Australian PM Malcolm
Turnbull spoke to Pacific Island leaders, including the PM of the Cook
Islands Henry Puna, in Pohnpei, Micronesia. Picture: Lyndon
Mechielsen/News Corp. Source:News Corp Australia
THERE is “no more pressing need” in
the region than climate change, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has told
Pacific leaders in Micronesia.
Mr Turnbull announced $300 million to help the Pacific “manage climate change and improve disaster resilience”.
The
Prime Minister landed in Pohnpei on Friday for his third round of
regional talks — having visited Hangzhou in China for the G20 and
Vientiane in Laos for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
summit.
“Over the next four years we’ll provide $300 million to
Pacific island countries including $75 million for disaster
preparedness. This is an additional $80 million on the current levels,”
he said.
Mr Turnbull also said Australia would ratify the Paris climate change agreement this year or early next year.
“We
will ratify it as soon as parliamentary processes allow ... Its
ratification is not controversial,” he told the Pacific Island Forum in
Pohnpei.
Earlier Mr Turnbull met with Federated States of
Micronesia Peter Christian; Mr Christian said he was ashamed Micronesia
did not have an embassy in Australia and that he would like to find “a
little building somewhere in Canberra”.
The two also discussed the
Pacific patrol vessels Australia will build, which will replace the
existing boats used to stop illegal fishing in the area, for search and
rescue, and for national security.
Held in the backdrop of green
hills, blue water and palm trees, Mr Turnbull looked decidedly relaxed
as he sported a green and blue leaf motif shirt at the 47th Pacific
Islands Forum — themed ‘Small and Far: Challenge for Growth”.
Speaking in the lead-up to the forum, FSM Vice President Yosiwo
George said due to the distance and smallness of forum countries they
face transportation, economic growth and development and foreign
investment barriers. “Many of our economies have the same
characteristics: low productivity, low growth, and an inefficient public
sector involvement in job creation,” he said.
How to solve these
issues as well as grappling with the increasing threat of climate change
and disaster mitigation will top the forum’s agenda.
According to
the World Bank, FSM already incurs, on average, $US8.8 million ($A11.5
million) per year (about 3.1 per of GDP) in losses due to typhoons,
earthquakes and tsunamis.
Climate change will only increase this
vulnerability — resulting in more intense typhoons, sea level rises
storm surges, floods and droughts — adversely impacting agriculture,
fisheries, coastal zones and water resources.
Malcolm Turnbull will
discuss the increasing impacts of climate change with Pacific Island
leaders in Pohnpei, Micronesia. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/News Corp. Source:News Corp Australia
On the opening day of the forum on Thursday, Papua New Guinea Prime
Minister Peter O’Neill heralded the recent commitment by the United
States and China to ratify the Paris Agreement — something Australia
aims to do by the end of the year.
“We must continue to show leadership and encourage all countries to ratify the agreement,” Mr O’Neill added.
In
a report released earlier this week, Oxfam Australia said Australia was
not doing enough in the Pacific to help them battle the effects of
climate change and called on the government to commit $A3.2 billion by
2020.
Mr Turnbull has already flagged that he will be announcing a
“substantial” assistance package at the forum, but details are yet to
be released. Australia will also be giving up to 21 patrol boats to
Pacific Island countries to promote air surveillance to monitor illegal
maritime activities.
On Thursday Mr Turnbull’s invitation to South-East Asian leaders to attend a special meeting in Australia has been enthusiastically received.
Mr Turnbull invited leaders to a special Australia-ASEAN summit in 2018.
“That
invitation has been received with great enthusiasm and we look forward
to that as another building block in this already very strong
relationship,” he told reporters in Vientiane on Thursday.
Morale is falling among CSIRO workers and staff
optimism about the future of the research organisation is low, according
to a staff survey.
The survey commissioned by the organisation
also reveals a massive disconnect between the organisation's management
and its staff overall.
It comes as the organisation prepares to axe hundreds of jobs, largely in the oceans, atmosphere, land and water climate science teams.
The
survey found 97 per cent of the leadership team believed in the next
year CSIRO would change for the better — compared to just 21 per cent of
staff who shared that view.
Staff at CSIRO are half as optimistic
for the future compared to other organisations in Australia and similar
research institutions around the world.
More than 3400, or around 64 per cent of staff, participated in the survey in July this year.
It
sets out the scale of the task at hand for chief executive Larry
Marshall, who has just had his contract renewed by the board until the
end of the decade.
"Dr Marshall has our support to continue to
implement [the] Strategy 2020," CSIRO chairman David Thodey said in an
email to staff.
In another report released today, a review of the decision-making
processes that led to the controversial job cuts by consultants Ernst
and Young found oversights in governance and risk management.
It
found consistent problems in the way management handled the cuts, known
internally as the Science Prioritisation and Implementation (SPI)
process.
The review recommends CSIRO "reassess the existing organisational
structure and practices … to provide appropriate management and
coordination to all phases of the SPI process".
"The lack of
proper planning and assignment of responsibility of each phase of the
SPI process … led to perceived levels of inadequacy in rigour and
consistency of Executive Team decisions," the consultant's report found.
"There
was also limited documentation of the role each of these key
stakeholders had to play; when they should be involved; or how they
should coordinate activity.
"There was found to be a lack of rigour and protocols regarding the documentation of key meetings and decisions."
CSIRO
said in its initial response to the review that by the end of the year,
the chief executive would "continue to assess the appropriateness of
the current organisation structure and practices and implement changes
accordingly".
New York Times - Julie Hirschfeld Davis | Mark Landler | Coral Davenport
MIDWAY
ATOLL — Seventy-four years ago, a naval battle off this remote spit of
land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean changed the course of World War
II. Last week, President Obama
flew here to swim with Hawaiian monk seals and draw attention to a
quieter war — one he has waged against rising seas, freakish storms,
deadly droughts and other symptoms of a planet choking on its own fumes.
Bombs
may not be falling. The sound of gunfire does not concentrate the mind.
What Mr. Obama has seen instead are the charts and graphs of a warming
planet. "And they're terrifying," he said in a recent interview in
Honolulu.
"What makes climate change
difficult is that it is not an instantaneous catastrophic event," he
said. "It's a slow-moving issue that, on a day-to-day basis, people
don't experience and don't see."
In an exclusive interview on his legacy, President Obama speaks to The Times's Mark Landler and Coral Davenport on climate change while visiting Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Photo by A.J. Chavar/The New York Times.
Climate change, Mr. Obama often says, is the greatest long-term threat facing the world, as well as a danger already manifesting itself
as droughts, storms, heat waves and flooding. More than health care,
more than righting a sinking economic ship, more than the historic first
of an African-American president, he believes that his efforts to slow
the warming of the planet will be the most consequential legacy of his
presidency.
During
his seven and a half years in office, Mr. Obama said, a majority of
Americans have come to believe "that climate change is real, that it's
important and we should do something about it." He enacted rules to cut
planet-heating emissions across much of the United States economy, from cars to coal plants. He was a central broker of the Paris climate agreement, the first accord committing nearly every country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Air Force One over Midway Atoll, which Mr. Obama visited last week to expand the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Credit A.J. Chavar/The New York Times
But
while climate change has played to Mr. Obama's highest ideals — critics
would call them messianic impulses — it has also exposed his
weaknesses, namely an inability to forge consensus, even within his own
party, on a problem that demands a bipartisan response.
He
acknowledged that his rallying cry to save the planet had not
galvanized Americans. He has been harshly criticized for policies that
objectors see as abuses of executive power and far too burdensome for
the economy.
That
has made Mr. Obama's record on climate curiously contradictory, marked
by historic achievements abroad and frustrating setbacks at home. The
threat of global warming inspired Mr. Obama to conduct some of the most
masterful diplomacy of his presidency, which has bound the United States
into a web of agreements and obligations overseas. Yet his
determination to act alone inflamed his opponents, helped polarize the
debate on climate change and will carry a significant economic cost.
Mr. Obama chalks up the contradictions both to politics and to the amorphous, unseen nature of the threat.
"It feels like, 'Meh, we can put this off a little bit,'" he said.
The
president spoke in a cottage on a Marine base that overlooks Kaneohe
Bay in his home state, Hawaii. Angry waves crashed on the rocks below
the house, the sea churned by one of two hurricanes spinning close to
the island. Hawaii, as one of Mr. Obama's climate advisers pointed out,
normally does not get back-to-back hurricanes.
"When
you see severe environmental strains of one sort or another on
cultures, on civilizations, on nations, the byproducts of that are
unpredictable and can be very dangerous," Mr. Obama said. "If the
current projections, the current trend lines on a warming planet
continue, it is certainly going to be enormously disruptive worldwide."
'All Bets Are Off'
Eight
years ago, when Mr. Obama ran for president against Senator John McCain
of Arizona, both men had essentially the same position on global
warming: It is caused by humans, and Congress should enact legislation
to cap greenhouse gas emissions and force polluters to buy and trade
permits that would slowly lower overall emissions of climate-warming
gases.
But in the summer of 2010, a cap-and-trade bill Mr. Obama had tried to push through Congress failed, blocked by senators from both parties.
"One
would have hoped for transformational leadership, in the way J.F.K.
would have done it," said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
A coal-burning power plant in Buchanan County, Va. Mr. Obama has introduced rules that could force hundreds of such plants to close. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times
That domestic defeat was compounded by failure on the world stage after efforts to enact a highly anticipated United Nations climate change treaty in Copenhagen fell apart in 2009.
By the fall of 2010, Tea Party "super PACs"
supported by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch had
seized on cap-and-trade as a political weapon, with attacks that helped
Republicans take control of the House.
Polls
showed that few Americans thought of climate change as a high public
policy priority, and the percentage of voters who accepted the reality
that it was caused by humans had tumbled.
"There
is the notion that there's something I might have done that would
prevent Republicans to deny climate change," Mr. Obama said. "I guess
hypothetically, maybe there was some trick up my sleeve that would have
cast a spell on the Republican caucus and changed their minds."
In fact, some Republicans, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, were willing to go forward with a more limited climate bill
that would have restricted emissions only from power plants. But the
president's own party would not unify even around that, with Democrats
from industrial and coal states digging in against him. Ironically, Mr.
Obama would end up with regulations that narrowly target power plant
emissions.
"The
White House wanted 60 votes on climate, and they weren't interested in
Republican votes," Mr. Alexander said in an interview. "Now it's back to
power plant only. The lesson here is that if people who want a result
would be a little bit more flexible, they might actually get one."
In defeat, the president appeared cowed. Campaigning against Mitt Romney in 2012, he barely mentioned climate change.
But
soon after Election Day, Mr. Obama interrupted a broad discussion with
historians about the country's challenges with a surprising assertion.
Douglas Brinkley, a historian who attended the session, recalled, "Out
of nowhere, he said, 'If we don't do anything on the climate issue, all
bets are off.'"
Mr.
Obama, who understood that a legislative push would be fruitless, told
his advisers to figure out how to enact deep emissions cuts without Congress. They found a way through the Clean Air Act of 1970, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations on dangerous pollutants.
In 2014, Mr. Obama unveiled the first draft of what would become the Clean Power Plan: a set of Clean Air Act rules that could lead to the closing of hundreds of coal-fired power plants.
The move enraged critics, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, whose state relies heavily on coal.
Another critic, Laurence H. Tribe, likened the rules
to "burning the Constitution" — a charge that might have stung, since
Mr. Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar, was a mentor to Mr. Obama
at Harvard Law School.
Mr. Obama dismissed the criticism as the voice of Mr. Tribe's client, Peabody Energy, the nation's largest coal company, which filed for bankruptcy protection
in April. "You know, I love Larry," he said, but "when it comes to
energy issues, Larry has a history of representing fossil fuel
industries in big litigation cases."
The legality of the climate rules is likely to be decided by the Supreme Court, the composition of which depends on the outcome
of the presidential election. Deep-pocketed corporations will not give
up the legal fight easily, even after a Supreme Court decision, and
Republicans in Congress will continue their legislative attacks. If the
rules survive, they will almost certainly cost the coal industry
thousands of jobs.
"What
we owe the remaining people who are making a living mining coal is to
be honest with them," Mr. Obama said, "and to say that, look, the
economy is shifting. How we use energy is shifting. That's going to be
true here, but it's also going to be true internationally."
Scrutinizing the Science
Few
people would have described Mr. Obama as a climate evangelist when he
ran for the White House in 2008. While he invoked the rising seas and
heating planet to thrill his young supporters, he did not have the long
record of climate activism of Al Gore or John Kerry, who is now his
secretary of state. Like many things with Mr. Obama, his evolution on
climate was essentially an intellectual journey.
Mr.
Obama immersed himself in the scientific literature, which left little
doubt that the planet was warming at an accelerating rate. "My top
science adviser, John Holdren, periodically will issue some chart or
report or graph in the morning meetings," he said, "and they're
terrifying."
Unusual weather events like the floods that inundated Louisiana last month are occurring more frequently. Credit Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times
The
morning Mr. Obama unveiled the final version of the Clean Power Plan
last year, he summoned his senior climate adviser, Brian Deese, to the
Oval Office. Mr. Deese expected that the president would hand him some
last-minute changes to his speech. Instead, he brought up an article in
the journal Science on melting permafrost.
The research not only documented faster increases in temperatures, but also drew direct links between fossil fuel emissions and extreme weather.
Mr. Obama scrutinized reports like the 2014 National Climate Assessment, which tied climate change to events like flooding in Miami and longer, hotter heat waves in the Southwest.
"More
and more, there are events that are happening that are astoundingly
unusual, that knock your socks off, like the flooding in Louisiana,"
said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international
affairs at Princeton University. "Those are the kinds of events where
it's becoming possible to draw attribution."
Benjamin J. Rhodes, one of the president's closest aides, recalled Mr. Obama talking about "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,"
Jared Diamond's 2005 best seller, which explored the environmental
changes that wiped out ancient societies like Easter Island and
discussed how modern equivalents like climate change and overpopulation
could yield the same destruction.
The
president's Pacific roots also came into play. In Honolulu last week,
he told a meeting of Pacific Island leaders that few people understood
the stakes of climate change better than residents of their part of the
planet. Crops are withering in the Marshall Islands, he noted. Kiribati is buying property in another country for the day that its own land vanishes beneath the waves. And villagers in Fiji have been forced from their homes by high seas. Shifting monsoon patterns in South Asia could affect a billion people who depend on low-lying agriculture, Mr. Obama said in his interview.
"If
you have even a portion of those billion people displaced," he said,
"you now have the sorts of refugee crises and potential conflicts that
we haven't seen in our lifetimes."
"That," he added, "promises to make life a lot more difficult for our children and grandchildren."
Joining Forces With China
Mr.
Obama and Hillary Clinton never seem to tire of telling the story of
Copenhagen: In December 2009, with the climate conference on the verge
of failure, the two learned of a meeting of the leaders of Brazil,
China, India and South Africa, from which they had been pointedly
excluded. Elbowing their way past a Chinese security guard, they crashed
the meeting, and over the course of 90 minutes of tense negotiations
with the abashed leaders, they extracted an agreement to set goals for lowering emissions.
The
Europeans, who had been cut out of the talks, derided the deal as
toothless, but Mr. Obama learned from the experience. A global climate
accord could not simply be a compact among developed economies, he said.
It had to include the major developing economies, even if they resented
being held to standards that had never applied to the club of wealthy
nations. And any agreement had to be led by the two largest emitters,
the United States and China.
Mr.
Obama set about persuading President Xi Jinping of China to join the
United States in setting ambitious reduction targets for carbon
emissions. Tensions were already high over China's hacking of American companies, and the United States was balking at China's slow-motion colonization of the South China Sea. A casual, get-acquainted summit meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi at the Sunnylands estate in California in June 2013 had failed to break the ice.
Mr. Obama with President Xi Jinping of China in California in June 2013. Despite their differences, the two leaders have worked together on landmark agreements to address climate change. Credit Christopher Gregory/The New York Times
But
the meeting did produce one headline: an agreement to explore ways to
reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, known as HFCs, potent
planet-warming chemicals found in refrigerants. In hindsight, it would
prove significant. The final international accord on the chemicals is expected to be ratified next month in Rwanda.
"It
was a place Obama and Xi found some common ground," said John D.
Podesta, a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton whom Mr. Obama
recruited to lead his climate efforts in his second term. (Mr. Podesta
is now the chairman of Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign.)
Mr.
Podesta and Todd Stern, the State Department's climate envoy, began
arduous negotiations with China. They were backed by Mr. Kerry and Mr.
Obama, who sent Mr. Xi a letter with a proposal in which the United
States would pledge to increase its target for reducing carbon emissions
by 2025 if the Chinese pledged to cap and then gradually reduce their
emissions.
China
had historically resisted such agreements, but the air pollution there
had become so bad, Mr. Obama noted, that the most-visited Twitter page
in China was the daily air-quality monitor maintained by the United States Embassy in Beijing.
"One
of the reasons I think that China was prepared to go further than it
had been prepared to go previously," Mr. Obama said, "is that their
overriding concern tends to be political stability. Interestingly, one
of their greatest political vulnerabilities is the environment. People
who go to Beijing know that it can be hard to breathe."
The Chinese were also swayed by Mr. Obama's announcement
in 2014 of his regulations to reduce emissions from coal-fired power
plants, which gave Mr. Kerry and his team of climate diplomats the
leverage they needed in months of meetings with China. On Nov. 11, 2014,
after a quiet stroll across a bridge in the Chinese leadership compound
beside the Forbidden City, Mr. Xi and Mr. Obama sealed their agreement.
"By
locking in China," Mr. Obama said, "it now allowed me to go to India
and South Africa and Brazil and others and say to them: 'Look, we don't
expect countries with big poverty rates and relatively low per-capita
carbon emissions to do exactly the same thing that the United States or
Germany or other advanced countries are doing. But you've got to do
something.'"
A little more than a year later, in Paris, the United States led negotiations among 195 countries that resulted in the most significant climate change agreement in history. And this past weekend in Hangzhou, China, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi formally committed
their two nations to the Paris accord. For Mr. Obama, it was not just
redemption for Copenhagen, but a vindication of his theory of the United
States' role in the world.
"There
are certain things that the United States can do by itself," Mr. Obama
said. "But if we're going to actually solve a problem, then our most
important role is as a leader, vision setter and convener."
An Ambitious, Divisive Legacy
To
his successor, Mr. Obama leaves an ambitious and divisive legacy: a
raft of new emissions rules that promise to transform the United States
economy but are likely to draw continuing fire from Republicans, and an
aggressive — some say unrealistic — pledge made in Paris to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050.
Mr. Obama in a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, left, during the climate talks in Paris in December. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
All
of this, he acknowledges, could be undone at the ballot box. "I think
it's fair to say that if Donald Trump is elected, for example, you have a
pretty big shift now with how the E.P.A. operates," he said.
Mrs.
Clinton has embraced Mr. Obama's go-it-alone approach, promising to
meet and in some cases exceed his goals without trying to pass
cap-and-trade legislation. She is proposing marquee projects like
installing 500 million solar panels by 2020 and giving states and cities
$60 billion to invest in energy-efficient public transportation and
buildings.
"It will be first-order business," Mr. Podesta said.
But Mrs. Clinton will face the same partisan fire Mr. Obama has. He noted that, like him, Mrs. Clinton had been pilloried in coal country
for acknowledging that coal mining would have a declining role in a
21st-century economy. Mr. Obama's bet is that as his regulations get
woven into the fabric of the economy, they will be harder for anyone to
unwind. He says that his successor should promote past victories,
including those of Republicans like Richard M. Nixon and George Bush.
For
his part, Mr. Obama said he planned to stay active in fighting climate
change in his post-presidential life. During his tour of the wildlife on
Midway, he paused to make an improbable remark.
"My
hope," he said, "is that maybe as ex-president I can have a little more
influence on some of my Republican friends, who I think up until now
have been resistant to the science."
The leaders of the U.S. and China
committed their nations to the fight against global warming on Saturday
when they handed arcane but momentous documents to the United Nation's
top official.
The documents stated that the U.S. and China are ready to join a new
global warming pact, putting it on course to potentially become
international law before the end of 2016.
Largely because of global warming, this year is expected to be the hottest year on record, beating a heat record set last year, which beat the record set the year prior.
"We have a saying in America — that you need to put your money where
your mouth is," President Obama said during the joint media appearance
in China before G20 meetings began. "And when it comes to combatting
climate change, that's what we're doing, both the United States and
China. We're leading by example."
Leading — but how? The legal details are wonky but critical. Their
story begins in Paris, and it doesn't end in China. Let us explain.
What's the Paris agreement?
Finalized during U.N. talks in Paris
in December, the agreement sets out steps that each country will take
to tackle global warming. China and the U.S. are the world's worst
climate polluters, and the actions they have pledged are seen as crucial
to the success of the pact.
Pres. Obama shakes hands with UN official Ban Ki-moon on Saturday and hands key paperwork to him. Credit: How Hwee Young/Reuters
In Paris, the U.S. agreed to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution it releases in 2025 to about a quarter below its 2005 levels. China agreed to halt the growth in its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 — something it appears to have already achieved.
Even if those and other nations' promises under the Paris agreement
are kept, global temperatures may yet soar well above 2°C (3.6°F)
compared with pre-industrial times — roughly twice the amount of warming
recorded so far. Further climate negotiations in the years ahead will
aim to keep warming below that dangerous level.
What did Obama just do?
To formally join the Paris agreement, a country must file an
"instrument of ratification" with the United Nations. This is a signed
letter or document confirming that a country is ready to start living up
to its commitments under the pact.
America could have sent a bureaucrat to U.N. headquarters in New York
to quietly file such a letter. Instead, Obama handed America's
instrument of ratification directly to U.N. secretary general Ban
Ki-moon in front of the world's pressbefore meetings in China.
The high-profile ceremony was designed to send a signal to the world
that its two biggest climate polluters remain committed to working
together to solve the climate crisis, such as by supporting and
promoting solar and wind energy, which could encourage others to do the
same.
Is the Paris agreement an international treaty?
The Paris agreement is a binding treaty under the UN. But Americans
use the word "treaty" to describe an international agreement that the
U.S. Senate has agreed to join. Since Obama hasn't sought the blessing
of the Senate for the new climate pact, the White House has been shying
away from the use of the word "treaty."
Has the U.S. joined the Paris agreement now?
By submitting its instrument of ratification, the U.S. has indicated
that it is ready to join the Paris agreement. After a number of other
countries have done likewise, the agreement will "take force."
What does take force mean?
Once an international agreement takes force, countries agree to begin
enforcing the rules of it within their own borders. The UN is an
organization, not a government, and it can't force the U.S. or any other
country to take measures to protect the climate. But countries that
flout global agreements risk being ostracized or punished through
embargoes and trade agreements.
When will the Paris agreement take force?
If at least 55 countries, collectively producing at least 55 percent
of global climate pollution every year, file their instruments of ratification by Oct. 7,
then the Paris agreement will take force for those countries before the
next round of climate talks, scheduled for November. That currently
seems likely.
"Entry into force is important, because if that were to fail, or be
long delayed, that would sap confidence in the Paris process," said David Victor, an international relations professor at UC San Diego. "It's a visible sign of progress."
If the Paris agreement takes force before the November talks,
countries that have joined the agreement by that time will huddle during
the negotiations in a new decision-making committee. That would give
those countries more influence than others over how the agreement will
be implemented during the years to come.
Why isn't the Senate involved?
Under U.S. law, international agreements only require Senate approval if they force changes to domestic laws. In part because about half of the Senate publicly doubts climate science, the Paris agreement was legally crafted to allow Obama to sign it without Senate approval.
"More than 90 percent of international agreements the U.S. has joined
have followed the same executive process the president just completed
for the Paris Agreement, and did not require a trip through the Senate,"
said Alex Hanafi, an attorney at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.
Some aspects of the Paris agreement are legally binding — such as
requirements that countries publish information about their pollution
levels each year, and what they're doing to try to reduce that
pollution.
French leaders and UN official Ban Ki-moon applauding after a global climate agreement was struck in Paris in December. Credit: UNFCCC/Flickr
These are already requirements under existing U.S. law, and they
could give other countries confidence that Americans are living up to
their promises.
"Transparency is critical to accountability in international
agreements," Hanafi said. "The force of international law to compel
countries to comply with their agreements is limited."
Other aspects of the Paris agreement are not legally binding. Most
notably, hitting a pollution target that a country set for itself under
the agreement remains entirely voluntary.
Not only do non-binding pollution goals circumvent the potential need
for Senate approval of the Paris agreement, many experts say they could
lead to better results. That's because the approach encourages
countries to aim for difficult goals without fear of being punished if
they fail.
What's Obama's hurry?
As greenhouse gases have piled up in the atmosphere, climate change
has shifted from being a theory about a future threat to a hazardous
fact of modern life. Temperatures have risen nearly 2°F since pre-industrial times, and the effects on droughts, heatwaves and floods are becoming clear around the world.
But this is about more than just science and the fate of humanity.
Obama is working to establish a climate legacy before he leaves office
in January. Democrats facing reelection are finding broad, if tepid,
electoral support for efforts to slow global warming.
Although Obama seemingly paid little attention to climate change
during his first term, climate action has been a defining focus of his
second term. Obama's diplomats played crucial roles in encouraging other
countries to show high levels of ambition during the Paris
negotiations.
There's also the question of Obama's successor. If voters elect
Democrat Hillary Clinton, America's newfound global leadership on
climate action is unlikely to change much. If Republican Donald Trump is
voted into office, the U.S. could quickly abandon that leadership, as
Trump has said global warming is a hoax.
Could a Trump administration withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement?
If the Paris agreement takes legal force this year, it would be
difficult for the U.S. to withdraw from it before four years have passed
— the length of a presidential term. Of course, that doesn't mean that a
Trump administration would be forced to take climate change seriously.
"Speculation on this point comes with a huge dose of uncertainty because of Mr. Trump's unpredictability," said Robert Stavins, a Harvard economics professor who is an expert on global environmental agreements.
As president, Trump "could simply not work hard to achieve" America's
goals under the Paris agreement, Stavins said. He could also appoint a
Supreme Court justice who would help to invalidate the federal pollution
rules that are key to achieving America's commitments.
Even without withdrawing from the Paris agreement, "Trump could all
but ensure that the U.S. [climate pledge] would not be achieved,"
Stavins said.
Could the Paris agreement end up saving the world?
The new agreement puts global pressure on countries to clean up their
heavy industries and to protect the climate, but it contains huge gaps.
It doesn't directly affect international shipping or aviation, both of which are heavy polluters, for which separate agreements are being pursued. Efforts to reduce a potent type of climate pollution released from refrigerators and air conditioners are being pursued through negotiations under yet another agreement.
"Of course, the Paris Agreement alone won't solve the climate
crisis," Obama said on Saturday. "But it does establish an enduring
framework that enables countries to ratchet down their carbon emissions
over time, and to set more ambitious targets as technology advances."
Australia has sought to water down climate declarations made through the Pacific Islands Forum.
AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will have some explaining to do when he attends the Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting in Pohnpei, Micronesia, this week.
Australia's continued determination to dig up coal, while refusing to
dig deep to tackle climate change, has put it increasingly at odds with
world opinion. Nowhere is this more evident than when Australian
politicians meet with their Pacific island counterparts.
It is widely acknowledged that Pacific island states are at the front
line of climate change. It is perhaps less well known that, for a
quarter of a century, Australia has attempted to undermine their demands
in climate negotiations at the United Nations.
The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – organised around an annual meeting
between island leaders and their counterparts from Australia and New
Zealand – is the Pacific region's premier political forum. But island
nations have been denied the chance to use it to press hard for their
shared climate goals, because Australia has used the PIF to weaken the
regional declarations put forward by Pacific nations at each key
milestone in the global climate negotiation process.
In the run-up to the 1997 UN Kyoto climate summit, Pacific island
leaders lobbied internationally for new binding targets to reduce
emissions. However, that year's PIF leaders' statement was toned down, simply calling for "recognition of climate change impacts".
Likewise, in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen talks, Pacific island countries called for states to reduce emissions by 95% by 2050. But at that year's PIF meeting in Cairns, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, convinced leaders to scale back the proposed target to 50%. Pacific media branded the outcome "a death warrant for Pacific Islanders".
Ahead of last year's Paris summit, Australia again exercised its "veto power"
over Pacific climate diplomacy. Over the preceding years Pacific island
leaders had made their climate positions quite clear, both at UN
discussions in New York and in a string of declarations including the Melanesian Spearhead Group Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, the Polynesian Leaders' Declaration on Climate Change, and the Suva Declaration on Climate Change.
Nevertheless, the official climate declaration
issued after last year's PIF in Port Moresby was significantly weaker
in several key areas. Most notably, it failed to call for global
negotiations to limit global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial
levels. This is a threshold that Pacific island states have consistently argued should not be crossed, because that would threaten the very existence of low-lying states such as Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands.
These countries are understandably very unwilling to compromise on this position. At the Port Moresby meeting, Kiribati President Anote Tong suggested
that Australia should leave the forum altogether if it was not prepared
to back the islands' positions in global climate negotiations.
There is little doubt that Australian attempts to gag its Pacific
island neighbours in these negotiations have aroused anger in the
region. This has been compounded by the fact that Australians are among the world's highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters and the Australian government is committed to increasing exports of the dirtiest source of emissions – coal.
Pacific perspectives on Australia's coal addiction
If Pacific islands are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, there is little doubt that most of the world's coal must stay in the ground. No serious policymaker disputes the basic fact that our carbon budget is severely limited.
There is no scenario in which building new coal mines, and expanding
existing ones, is compatible with effectively tackling climate change.
Pacific island governments are calling for a global move away from
coal. In September 2015, the Pacific Islands Development Forum (a new
regional body that meets without Australian representation) called for
an urgent international moratorium on the development and expansion of
fossil-fuel-extracting industries, particularly new coal mines.
Leaders from the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu issued a similar statement on the sidelines of the Port Moresby summit. President Tong wrote personally to world leaders before the Paris talks, asking them to support the moratorium.
Australia's view could scarcely be more different. It is the world's largest coal exporter, and both major political parties are financially backed by the coal lobby. Rather than move away from coal, the government is seeking to expand exports dramatically, with public subsidies and taxpayer-funded infrastructure.
Australia wants to keep its coal rolling. CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
These exports are still largely shielded from discussions about
Australia's contribution to climate change. Because Australian coal is
burned in China, Japan and elsewhere, the emissions are ascribed to
those nations.
In 2016 Australia will export around 1 billion tonnes of carbon
dioxide emissions, embodied in coal. By some estimates, over the next
five years Australia's "carbon exports" will overtake those from Saudi oil.
Australia's coal addiction has implications for its relations with
Pacific island neighbours. For a start, it has undermined any claim that
decisions made at the Pacific Islands Forum represent the "true"
Pacific voice on climate change.
The ramifications may go deeper still. While Pacific leaders still
accept the need to meet with their wealthier and more powerful neighbour
– Australia is a crucial partner in times of natural disaster and a key
source of development aid – joint decisions made at the PIF are
beginning to ring hollow. Island states are increasingly using other multilateral forums to pursue their interests.
Pacific leadership and global climate diplomacy
To be sure, Pacific island states have long pursued independent
diplomatic strategies to tackle the root causes of climate change. The
first UN proposal for multilateral climate action – which later became
the Kyoto Protocol – was proposed in 1994 by Pacific diplomats working through the auspices of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).
Twenty-one years later, Pacific leaders were again crucial in securing the Paris Agreement, the first truly global agreement for tackling climate change. Last week US President Barack Obama told Pacific island leaders in Hawaii that agreement would have been impossible "without the incredible efforts and hard work of the island nations".
Pacific island states have been able to exercise global climate
leadership despite Australia's efforts. How Pacific island countries
pursued recent climate diplomacy is instructive. In the lead-up to the
Paris talks, Pacific ambassadors to New York met regularly as the Pacific Small Island Developing States (P-SIDS) grouping, where previously they were more likely to meet under the auspices of the PIF.
Last year, the P-SIDS ambassadors wrote a "zero draft" of a Pacific
island declaration on the global climate change negotiations, which
ultimately became the strongly worded Suva Declaration on Climate Change.
It had been finalised at the 2015 Pacific Islands Development Forum
leaders' meeting and released just days before the watered-down Port
Moresby statement. Unsurprisingly, Pacific states pursued the Suva
position once they arrived in Paris.
These tactics proved crucial to the advancement of Pacific islands'
position in the global climate talks. But Pacific states also acted on
their own. Remarkably, the Marshall Islands was almost single-handedly responsible for the successful negotiation of an ambitious Paris Agreement.
Six months before the December Paris conference, the Marshall Islands government convened a series of private meetings
that paved the way for the formation of a "high-ambition coalition" of
climate-progressive states. By the second week of the summit, this group
had swelled to include the United States, the European Union and more
than 100 other countries. This coalition ultimately had a crucial say in
formalising the agreement's 1.5℃ goal.
The Marshall Islands helped to galvanise what became an inexorable push towards a 1.5-degree target in Paris. Reuters/Jacky Naegelen
In the months before the Paris talks, Australia was not invited to join the high-ambition coalition. It attempted to join right at the summit's tail end, but was later snubbed by coalition members at the Paris deal's signing ceremony in New York in April.
There seems little doubt that Australia was left out in the
diplomatic cold precisely because its climate "ambitions" are so
dismally low. Indeed, when Australia announced its intended emissions
targets for the Paris Agreement, the Marshall Islands' foreign minister,
Tony de Brum, complained
that if the rest of the world followed Australia's lead, his country,
and other vulnerable nations on Australia's doorstep, would disappear.
The contrast could not be starker. While Pacific leaders are praised
for their efforts to develop global climate solutions, Australia faces ignominy.
Unless Australia changes direction, it will continue to be seen as an
irresponsible middle power – a rogue state undermining global efforts to
tackle climate change.
Australian governments will also find it increasingly hard to
convince Pacific island countries they are a friend as well as a
neighbour.
A month before the 2008 presidential election,
sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright (of Oklahoma State and
Michigan State, respectively) published a prescient study on the rapidly growing partisan gap on issues of environmental and climate protection.
They concluded by speculating that a win by Sen. John
McCain, an outspoken climate champion, could represent "a sea change
among Republican Party leadership on the issue of climate change,"
whereas an Obama victory "could see Republican trends toward increased
skepticism continue for the next several years.
Well, we know how that turned out.
Now Dunlap and McCright (along with Oklahoma State's Jerrod Yarosh) have updated their study, giving usa fresh look at public opinion on climate change at the end of the Obama era.
The findings are dismal, if not very surprising:Polarization
only accelerated after 2008, the gap between the parties is wider than
ever, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.
The large and growing partisan gap on climate change
Let's look at some charts from the study, and then we'll have a think about what it means for US politics.
First, here's a chart showing how League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores, which track the voting records of members of Congress, have changed over time.
As you can see, environmental issues were reasonably
bipartisan back in the 1970s. The parties began to drift apart in 1980,
and then more sharply when Bill Clinton became president in 1992. In
2008, when Obama took office, there was another lurch, and now
Republicans in Congress are very close to unified in opposition to all
environmental legislation.
So, yes, polarization among US federal legislators has most definitely grown more extreme, to near-comical levels.
But what about public opinion? For that, we shift over to
Gallup, which has been asking a set of climate-related questions pretty
consistently since the late 1990s. It has the best longitudinal data
available.
Here are responses to a question about whetherthe effects of climate change have already begun:
The partisan gap grows in the 2000s and then widens
further in 2008. Democratic answers fluctuate, but overall they trend
higher (though not yet reaching the heights of 2007, when Al Gore's
movie came out). Republicans never again reach their peak of 2007, or
their even higher peak of 1997.
Are changes in climate mostly due to human activity?
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
Again, the partisan gap grows wider in 2008, with
Democratic numbers rising and Republican numbers never reaching their
2001 peak.
Do you personally worry about climate change?
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
The lines on this one look somewhat different, obviously
shaped by the financial crisis, which left little room for additional
worries. The size of the gap peaks in 2007, but remains large.
And so on through various other climate questions. The authors sum up the size of the gaps over time:
On every question, the partisan gap grew between 2001 and
2008, and grew again (with one exception, where it remained steady)
from 2008 to 2016.
What's more, the gap between self-identified conservative
Republicans and liberal Democrats is far larger than the above numbers
indicate, sometimes reaching into the 60s. And it's the committed
partisans who are most likely to vote and wield influence over
policymakers.
Taking these trends at face value, it looks like the GOP
is going be under continuing pressure to keep climate skepticism central
to Republican orthodoxy, at least for the foreseeable future.
Hopes for reducing polarization are mostly forlorn
There are three sources of hope for reducing polarization in the short term. Dunlap et. al. shoot them all down.
The first is education — better informing the public about climate science. The much-derided "information deficit model"
has proven a failure in practice. "Two decades of news coverage and
educational campaigns since 1997 have produced only modest increases in
Americans' belief in the reality and human cause of climate change, with
gains among Democrats often offset by declines among Republicans," the
authors write.
The second is better "framing," pitching climate to
conservatives in terms more likely to appeal to their values — climate
as a national security threat, or an economic opportunity, or a threat
to God's covenant. However, dozens of studies have found small or
negligible effects from these strategies. "The evidence so far gives
little basis for optimism," they conclude.
The third is personal experiences with extreme weather
events, which, it is often hoped, will drive home the reality of climate
change. But what evidence exists shows that such experiences have
little-to-no effect on climate beliefs, especially among committed
partisans. People interpret their experiences through their preexisting
worldviews.
"Again," Dunlap et. al. write, "the evidence thus far does
not provide much support for optimism."
No help. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Why is polarization so resistant to change?
The reason increasing polarization on climate change remains so resilient is that it's not really about climate change. The issue has been swept up in a much larger, broader trend of polarization in US politics (which I have written about before).
As Americans sort themselves into camps, both ideologically and
geographically, political orientation becomes more and more a matter of identity — or as sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called it in her excellent account of white working-class communities in Louisiana, "deep story."
Skepticism toward climate change and hostility toward
climate policy have been yoked to conservative identity. To reject them
is to risk rejecting that identity and harming the social relationships
that come with it. And most people have much stronger commitment to
their core identity than they do to any individual political issue.
Once an issue has been yoked to our core identities, we
stop reasoning like scientists (gathering evidence, seeing where it
leads) and start reasoning like lawyers (start with a conclusion, work
backward to build a case). Yale psychologist Dan Kahan calls it "motivated reasoning"—
"the unconscious tendency of individuals to process information in a
manner that suits some end or goal extrinsic to the formation of
accurate beliefs." In this case, the "end or goal" is preserving
commitments core to identity.
Studies show that a college education and a
self-identified understanding of the issue both tend to raise Democrats'
concern over climate change, but the same factors have no effect,
sometimes even a negative effect, on a Republican's concern. Why?
Because Democrats, for basically tribal reasons, are likely to be open
to the idea that climate change is a problem. Republicans, for basically
tribal reasons, are unlikely to be open to the idea. A committed
Republicans is apt to learn more about climate change in order to bolster the skeptical case.
Core identity commitments are extremely difficult to
dislodge. Insofar as they shift, the change tends to originate inside
the tribe.
The forlorn hope of focusing on clean energy
Many people (myself included)
have noted that, despite their partisan opposition to climate action as
such, pluralities and sometimes even majorities of Republicans favor
many policies that would have the effect of reducing carbon emissions —
local pollution regulations and clean energy support, especially.
Perhaps there's hope there?
Dunlap and crew say no:
[A]s Lilliana Mason and other political analysts note,
individuals can hold relatively moderate positions on many issues and
yet be strong partisans committed to keeping the other party out of
office. Thus, as long as rank-and-file Republicans vote for conservative
candidates, and those candidates remain steadfast in opposition to
climate change action, the former's receptivity to climate-friendly
policies remains almost irrelevant—for the Congress they help elect will
be highly unlikely to give such policies any consideration.
This is an important point to understand. Even someone
with moderate opinions on particular issues is subject to the growing
influence of "negative partisanship."
In a 2015 paper,
political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster showed that
"since 1992 and especially since 2008 … growing proportions of strong,
weak and leaning party identifiers have come to perceive important
differences between the parties and to hold extremely negative opinions
of the opposing party. This has led to sharp increases in party loyalty
and straight ticket voting across all categories of party
identification."
Even self-identified moderates, centrists, and independents tend to vote like partisans these days.
And parties have shifted toward parliamentary-style
discipline. If you vote for a Republican, even if you have moderate
inclinations on clean energy and pollution regulations, even if the
particular Republican you vote for has such inclinations, what you get
is the party. And the party, institutionally speaking, is united against
climate action.
(The inverse is not quite as true yet of Democrats, on
climate anyway. There are still holdouts in coal and heavy manufacturing
states.)
Political parties are generally shaped by a few core
commitments, the concerns of big donors, and the influence of organized,
engaged constituencies. The GOP's core ideological opposition to taxes
and regulations, its big fossil fuel donors, and its most intense
constituencies are all pushing it strongly toward skepticism, denial,
and opposition on climate policy.
What to do?
This is all a bit depressing and hopeless. What to make of it?
Most of all, it clarifies the stakes of the 2016
elections (if additional clarity was needed). The continued
hyper-polarization around climate change means it matters very, very
much for climate policy which party controls Congress and the presidency
for the next four years.
"Whether, and how, individual Americans vote this
November," Dunlap et. al. write, "may well be the most consequential
climate-related decision most of them will have ever taken."
But do we have to accept that we're stuck with partisan
polarization in the world's richest country, toward the biggest
challenge our species has ever faced? Is there nothing that can cleave
climate off from the culture war, from the role it now plays in
conservative identity?
Longtime readers know I'm very, very skeptical
toward most such efforts. But I'll discuss a few thoughts along those
lines in a subsequent post, which will address the question of just how
Republican sentiment on decarbonization might be shifted.
