16/03/2019

Climate Change Strikes Across Australia See Student Protesters Defy Calls To Stay In School

ABC News


Students strike for climate change (ABC News)

Key points:
  • Students have used a combination of humour, passion and urgency in protests across the country
  • The protests were inspired by the actions of a 16-year-old Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, in Stockholm
  • PM Scott Morrison objected to a previous similar protest, saying he didn't want to see "schools being turned into parliaments"
Tens of thousands of young Australians have walked out of their classrooms today to stage protests in capital cities demanding action on climate change.
Rallies began in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra and Hobart outside state parliament buildings and town halls.
Students have also marched at rallies across regional Australia, with large crowds protesting at Geelong, Byron Bay, Coffs Harbour, Cairns and Townsville.
Many used humour to get their point across, with posters referencing internet memes and suggesting fail grades for the nation's political efforts on climate change policy.
Others were more serious — one poster urged politicians to "panic" about addressing climate change and another warned "there is no Planet B".
Melbourne protest organisers said about 20,000 people attended the rally outside Parliament House. (ABC News: Stephanie Anderson)
In Melbourne, protesters filled Spring Street in the CBD, blocking traffic and trams and chanting "this is what democracy looks like" and "students united will never be divided".
Milou Albrecht and Harriet O'Shea Carre, both 14, travelled from Castlemaine in central Victoria to march in Melbourne.
Harriet O'Shea Carre and Milou Albrecht travelled with 400 of their fellow students to make the Melbourne march. (ABC News)
The pair started the rally last year and were joined by 400 others from Castlemaine Secondary School.
"Together our collective voice is very strong and powerful," Harriet said.
What do the students want?
  • Stop the Adani coal mine in central Queensland
  • No new coal or gas projects
  • 100 per cent renewables by 2030
Hobart College student Imogen Viner said she was concerned about the future of forests in Tasmania.
"Specifically for Tassie, we want to look at stopping how much forestry she's got going on," she said.
Frida Elliott, 15, said she did not care whether her school supported her presence at the Hobart rally.
"We're told we shouldn't be missing class time by our teachers … but there's nothing they can do about it and they've taken a step back and realised the power we have here," she said.
Rallies were also held in Darwin, Brisbane and Perth.
Hundreds of students defied school warnings to attend a rally at Peregian Beach on the Sunshine Coast. (ABC News: Megan Kinninment)
There were 50 rallies planned across the country for students to protest against what they see as the destruction of their future.
Meanwhile, New Zealand rallies have seen strong turnouts, with a student march blocking streets in Wellington this morning.
Thousands of protesters gathered in Perth's CBD to join the nationwide movement. (ABC News: Evan Morgan Grahame)
Students 'on the right side of history'
The protests were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg, who pledged to protest outside the Parliament in Stockholm until the country caught up on its commitments under the Paris Agreement.
Greta urged students to ignore calls from some politicians to stay in school.
Students in Byron Bay ditched school to join the global movement. (ABC News: Sam Turnbull)
"I say that the children are on the right side of history and that those politicians are not," she said.
"So they should keep on fighting and they must be prepared to go on for a very, very long time.
"I don't think decision-makers will get the message for a very long time."
In Melbourne, students staged their protest outside Parliament House. (ABC News: Bez Zewdie)
Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan said he would meet with the climate strikers to discuss their concerns outside of school hours, while Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the protests should have been held on a weekend.
"Students leaving school during school hours to protest is not something that we should encourage," Mr Tehan said.
"Especially when they are being encouraged to do so by green political activists."
Similar protests in November prompted Prime Minister Scott Morrison to warn against the idea of students leaving school to participate in protests.
"We don't support our schools being turned into parliaments. What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools," Mr Morrison said at the time.
Students are calling for a switch to renewable energy. (ABC News: Gabriella Marchant)
But other politicians have thrown their support behind the rallies.
NSW Opposition Leader Michael Daley encouraged students to exercise their "democratic right" to protest.
Independent MP Julia Banks said she was proud to support students for "using their voice".
"This is their time," she said on Twitter.
Signs got creative in Hobart. (ABC News: Monte Bovill)
Greta received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts starting a global climate change movement.
Her view is shared by students around the globe, including the 15-year-old student organiser for the Sydney school strike, Jean Hinchcliffe.
"I believe that I have learnt much more from these strikes and the organising process than I have learnt in any lesson during school," she told the ABC.
"The amount of experience you gain from it and learning to mobilise and participate in democracy I think is far more worthwhile than any history lesson."
At the November protests, students filled arcades and city squares, defying calls by the Prime Minister to stay in school, to call for an end to political inertia on climate policy.
Students gathered on the steps of South Australia's Parliament House. (ABC News: Gabriella Marchant)

Ruby Clark, 12, was among thousands of protesters gathered at Garema Place in Canberra. (ABC News: Niki Burnside)

Thousands of students gathered in Hobart. (ABC News: Monte Bovill)
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Teenage Climate Activist Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize

Fairfax - AP | Peter Hannam

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, started a global campaign for student action that will culminate in an international day of strike action by students on March 15. Credit: DPA
 
Three Norwegian lawmakers have nominated Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who has become a prominent voice in campaigns against climate change, for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Freddy Andre Oevstegaard and two other members of the Socialist Left Party said they believe "the massive movement Greta has set in motion is a very important peace contribution".


Thousands of children walk out of their classrooms for a global climate strike amid growing anger at the failure of politicians to tackle the escalating crisis.

Oevstegaard told the VG newspaper Wednesday that "climate threats are perhaps one of the most important contributions to war and conflict".
Thunberg, 16, has encouraged students to skip school to join protests demanding faster action on climate change, a movement that spread far beyond Sweden.
On Friday, about 40,000 students in Australia are expected to strike in as many as 55 separate protests as part of the School Strike 4 Climate campaign. That number is about twice that of a similar action in November, with over 100 nations likely to take part this time around.
Thunberg has been staging a Friday strike since last year, boycotting 42 days of classes since she began last year.
"The plan was to school strike for three weeks [in the run up to Swedish elections]," she said. "But at the end of that I wanted to go on. So then I started Fridays For Future ... The emissions are still going up so nothing has been achieved really."

Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg leading a march of thousands of French students through Paris in February. Credit: AP
 
When not standing vigil in public protests, the 16-year-old has travelled widely - always avoiding flights to save on greenhouse gas emissions - and addressed a UN conference on climate in Poland, the World Economic Forum in Davos and the European Union in Brussels, among other events.
"But my grades are still good and I have not missed out on what I need to achieve in school," she said.

IMAGE

Any national lawmaker can nominate somebody for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee doesn't publicly comment on nominations, which for 2019 had to be submitted by February 1.
Friday's strike will be held from midday at the Sydney Town Hall, the Old Treasury in Melbourne and Garema Place in Canberra. In Brisbane it will be held from 1pm at Queen's Gardens and in Perth from 11am at St George's Cathedral, with dozens of other protests to be held in regional parts of Australia.

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Environmental Groups Take France To Court Over Climate Change Inaction

Reuters - Bate Felix | Marine Pennetier | Danielle Rouquié | Jean-Baptiste Vey

PARIS - Environmental groups including Greenpeace and Oxfam have filed an unprecedented court action against the French government, accusing it of insufficient policy actions to tackle climate change.
French President Emmanuel Macron addresses the United Nations Environmental Assembly (UNEA) in Gigiri, within Nairobi, Kenya March 14, 2019. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya
The groups aim to persuade the Paris Administrative court to force the government to apply its own policies, such as the multi-year energy plan, known as the PPE, and international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate accord.
“The state is not living up to commitments it has made itself, especially in the context of the Paris agreement of 2015,” said Cecile Duflot, a former minister and current Executive Director of Oxfam France.
“The state is a litigant like any other, our goal is for it to be condemned to act,” she told France Inter radio.
The court action is backed by an online petition signed by more than 2 million people and is supported by other NGOs including the Nicolas Hulot Foundation, created by a former minister and renowned environmentalist who resigned from President Emmanuel Macron’s government last summer over slow progress on climate change goals.
A Greenpeace statement said that France was on the wrong track in terms of curbing its emissions of greenhouse gases, which have been on the rise since 2015.
“This wait-and-see attitude has only worsened the situation in the agriculture, transport, energy and biodiversity protection sectors, with France falling behind and now requiring a restart and strong and urgent measures,” it said, adding that the government was refusing to put urgent measures in place to reach its objectives.
French Environment Minister Francois de Rugy, denied that the government was dragging its feet, adding on BFM Television that the court action would not lead to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Speaking in Kenyan capital Nairobi on the sidelines of the One Planet Summit he launched in 2017 to speed efforts to tackle climate change, President Macron said he does not believe the court action would lead anywhere.
“The solution is in all of us. On this issue, it is not the People vs. The Government. This nonsense should stop,” Macron said on LCI Television.
“We all must act. Governments must act. Major enterprises must act. Investors must act. Citizens must act. All together.”
A draft energy and climate law that was due to be presented to the cabinet this week has been postponed so that it can be reworked with more ambitious environmental goals.

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15/03/2019

Climate Change Top Of Voters' Minds In NSW Election

Fairfax - Alexandra Smith

Climate change is a key election issue for most people in NSW, polling shows, as the environment emerges as a more pressing concern for voters than hospitals, schools and public transport.
Exclusive Herald polling shows that 57.5 per cent of voters say they will be swayed by climate change and environmental protection when deciding who to vote for on March 23.
57.5 per cent of voters say they will be swayed by climate change and environmental protection.
Credit: Brook Mitchell
Almost 37 per cent of people said climate change would not be a vote changer, and five per cent were unsure, the UComms/ReachTEL poll reveals.
Voters identified the environment as their top concern after the management of the state's finances, but ahead of health and hospitals, transport, schools and cost of living pressures.
Internal party research showed climate change played a major role in last year's Wentworth byelection and is shaping up to be a key issue in former prime minister Tony Abbott's seat of Warringah.
With climate change again looming as an issue at the federal election in May, Mr Abbott on Friday abandoned his call to withdraw from the Paris agreement to reduce carbon emissions, falling in to line with Prime Minister Scott Morrison on the key policy.

Independent candidate for Warringah Zali Steggall and former PM Tony Abbott debate over the cost of renewable energy.

A war of words broke out between the NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin and the federal government late last year, when Mr Harwin attacked the Morrison government as "out of touch on energy and climate policy".Mr Harwin's strong stance was seen as a way of differentiating the state Liberals from their federal counterparts over the issue of climate change but also more broadly.
As part of the state election campaign, Premier Gladys Berejiklian has announced interest-free loans to 300,000 households for solar and battery systems while Labor has pledged to put solar on 500,000 homes over the next 10 years through rebates.
Labor Leader Michael Daley has committed to the state government's agencies acquiring 100 per cent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025. By the 2030, the state will have a renewables target of 50 per cent and aiming for 100 per cent renewables by 2050.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific Campaigner, Holly Dawson, said the poll results showed voters did not view climate change as a federal issue.
"This poll reflects an ongoing trend - NSW across the political spectrum cares about the environment and expect the state government to act on climate change," Ms Dawson said.
"This poll is a strong mandate for climate change to be at the front of negotiations if a hung parliament were to occur. The independents that both parties will court to form government have already publicly announced that they want strong action to address climate change."
The three independents – Sydney MP Alex Greenwich, Lake Macquarie MP Greg Piper, and Wagga Wagga MP Joe McGirr – are demanding Labor and the Coalition take action on climate change.
The crossbenchers, who will hold the balance of power if the government loses six seats, wrote to the Premier and Mr Daley last week asking them to act on transitioning from coal mining to clean energy.
The poll of 1019 voters across NSW on Thursday night also showed Labor ahead of the Coalition 51:49 on a two-party preferred basis and had Labor leader Michael Daley as preferred premier.
It also revealed that opinions were mixed about which party is best equipped to lead the state amid falling house prices and forecasts for slower growth.
Only one-third of voters said the state's economic outlook makes them more likely to vote for the Berejiklian government, despite the Premier using financial management as a key selling point.
As the leaders ramped up their campaigning ahead of next week's poll, Ms Berejiklian visited a school yesterday to spruik her policy for more before and after school care, while Mr Daley announced 5000 extra teachers.

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Victoria Can, And Should, Lead The Country On Climate Change

Fairfax - Jonathan La Nauze*

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has spent much of the past few weeks trying to repair the Coalition’s terrible reputation on climate change.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the government's climate package at a function in Melbourne.
Credit: AAP
It appears he has finally heard the sustained and unequivocal demand from Australians to step up on this issue – though after a summer of record high temperatures, crippling drought, mass fish deaths and more bushfires, there should be no prizes for noticing.
But a big part of what has caught Morrison’s attention is the voters of Victoria, who sent the Coalition a clear signal last November and appear willing to do so again at the impending federal election.
The signs Victoria was ready to lead the country were evident back in August. Malcolm Turnbull chose appeasement on the National Energy Guarantee and ultimately lost his prime ministership. That same week, Premier Dan Andrews confidently announced his first big election commitment – half-price solar for 650,000 homes.
It was a startling contrast. The federal Coalition couldn’t stomach the most modest of climate policies, while state Labor plastered theirs on the side of their campaign bus. Support for rooftop solar became Victorian Labor’s most visible election commitment and biggest contrast with the Liberal opposition, which had pledged to scrap the renewable energy target and build a new gas or coal power station instead.
After the thumping win for Labor, Victorian Liberals conceded they’d misread the public mood on clean energy and cutting pollution. Having lost his blue-ribbon seat of Hawthorn, shadow attorney-general John Pesutto acknowledged many conservative people “just want our party to do something” about climate change. His own daughter joined the student climate strike rallies.
Julian Burnside will run as the Greens candidate in the seat of Kooyong.
Credit: Jason South
If replicated at the federal election, November’s swing would see Liberals lose safe seats across Melbourne. This has inspired several prominent independent candidates – plus, last week, lawyer Julian Burnside for the Greens – to run against the Coalition in Victoria, with action on climate change central to their pitch. It’s hard to imagine this happening if the Victorian election hadn’t proven voters will dramatically shift loyalties, given a credible climate alternative.
But at the federal level, neither Labor nor the Coalition is offering a serious plan to get us off coal and gas in a meaningful timeframe.
Two days before the Victorian election, Bill Shorten announced a plan for cleaning up Australia’s energy system. Perhaps he was emboldened by polling showing Andrews’ apparent conversion of support for renewable energy into electoral reward. But Shorten’s plan still lacks urgency and would keep pollution at catastrophic levels for decades.
Morrison’s recent policy offerings would be even more damaging to our climate. Some have merit but overall they fail to do the obvious and most important thing needed to stop global warming – limit pollution from coal and gas power stations.
This is the gaping hole in the two major parties’ response to the climate crisis and it presents a unique opportunity for Victoria to step up once more.
Why? Because Victoria’s Environment Protection Authority is currently reviewing the licences of our state’s three coal-burning power stations, which are among the dirtiest in the world, and Victoria’s biggest source of climate pollution.
The EPA already licenses and regulates other types of air pollution, such as toxic particles and sulphur dioxide, but hasn’t yet imposed any constraint on the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.
Victoria could be the first Australian state to put limits on this pollution from coal-burning power stations and the decision would come smack-bang in the middle of a federal election campaign fought on climate change.
We know it would be popular. People hate the big energy companies and want the government to pull them into line. Polling shows overwhelming demand for government action on climate change, including intervening in the electricity market. And imposing a legal limit on pollution is a simple proposition to put to the public.
The conditions today are similar to the debate over renewable energy last August. The federal government is in chaos and the public is crying out for real action, not fudging half-measures.
Many people see climate change as a federal domain, but actually the states are responsible for energy supply and have most of the regulatory levers – like the EPA – to cut pollution across all sectors of the economy. Plus Andrews has already done the hard yards cranking up the renewables we will need as we phase out Victoria’s ageing coal power stations.
All of which means Victoria can, and should, lead the entire country on the issue.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that human civilisation has just 12 years to avert an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. We live in an extraordinary time and it calls for extraordinary leadership, not merely sound management. The Andrews government has just won an election with a massive mandate on climate change and renewable energy and here is the perfect political moment to act. Will they seize it?

*Jonathan La Nauze is CEO of Environment Victoria.

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Students Are Striking For Action On Climate Change — A Truancy Everyone Should Applaud

Los Angeles Times - Haven Coleman | Bill McKibben

A student with her face painted participates in a climate change protest
 organized by 'Youth Strike 4 Climate' in London on Feb. 15.
Facundo Arrizabalaga / EPA-EFE / REX
Haven Coleman
Haven Coleman, a student in Denver, has been striking for the climate weekly since January. She is founder and co-director of US Youth Climate Strike.
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben wrote the first book on climate change in 1989, and helped found the global climate campaign 350.org.
Consider this a note explaining why one of us will be absent from school on March 15 — and why everyone else should applaud this truancy.
Beginning last August, a Swedish schoolgirl named Greta Thunberg went on strike from her classes, choosing instead to spend the days on the steps of the Parliament building in Stockholm.
Her reasoning: If her government couldn’t be bothered to safeguard her future by taking action against climate change, it was a bit rich to demand that she spend her time preparing for a future that might not exist.
Her protest soon spread across Scandinavia, Europe, Britain and Australia.
Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren have now participated worldwide, and the protest has drawn some prominent support: German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on March 2, “I very much welcome that young people, school students, demonstrate and tell us to do something fast about climate change." But of course others have been less understanding.
During climate demonstrations in Australia, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, “We do not support our schools being turned into parliaments. … What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.”
Lacking access to piles of cash, young people do what they can. And a strike is one such measure.
AUSTRALIA
School Strike 4 Climate Action
Join A March 15 Strike
DETAILS
On Friday, many thousands of American students will be joining the school strike, so we’d like to lay out the reasoning behind it in more detail, in the hopes that people will view these protests with the seriousness they deserve.
It was 30 years ago that scientists first explained that burning fossil fuels was changing the composition of the atmosphere and driving the rapid warming of the Earth. That is enough time to educate a student all the way from preschool to a PhD, but it hasn’t been time enough for our politicians to learn how serious a climate catastrophe we are facing.
The American government, in particular, is a study in inaction. Our federal government has reversed course on every effort to change laws and regulations. Our current president has taken steps to drop out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the only international effort to combat global warming. Young people see that their future is on the line, which is why they’ve been at the front fighting against oil companies, pipelines and fracking wells.
You don’t need to be much past first grade to know that when you’re in a hole you should stop digging. Or, in this case, drilling. It is time to replace fossil fuel energy with power from the sun and wind — and we have the cheap solar panels and turbines to do it. But America has become the largest producer of gas and oil in the world, and most politicians lack the courage to stand up to the industry. Both of us, for instance, worked last fall on a modest Colorado referendum that would have prohibited oil wells right next to homes and schools, only to watch fossil fuel companies outspend local activists 40 to 1 and narrowly defeat the measure.
So, lacking access to piles of cash, young people do what they can. And a strike is one such measure.
It’s not a stunt. A stunt is Australia’s now-prime minister bringing a lump of coal to parliament to pass around to his colleagues. A stunt is former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper literally drinking a cup of fracking fluid.
A school strike, instead, recalls some of the most pivotal moments in American history. In 1963, for instance, the Rev. Martin Luther King found that he had run out of adult volunteers to stand up to Bull Connor at the height of the civil rights battle in Birmingham.
So, after much soul-searching, King asked the city’s schoolchildren to leave class and face the police dogs and firehoses. “Don’t worry about your children,” he told their frantic parents. “They’re gonna be all right. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job not only for themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.”
No one striking for the climate on March 15 will confront the immediate perils those brave schoolchildren had to endure. But just as they anticipated a future blighted by segregation, so today’s young people face a future blighted by environmental destruction. And so they must act.
It would be better, of course, if adults had taken the lead. Stopping climate change is their responsibility. But they haven’t. Though pretty much every politician has made it out of college, their education seems to have done them little good.
Maybe, at least for a day, there’s more education to be found out in the street. Instead of studying history, it’s time to make it.

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14/03/2019

Even In Its Dying Days, The Government Denies The Need For Climate Action

The Guardian - *

The reckoning for this failure will come at the next election. And it can’t come soon enough
‘While the PM will blow his foghorn on taxes and boats, it is the climate change policy failure that leaves his government condemned in the eyes of so many of its own.’ Photograph: Richard Wainwright/AAP 
For all the skittishness of Australian politics through the years of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments there’s been one factor that has been remarkably consistent.
Amid leadership coups, cultural offensives and the revolving door of energy policy acronyms, the Australian public has remained steadfast in its belief that more needs to be done to address climate change.
Whether the focus has been an ETS, an ERF, a CET or a Neg or just a big stick, the majority of the voting public has not moved from its view that meaningful action is required by government.
After the craziness of another fortnight of Coalition energy policy where our fossil-fondling PM has whipped up some new renewable buzzwords while his National party partners are baying for taxpayers to fund new coal projects, it’s worth reminding ourselves of this baseline. Because it explains so much of why this government’s condition has reached terminal status.
For the past decade the Essential poll has asked two benchmark questions when it comes to climate change. The first is around whether people believe the climate science.


Over the past decade this split has been stable. Granted, it dipped into the high 50s at the height of Tony Abbott’s attack on the Gillard government’s so-called carbon tax, but that was after Labor had spent the best part of a term faffing around on the issue.
What’s most striking in these numbers is the disconnection between the climate sceptics within the government and Coalition voters. Indeed, on the science they are much more aligned with One Nation and conservative independent voters who make up the “other” cohort of voters. As for younger voters, the Coalition comes across every bit as much a fossil as the fuel they seek to dig up.
The second question we have regularly asked is whether people believe Australia is doing enough to address climate change. Again, a majority – including one-third of Liberal voters – say they are not.


All of which makes Barnaby Joyce’s entreaty for an election fought on coal appear delusional, as some of the more tethered members of the government have felt compelled to point out in recent days. These words of moderation come too late. Joyce’s indulgence will only provide further impetus to the swathe of moderate independents challenging the Liberal heartland in more affluent areas of Sydney and Melbourne where Sky after dark does not rate.
Meanwhile, as the Coalition’s self-inflicted wounds fester, Labor simply holds its line with a commitment to 50% renewables by 2030 and aggressively promotes battery storage. Yes, there are calls for a more rapid phaseout of coal from the left, but all the pressure on policy is currently on the Coalition.
As a separate table in this week’s report shows, one of Labor’s core brand advantages over the Coalition, alongside wages and workplace conditions, is climate change.
While Scott Morrison will blow his foghorn on taxes and boats, it is the climate change policy failure that leaves his government condemned in the eyes of so many of its own.
Perhaps it’s the ultimate revenge on a government that came to power through a cynical attempt to deny the need for climate action. As the summers have got warmer and warmer, the public’s anger at the inaction has got hotter.
The failure of this government has not just been the toppling of its leaders. It’s been the reason for the topplings, which has been more than the blind pursuit of power, but power in the name of energy.
And even in its dying days, key members of the government continue in this state of denial. Not just of the science, nor the need for meaningful action, but denial that this is the sort of leadership elected governments are expected to exhibit.
The reckoning is coming and it will be harsh. And it can’t come soon enough.

*Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential and a Guardian Australia columnist

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