen by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.)

Facebook did not flag either post for a third-party fact check. As Stop Funding Heat discussed in a previous report in May 2021, this may be due to loopholes in Facebook’s fact-checking policies, which until August shielded content that was deemed to be “opinion.” (The same set of rules continues to exempt politicians from ever being fact-checked.)

In response to the study, Meta expressed concerns about the authors’ approach, saying that the report used “made up numbers and a flawed methodology to suggest content on Facebook is misinformation when it’s really just posts these groups disagree with politically.”

Over the past year, Meta has repeatedly stated its commitment to climate action. It reached net-zero carbon emissions in 2020 and recently announced it was operating on 100 percent renewable energy.

Mark Zuckerberg, chair and CEO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company. AP Photo / Esteban Felix

Jake Carbone, a senior data analyst at the nonprofit think tank InfluenceMap who was uninvolved with the new report, said that these efforts are incommensurate with the scale of change needed to address the urgent problem of climate misinformation.

“When stories look back on the impact that Facebook has had, they’re not going to talk about the emissions that came from its servers,” he said. “It’s really important to look at the impact that its information ecosystem is having.” The report identified a number of measures, mostly involving greater transparency, that could help Meta address Facebook’s misinformation problem.

The authors called for the company to make its definition of climate misinformation public and share internal research about how misinformation spreads on its platform. They also suggested implementing a total ban on climate misinformation in paid advertising — a method by which millions of viewers are exposed to anti-climate action messaging.

“This content causes harm,” Buchan said, adding that without much stronger efforts and transparency from Facebook’s parent company, government regulators may need to step in. In the lead-up to the major climate conference known as COP26, he said, other big tech companies have put out new efforts to combat climate misinformation.

Last month, Google announced a pledge to demonetize climate denial content from its video platform, YouTube. And this week, Twitter announced a new policy of “pre-bunking” climate disinformation in an attempt to get ahead of false content before users see it.

Meta, however, seems determined to double down on familiar Facebook tactics. In September the company announced a $1 million investment in a new fact-checking grant program; earlier this week (timed with the start of COP26) it pledged a series of initiatives to drive more Facebook users to the Climate Science Center and suggest ways for Messenger and Instagram users to shrink their carbon footprint.

But critics say these programs are unlikely to change the underlying misinformation problems highlighted in Stop Funding Heat and the Real Facebook Oversight Board’s report.

“It’s a distinct lack of humility during this time,” Buchan said. “We’re hoping that Facebook can take leadership on this issue before it gets a lot worse.”

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