19/10/2019

Drop The Doom And Gloom: Climate Journalism Is About Empowerment

The Conversation - 

A farmer who installed solar panels to power his irrigation systems on the family farm walks by the panels near Claresholm, Alta., in June 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
There is a simple irony in dealing with climate change. To get a handle on the problem means that, at a certain level, the conversation has to move away from climate change. What does that mean?
The secretary general of Amnesty International shed some light on this apparent contradiction ahead of September’s United Nations climate change conference in New York.
“I think one of the catastrophic mistakes we made in 1992, when the Rio Earth Summit happened, was framing our response to the threat of climate change solely or primarily as an environmental issue,” Kumi Naidoo said on the news program Democracy Now!
“I think we needed to have done then what we are trying to do now … which is to ensure that we bring a cross-cutting understanding of climate change and bring a more human-centric approach to addressing (it).”
This means, Naidoo said, dealing with climate change by focusing on human rights and on reducing inequality.

Broadening the climate conversation
When it comes to climate-related economic issues, news narratives typically focus on the trade-off between jobs and protecting the environment.
That was one of the findings of a December 2018 study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “Although they tend to choose different sides, mainstream and alternative media both frequently reinforce the assumption that there is an inevitable trade-off between environmental protection and job creation,” the study concluded.
What if the discussion in the news media, and in politics, instead focused on what a post-carbon economy would actually look like, and, crucially, how such an economy would actually thrive? It’s the vision of a society and of a prosperous, modern economy that has climate change baked into it.
But how does the world actually get there, especially when mitigating climate change is still largely seen as an impediment to economic growth?
Better climate change communication is a good place to start.

Making the uncomfortable comfortable
Mitigating climate change is often seen in the context of making choices that can be undesirable: flying less, buying less, ditching the car.
Instead, the choices people must make to fight climate change can be framed as enjoyable, desirable or even moral, instead of avoidable. In other words, things that people actually want to do.
To make that shift, University of Michigan sustainability professor Andy Hoffman argues for a “consensus-based” approach to climate change. Such an approach treats climate change as a cultural issue instead of simply as a scientific and environmental problem. It “frames climate change mitigation as a gain rather than a loss to specific cultural groups,” Hoffman writes. He adds:
“To be effective, climate communicators must use the language of the cultural community they are engaging.”
It’s important to speak to people about climate change through values that make sense to them.
Stories of people taking action that others around them can relate to also have a huge impact. A neighbour enjoying their electric vehicle (and saving on gas) has a far more persuasive influence over other residents on the block than an expert on the news telling people they need to drive less.
A neighbour’s love of her electric car is likely a lot more compelling than experts urging people to drive electric vehicles. Shutterstock
A different narrative
When it comes to climate change coverage, doom and gloom is usually the lead. There is also a heavy emphasis in conventional climate journalism on individual lifestyle changes.
Instead, climate journalism can play a much more important role in painting the picture of how a post-carbon economy might actually work. That process can begin with a conversation around solutions that are already being implemented, especially those that are happening through collective action and a sense of empowerment.
A great example is a recent Global News report on the T’Sou-ke Nation on Vancouver Island, a community that is taking renewable energy production into its own hands. Or a story in Maclean’s magazine about an Ontario town that is working toward a greener future.
These forms of storytelling are crucial for the conversation to shift toward a new default position: climate change as the current upon which the economy rides. Ultimately, it will require political will for the world to get there. But support is building, and it’s the masses who are leading the way.
“If you actually look at the most beautiful parts of our histories, it’s mass movements, it’s collectives, it’s groundswells,” author and activist Rebecca Solnit recently said on CBC Radio’s The Current.
“We need a framework in which maybe everybody is potentially a hero, and it’s not the exceptional but the ordinary people who change the world.”
As stories about collective action become a more prominent feature of climate journalism, so too will climate change start to feel more accessible and less scary. In the near future, climate change will not be something big, distant and seemingly impossible to overcome.
Instead, it will just be a fact of life around which everything else revolves, including human rights, jobs and the economy. The best climate change story, in other words, may very well not be a climate change story at all.

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What Is Climate Change And What Can We Do About It?

Climate Council - Explainer




Climate science can be complex, and misinformation in politics and the media can make it difficult to sort fact from fiction. Here, we’ve answered eight common climate change questions, including what’s causing climate change, what scientists are saying and what we can do about it. Read on to get up to speed.

1. What is climate change?
2. What is causing climate change?
3. How is climate change affecting Australia?
4. Why do only a few degrees of warming matter?
5. How do scientists know the climate is changing?
6. What are the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia?
7. What can Australia do to combat climate change?
8. Where can I find out more?

1. What is climate change?
Climate is different from weather. When we talk about the Earth’s climate, we are referring to the average weather conditions over a period of 30 years or longer. Weather, on the other hand, refers to what you see and feel outside from day to day (e.g. sunny, rainy).
So climate change is any change in the climate, lasting for several decades or longer, including changes in temperature, rainfall or wind patterns.
And according to science, our climate is changing quite dramatically – it’s getting hotter.
Long-term air and ocean temperature records clearly show the Earth is warming. The global average temperature has already risen by 1.1°C since the pre-industrial period. This might not sound like a lot, but 1.1°C represents a massive amount of extra heat and energy – the equivalent of four Hiroshima bomb detonations per second.
While the earth’s climate has changed throughout history, scientists agree that the significant changes we’ve seen over the past hundred years or so have been due to human activities. Recent warming is also happening at a rate that is much faster than previous climatic changes.
Temperature Anomalies by Country 1880-2017 based on NASA GISTEMP data. By Antti Lipponen.

2. What is causing climate change?
The short answer is, the excessive amount of greenhouse gases entering the Earth’s atmosphere due to human activity is causing our climate to change dramatically. But there’s more to it than that.
Let’s break it down. A certain amount of greenhouse gases (like water vapour, ozone, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous dioxide) occur naturally. For example, carbon dioxide is produced by plants, or decaying organic matter (biomass). These greenhouse gases act like a blanket in our atmosphere, trapping some of the sun’s heat close to the Earth’s surface. This is known as the ‘greenhouse effect’ – and it makes the planet warm enough for us to live.
But since the Industrial Revolution (which began in the mid to late 1700s), greenhouse gases have built up in the atmosphere, which is trapping more heat close to the earth’s surface. This is because humans began digging up and burning coal, oil and gas, as well as scaling up agriculture and tree-clearing (deforestation), and increasing waste (landfill), which are all processes that produce greenhouse gases.
As more greenhouse gases are added to the Earth’s atmosphere, more of the sun’s heat is trapped and this causes the Earth’s average temperature to rise.
Carbon dioxide is the most significant of all the greenhouse gases, followed by methane. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by more than 45% since the Industrial Revolution and are now the highest they have been for at least 800,000 years.



3. How is climate change affecting Australia?
Australia is one of the most vulnerable developed countries in the world to the impacts of climate change, which include:
  • Increased frequency and/or severity of extreme weather events including floods and droughts
  • More frequent, more intense and longer-lasting heatwaves. Heatwaves are deadly, having killed more people than all other extreme weather events in Australia combined.
  • Greater risk and severity of bushfires and earlier, longer bushfire seasons
  • Sea level rise, leading to more coastal flooding, erosion and saltwater intrusion into freshwater wetlands, such as in the World-Heritage listed Kakadu National Park
  • Impacts on wildlife due to heat stress, drought and habitat changes, which have flow-on effects down the food chain. Australia holds the first record of a mammalian extinction due to climate change.
  • More frequent marine heatwaves, which impact marine ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef. After the back-to-back marine heatwaves in 2016 and 2017, 50% of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef died.
  • Impacts on health due to changes in air pollution and aeroallergens (such as pollen), vector-borne diseases, extreme weather events and other factors
  • Increased pressure on emergency services and health systems, as the fire seasons of states and territories increasingly overlap which stretches resources, and the health impacts of climate change worsen
  • Agricultural impacts from more frequent droughts, floods and heatwaves
We are already experiencing these impacts today, at a rise in temperature of just 1.1 ̊C since the pre-industrial period. In 2019, Australia has seen devastating floods in Townsville, an early start to the bushfire season damaging properties and burning through untouched rainforests in NSW and QLD, and an ongoing drought which has threatened the food and water security of Australians for many years.
The risks to our wellbeing and livelihoods, and to other species and ecosystems, become much more profound as temperatures continue to rise.
Read more about droughts, bushfires and other extreme weather events in Australia here.

4. Why do only a few degrees of warming matter?
A few degrees of warming is incredibly significant.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strongly recommends limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5°C, to avoid the impacts of climate change steeply escalating. Even at 1.5°C of global warming, times will be tough. But the impacts amplify rapidly between just 1.5°C and 2°C of temperature increase, as visible in the following infographic.
Adapted from WRI (07/10/18) based on data from IPCC (10/2018).
To avoid the impacts we’d experience at 2 degrees warming, we have no other choice but to limit our warming to 1.5 ̊C. It is still possible, but only if we act now.
If nothing changes, we are on track for a rise in temperatures of between 4-6 ̊C. To put this in context, the difference in temperatures between now and the last ice age was around 4 ̊C.
The Paris Agreement (a universal agreement involving over 190 countries committing to limit global warming to well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 ̊C) is an important step towards addressing the global challenge of climate change. But with the current pledges that countries have put forward, the world is on track for at least 3.2 ̊C of warming by the end of the century.
Read more about limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees here.

5. How do scientists know the climate is changing?
Scientists collect data about the climate by testing a number of things: air and ocean temperature, precipitation (rain, snow), sea level, ocean salinity and acidity, tree rings, marine sediments, and pollen, to name a few.
Ice cores from Antarctica are incredibly helpful in showing how the climate has changed over time, because they can provide a record of what the level of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane were in our atmosphere in the past, as well as providing clues about past temperatures. Ice core data stretches back 800,000 years and shows that the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere over this period never increased so quickly, or by so much, as during this era of human influence.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over the past 800,000 years, based off data from ice cores. C02 levels have never been as high as they are now. Source: NOAA
Pulling all of this data together, scientists have concluded that humans have been driving the significant changes in climate that we are currently experiencing. The evidence that supports anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is vast and includes many lines of evidence published in tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles.

6. What are the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia?
There are eight major areas (sectors) in Australia responsible for our greenhouse gas emissions:
  1. Electricity (emissions from burning coal and gas to power our lights, appliances and more)
  2. Transport (emissions from petrol and diesel used to power cars, trucks and buses, and emissions from aviation fuel used to power planes)
  3. Stationary energy (fuels like gas consumed directly, rather than used for electricity, in industry and in households)
  4. Agriculture (greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide produced by animals, manure management, fertilisers and field burning)
  5. Fugitive emissions (gases leaked or vented from fossil fuel extraction and transportation)
  6. Industrial processes (emissions produced by converting raw materials into metal, mineral and chemical products)
  7. Waste (methane from decaying organic matter)
  8. Land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) (emissions and removals mainly from forests, but also from croplands, grasslands, wetlands and other lands).
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by sector, 2019. Electricity is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, responsible for 32% of emissions. This is mainly because 84% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, the large majority of which (62.3%) comes from coal. Fortunately, Australia is the sunniest and one of the windiest countries in the world, which means we are perfectly placed to generate our electricity from renewable energy sources, like solar and wind. Updating Australia’s energy system with renewables and storage is crucial for cutting our greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change. Source: March 2019 quarterly updates.



 7. What can Australia do to combat climate change?
Although we are already experiencing the consequences of climate change today, we also have the solutions to address it.
Australia urgently needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions as part of a strong global effort. But currently, emissions in Australia and globally are still rising.
The IPCC has suggested that the world must cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by no later than 2050 to have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5 ̊C. This means that global carbon dioxide emissions have to start dropping now, and be on a path to fall by at least 45% below 2010 levels by 2030. Methane and other greenhouse gas emissions must drop steeply as well.
For this goal to be achievable, we have to start driving down all emissions across all sectors now.
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions (excluding land use) have been rising consistently for five years since 2014, and are at the highest levels on record.
Here are the easiest, most efficient and cost-effective ways for Australia to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions:
  • Electricity
    Rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuel generated electricity to renewable energy and storage technologies is the quickest and cheapest way to reduce emissions. In Australia and many other countries, new renewable energy is now cheaper than new coal (over its lifetime), and global investment in coal has plummeted by 75% in three years.
  • Transport
    Avoiding dangerous climate change doesn’t start and end with changing electricity. We also need to electrify our transport systems – like buses, cars, trains and trams – and power them with 100% renewable electricity too. Transport makes up around 19% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, but these emissions can be reduced by: improving public transport’s quality, efficiency and accessibility, encouraging active transport (such as cycling and walking), and building infrastructure (like vehicle charging stations), to encourage people to use electric vehicles.
  • Agriculture
    Agriculture contributes roughly 13% of Australia’s emissions, and deforestation accounts for around 9% of Australia’s emissions. But climate solutions like reforestation and regenerative agriculture can increase how much carbon is stored in soils and vegetation, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
  • Fossil fuels
    Australia needs to actively transition away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, including those we export. As the second largest exporter of both thermal coal (which is burned to generate electricity) and gas, Australia has a huge influence on global emissions and the fossil fuel market. If we include all the fossil fuels that Australia exports, Australia is the fifth biggest polluter in the world – so we’re a big deal when it comes to climate change. Australia should not approve any new fossil fuel projects, and must actively phase out existing projects to reduce emissions. This process has to support fossil fuel-dependent communities and workers – and make sure that they have opportunities to move into other industries.
8. Where can I find out more?
The Climate Council has created a range of science-backed materials to further explain the causes, impacts and solutions to climate change. Take a look at our Reports, Videos and Infographics.

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Indigenous Farming Practices Failing As Climate Change Disrupts Seasons

National Geographic - Peter Schwartzstein

 Farmers around the world rely on millennia-old wisdom to guide their planting. Scrambled weather and seasons are forcing them into uncharted territory.
A farmer on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona inspects his corn crops amidst a summer drought. The tribal lore that sustained Hopi farming practices isn't working anymore, as climate change shifts seasons. Photograph by George H.H. Huey, Alamy
The Hopi tribesmen of northern Arizona are born meteorologists.
When snake weed blooms in the spring, they know they’re in for bumper summer rains. When the desert stays largely barren, they prepare for drought. As far back as tribal lore goes, Hopi farmers have sustained themselves and their crops by diligently reading their arid mesa surroundings.
This summer, however, their millennia-old forecasting techniques failed them, and not for the first time in recent years. The weeds sprouted in great numbers in April. The usual rains in August did not come at all. Were it not for local grocery stores and the seed stockpiles they maintain in anticipation of the occasional bad year, many Hopi might well have gone hungry.
“These indicators have always been dang reliable. We have over 2000 years of replication. We know our fields, like many indigenous people,” says Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi farmer who grows corn, beans, squash, and melons on the tribal reservation several hundred miles north of Phoenix. “But when I talk to my people, they say our winters are getting longer, so people plant a little later, and that can wreak havoc. Now we’re kind of in a bad situation.”
They’re not alone. Climate change is upending millions of people’s lives, yet few communities are seeing their crops and worldviews crumble quite like those that rely on indigenous weather forecasting. Dependent in many cases on millennia-old trial and error, as well as analyses of the landscape to gauge planting cycles, their fields are withering as the conditions on which the calendars are predicated change. Without that accumulated wisdom to fall back on—bird migrations, wind direction, stars, and more—farmers are feeling particularly defenseless just as other consequences of climate change complicate their lives.




As a measure of climate change’s severity, it’s a sobering one. Many of these farming communities are unfamiliar with “climate change” as a concept, and yet they’re all acutely aware that something’s horribly awry. There’s no denial or skepticism here, only shock and dismay as practices and traditions that have withstood thousands of years of civilizational rise and fall are becoming obsolete. Wrapped up as these growing patterns often are with local religious and cultural rites, there can be a heavy psychological toll to this change as well.
But in practical terms, too, the implications of this failing indigenous wisdom are extra grim, travels through traditional farming areas reveal. Because many farmers have zero or limited access to modern weather forecasting, they have nothing else to turn to when the rains, temperatures, and wildlife behave in new and unexpected ways. And because many of these calendars predominate in the parts of the world that are bearing the brunt of climate change, notably tropical and dryland areas, the value of their knowledge is shriveling fast. Failing crops and hence hunger are increasing. Meteorologists fear that those losses and that suffering will only intensify unless help arrives in a hurry.
“People used to forecast weather/climate just by observing natural phenomena,” says Tsegaye Kedema, director of the National Meteorological Agency of Ethiopia, in an email. “However, due to climate change these phenomena also changed and the forecasters lost their credibility and status within the community. This creates a big problem for the communities to perform their informed farming activities.”

Crumbling calendars
The trauma spans almost every continent.
In southern Iraq, farmers work much the same land as the Sumerians, the civilization that pioneered irrigated agriculture in about 6000 BCE, and still abide by much of the ancient planting timetable. But as summers become longer and hotter and other seasons shift, many farmers have been left bewildered, angry, and scared.
“The old people have the same mindset as in the past. They feel there’s a continuity because there’s been no development and we have the same tools and same ways of agriculture,” said Jaafar Jotheri, a geoarchaeologist at Iraq’s Al-Qadisiyah University whose father and brother still farm to the south of Baghdad. “Now they’re seeing the climate change, though, and some of the older people don’t know what and when to grow.”
Southern Iraqi farming is rich with millennia-old idioms that no longer hold true. ‘August is for reducing the grapes and producing the dates,’ goes one, but the grapes and dates have started to come at irregular times in recent years. ‘September is the month of moving the buffalo from the water,’ goes another, but Septembers are so hot that water buffalo must be grazed in the marshlands of southern Iraq until later in the year for fear of overheating them.
Iraqi farmer Raed al-Jubayli checks dates at his palm tree nursery in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Iraqi farmers are also facing challenges as their traditional farming wisdom no longer holds true. Photograph by Haidar Mohammed, ALI/AFP/Getty
In southern Egypt and northern Sudan, many farmers still depend on the Coptic calendar, a variation of the ancient pharaonic calendar. They, too, however, are finding that reality no longer conforms to thousands of years of Nile-side wisdom. These days, it’s often too hot to plant wheat at the end of Masry, which roughly corresponds with August, and it can derail the rest of the winter planting cycle if the delay drags on long enough.
Until 20 years ago, this calendar was “almost perfect,” says Ismail Elgizouli, a Sudanese scientist and former acting chair of the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But now “due to climate change there is variability from one year to another.”
As in Iraq and other parts of the region, Sudan’s farmers are fleeing the countryside en masse. It’s a wretched end for a calendar that anchored ancient Egypt’s vital agricultural sector and enabled its pharaohs to measure the length of their reigns and to time celebrations.
And in large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, things are also going very wrong. The Nganyi people of Western Kenya have traditionally used everything from grasshopper swarms to the winds that whip in off Lake Victoria to predict rains, but deforestation and biodiversity loss have put paid to their longstanding success.
It’s a similar situation in Eastern Kenya, where the Atharaka’s usual forecasting measures—the flowering of various plants, the croaking of frogs—have crumbled amid drought. From insect-reading communities in northern Benin, to Nigeria, where some farmers read stars to predict crop yields, the utility of these traditional measures is evaporating fast.




According to several studies, older farmers and geographically isolated farmers are particularly vulnerable to the changes because they’re less likely to be offered help transitioning to other types of forecasting. So, in a cruel yet common twist, it’s the poorest of the poor who are suffering most.

Rolling out modernity
But as desperate as the situation might look in places, this is at least one consequence of climate change that is, in theory, within our capacity to tackle. Farmers in richer parts of the world, like Australia, have overcome a number of climate challenges by tweaking their agricultural calendars and sowing earlier. By successfully rolling out modern forecasting to areas that have had none, developmental organizations have already enjoyed some success.
Farmers in West Africa saw a 20 percent rise in millet yields after they gained access to modern meteorological information, according to World Meteorological Organization (WMO) data.
“Farmers need to know: When do I plant? What do I plant? If a farmer usually has a mix of 60 percent corn and 40 percent millet, they’ve got to make a judgement,” says Robert Stefanski, Chief of the Agricultural Meteorology Division at WMO. “Corn might be more profitable, but it uses more water, so if there's a drier season, perhaps they'll make a decision based on that forecast.”
Even seven-day forecasts can allow farmers to assess whether they have long enough dry periods to weed their fields or spray their crops.


Causes and Effects of Climate Change What causes climate change (also known as global warming)? And what are the effects of climate change? Learn the human impact and consequences of climate change for the environment, and our lives.

The challenges are still considerable, of course. Agricultural assistance is shrinking in many of the places it’s most needed as developing countries redirect resources toward more profitable industries. Given the religious and cultural components of indigenous knowledge, there will be insurmountable costs no matter what. It will require finesse, too. “You can’t go into a place and say: your traditional knowledge is not valid. You can’t be adversarial since a lot of it is based on science,” Stefanski says.
But if we’re smart, we might even see this as something of an opportunity, farmers and meteorologists say. After all, indigenous forecasting relies on a careful reading of the natural landscape, something many societies appear to have lacked as environmental practices have deteriorated. If nothing else, we might learn something from many indigenous communities’ fortitude.
“We’ve seen our crops die before, so we’re prepared for the psychological impact of climate change,” said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, the Hopi farmer. “We can handle it.”

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Five Radical Climate Policies That Most Americans Actually Like

The Atlantic - Robinson Meyer

Most registered voters are in favor of spending trillions on weatherized buildings and renewable-energy infrastructure.
Young people protest outside the San Francisco Federal Building during a Climate Strike march. Kate Munsch / Reuters
For the first time in years—and maybe ever—Democrats are getting ambitious about climate change. Several presidential candidates have proposed $1 trillion plans that variously nudge, cajole, and force the economy to reduce carbon pollution. The largest plan, from Senator Bernie Sanders, calls for $16.3 trillion in public investment over 10 years, which would be the biggest economic stimulus package since the New Deal.
These plans confront a confusing array of public views. Voters are more worried about climate change than ever before, but they also seem to dislike the Democratic Party’s move to the left. So how do voters feel about this new set of progressive policies?
A new survey finds: They like it. At least five aggressive and left-wing climate policies are supported by most registered voters in the United States. Americans seem particularly fond of large spending packages, as Sanders has advanced, and climate policies with a populist bent, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed climate import fee and her “economic patriotism” plan.
The poll was conducted by YouGov Blue and Data for Progress, a liberal think tank. While I try to avoid explicitly ideological surveys, I trust this data because YouGov is a reputable, nonpartisan firm that also conducts polls for CBS News and The Economist.
Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, also told me that the poll’s findings are in line with other research. “Climate policy is very popular,” she said. “If you highlight the cost, it’s less popular. If you highlight new taxes, it’s less popular. But if you highlight job creation or the air-pollution benefits, it’s more popular.”
She added that many climate policies are especially favored now because the public tends to take views opposite those of the sitting president, a concept known as thermostatic public opinion. “With Trump being president, you’re going to find people want more environmental protection now than when Obama was in power,” she said.
These results also align with those of conservative-leaning surveys. The American Action Network, an advocacy group tied to the House GOP, recently asked Americans in 30 congressional districts—including 12 “battleground” districts and 10 Donald Trump–supporting districts—if they liked the idea of a Green New Deal that would move the United States “from an economy built on fossil fuels to one driven by clean energy.”
Shockingly, the idea was more popular than not, with 48 percent of respondents in support and 7 percent undecided. Only when pollsters told people that a Green New Deal could cost $93 trillion did support for the idea collapse. But according to the GOP group’s own math, a Green New Deal that focused only on climate change could cost only $13 trillion.
Results from the new YouGov Blue/Data for Progress poll find majority support for spending along those lines, though the poll never uses the term Green New Deal. Here are the five climate policies with the most support:

1. A national recycling program for commodities
During World War II, the federal government encouraged Americans to save and pool commodities—including paper, steel, and rubber—so that they could be recycled and turned into new ships, planes, and guns. Sanders proposes launching a similar program today for clean energy. It would seek to reduce the cost and blunt the environmental impact of the huge build-out of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries that he proposes.
The idea is overwhelmingly popular, with 64 percent of registered voters in support and only 16 percent opposed. Americans of every race, age, and religion overwhelmingly support the idea. So do six in 10 white men, and a majority of self-described born-again Christians.

Data for Progress/YouGov
2. $1.3 trillion to weatherize every home and office building in the United States
At least three different Democratic climate plans—proposed by Senator Amy Klobuchar, Governor Jay Inslee (whose plan has been largely adopted by Warren), and Sanders—have promised to boost federal spending on weatherizing homes and buildings. Sanders’s plan calls for more than $2 trillion in grants to help families improve their home’s energy efficiency.
The idea is very popular. Six in 10 voters support spending more than $1 trillion “to weatherize homes and buildings to make them more energy-efficient and reduce energy bills.” A smaller majority of voters older than 65 also support the proposal.

Data for Progress/YouGov
3. $1.5 trillion for a massive federal build-out of renewable energy
Sanders promises to build out enough wind, solar, and geothermal energy to power every home and business in the United States by 2030. Such a plan would cost $1.5 trillion, he says, and it would be possible to execute under the existing legal powers of the Energy Department.While the poll didn’t ask Americans if they would support that legal maneuver, a large majority of voters said they were ready to foot the bill for the plan. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they would strongly or somewhat support $1.5 trillion in federal spending to build out renewables. Among white voters without a college degree—a group that normally breaks Republican—the idea found 52 percent in support.

Data for Progress/YouGov
4. A climate adjustment fee on environmentally destructive imports
Warren has proposed imposing a “border carbon adjustment” on imports that require high levels of carbon emissions. This policy could help American climate policy from “offshoring” carbon pollution into China and India, supporters say, and it would encourage American cement- and steelmakers to invest in greener ways to make their products.
For now, at least, Americans love the idea. Sixty percent of respondents strongly or somewhat supported the idea, while only 23 percent opposed it. (About one in five Americans still aren’t sure what to think.)
But among working-class voters, the idea was one of the most popular proposed. Fifty-five percent of people without a college degree liked the idea, a level of support that did not change across white and nonwhite respondents. Voters from families making less than $60,000 a year also supported the idea at about that level.

5. “Economic Nationalism for Climate Change”
This summer, Warren announced her plan for “economic patriotism,” a policy agenda that actively aims to boost American jobs and industry. Its first plank is a green-manufacturing scheme that pledges $2 trillion over the next 10 years. In short, Warren seeks to revive industrial policy.
This poll asked about “economic nationalism,” which it described as a plan to “aggressively encourage large American manufacturing firms to specialize in solar panels, wind turbines, and other climate-friendly technologies.”
The proposal commanded majority support, with 53 percent overall in support and 30 percent in opposition. It also won a majority of voters who said they lived in a suburb or rural area. Among white voters without a college degree, the idea was above water at 46 percent and an eight-point support gap.
But 15 percent of that group said they weren’t sure what to think of the proposal. That may suggest that the group could reject it overall if Republican leaders turn against it. Or perhaps not: Among deeply Republican segments of the electorate—such as white, self-identified born-again Christians—the idea is already 20 points underwater.

Data for Progress/YouGov
Not every idea was so popular.
Sanders has proposed to fund his $16.3 trillion Green New Deal “by imposing new taxes, fees, and lawsuits on fossil-fuel companies.” Forty-three percent of voters approved that idea, making it more popular than unpopular. But nearly a third of respondents “strongly opposed” it, suggesting that any backlash could be widely and deeply felt.
Stokes wondered if voters were responding primarily to the “taxes” line in Sanders’s pitch. In a recent poll she ran with other researchers, funding climate policy through lawsuits against fossil-fuel companies was one of the most popular options.
Electric-vehicle policy seems particularly tricky. In his plan, Sanders proposes a $2 trillion grant program for low- and middle-income families to buy new electric cars. Yet nearly half of voters oppose that idea outright. A majority of voters also reject Sanders’s proposal to end the sale of gas-burning cars by 2030. That plan attracts the special ire of white voters, 42 percent of whom “strongly oppose” it. Warren, Senator Kamala Harris, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg have all proposed similarly timed bans.
The only other proposal opposed by a majority of voters was a plan to nationalize and shut down fossil-fuel companies such as Exxon while making sure workers “laid off by this closure would be fairly compensated.” No Democratic candidate has supported this idea, but it is a goal of some activists and researchers on the American far left.
Finally, YouGov and Data for Progress polled the popularity of a carbon tax of $100 a ton. Carbon prices are widely seen as a possible centrist solution to climate change. They win the support of most mainstream economists. As such, there is plenty of good polling on them. It shows that a majority of Americans often, but not always, support the general idea of a carbon price.
But this poll aimed to explore more radical policies, so it asked about a $100-a-ton carbon price. This is very, very high. Only two countries, Sweden and Switzerland, levy carbon taxes of at least $100 a ton. In the United States, state-level carbon prices range from $5 to $15 a ton. The Climate Leadership Council, a bipartisan advocacy group backed by major oil companies, endorses a federal carbon price of $40 a ton.
Yet such a high price may find some support in climate science. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that carbon prices might need to start at $135 a ton—and then keep rising—to keep global temperature rise from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But there isn’t yet public support for that kind of policy. Nearly half of voters, 47 percent, oppose such a high price, according to the poll. The 38 percent of voters who support the policy in any way is only moderately larger than the 33 percent of voters who say they “strongly oppose” it. The one bright spot for supporters: About 15 percent of respondents were not sure.
All respondents were told that the $100 carbon tax could increase gas prices by about 88 cents a gallon, an estimate based on data from Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank.

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18/10/2019

Australia Spends Billions Planting Trees – Then Wipes Out Carbon Gains By Bulldozing Them

The Guardian -  |

Little more than two years of land clearing will cancel out the $1.5bn in taxpayer funds that goes towards protecting native habitat
John Mailler at his tree-planting project around the Moree water park. He calls the extent of land clearing around the town ‘tragic’. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
Since 2015 the Australian government has committed more than $1.5bn of taxpayer funds to climate change projects that plant or protect native habitat. Over a slightly longer period it has also spent nearly $62m on a policy to plant 20 million trees promised under Tony Abbott.
At the same time the country has significantly stepped up land-clearing programs in several states, bulldozing hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests, mostly for agriculture.
Official data allows an estimate of the scale of the contrast: little more than two years of land clearing will effectively cancel out what the public is spending to avoid 125 million tonnes of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. The equivalent to what has been planted over several years in the 20 million trees program is wiped out in just six months of land clearing. “It’s pretty absurd,” says Jess Panegyres, the Wilderness Society’s national nature campaigner.
“We’re putting huge amounts of taxpayer dollars into avoided deforestation and reforestation and at the same time we’re allowing Australia to become a deforestation hotspot globally. Any of the gains that we’re making under these taxpayer-funded schemes are being wiped out almost immediately.”
What is being lost can be cut up in different ways. Using government figures, the Wilderness Society estimates a Melbourne Cricket Ground-sized area of forest and bushland was cleared every two minutes in 2017.
Over a longer timeframe, an academic study found last month that more than 7.7m hectares – an area larger than Tasmania – of potential threatened species habitat had been cleared since 1999. It said 93% of this land had not been referred to the federal environment department for assessment and approval before being cleared, as required under national environment laws.

Land clearing in potential threatened species habitat
Showing potential forest and woodland clearing in areas where threatened species, migratory species, or threatened ecological communities are known or likely to occur. Red indicates land clearing that was not referred to the federal environment department for assessment and approval before being cleared, and blue shows clearing that was referred
Source: Ward et al. 2019 / University of Queensland
Not all land cleared is equal. Much of it is regrown forest in areas that have been felled before. But a significant minority is intact mature forest, which is a deeper store of carbon dioxide. Scientists say both need to be protected if Australia is to stem an unfolding extinction crisis.
Australia has a long history of forest clearing. The proportion of the country covered by forest has fallen from about 30% to less than 16% since European invasion. But, after a relative decline, a big upswing in land clearing began in 2013, when Campbell Newman’s Liberal National government relaxed laws preventing mass deforestation in Queensland.
Data from the state’s world-leading vegetation monitoring system, known as Slats (statewide landcover and trees study), shows that in the five years that followed about 1.7m hectares – an area larger than greater Brisbane – of native vegetation was bulldozed, far more than in the rest of the country combined.
In the most recent two years in which data is available, ending in June last year, about 40% of that was in Great Barrier Reef catchments, increasing the amount of sediment running into the ocean along the coast.
A crop paddock prepared for sowing on the road linking Nyngan to Bourke in outback NSW. It has been left bare because of the lack of rain. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
The Labor state government passed legislation last year that the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said would end broad-scale land clearing – despite environmental lawyers warning that the new laws were full of loopholes. The latest Slats data that will show the result of that are yet to be released, but Panegyres says while the laws should work to reduce the bulldozing of mature forest, anecdotal evidence suggests the loss of growing forest and native vegetation has continued in some areas. “There’s a lot of land clearing still being reported to us,” she says.
While Queensland closely tracks land clearing, the picture in other parts of the country is less clear.
Neither Western Australia nor the Northern Territory keep jurisdiction-wide data. In the west, where land-clearing laws were relaxed under the former Liberal premier Colin Barnett in the name of removing red tape, a partial picture can be calculated by tallying the permits granted by some departments – but this leaves significant gaps.
Land clearing in New South Wales is unarguably on the rise. While it has not reached the heights of Queensland, figures from the state’s Office of Environment and Heritage show clearing for crops pasture and thinning tripled between 2014-15 and 2017-18, the year the state government introduced more lenient native vegetation protection laws. More than 27,000 hectares, nearly 100 times the size of Sydney’s central business district, were cleared for agriculture in the latest year for which data is available. Most of the clearing has been between Moree and the Queensland border. If native forestry is included, the figure rises to 58,000 hectares.
The data shows land clearing had already escalated before the laws came into effect, farmers having apparently anticipated the change. Though some Liberal ministers are deeply concerned about the scale and pace of the escalation and its impact on biodiversity, the National party has repeatedly called for protections to be wound back.
The contrast makes little sense to some people planting trees on behalf of taxpayers. Around the Moree water park, a human-made water-skiing area 6km north-west of the New South Wales town, a small forest of native trees is taking root, despite two years of drought, thanks to a $29,500 grant from the 20 million trees program. Eventually 7,000 trees will be planted.
John Mailler, 80, a retired share farmer and volunteer working on the project, germinates his own plants from local seed at his property 40km away and drives in regularly to tend the trees, which are being planted by a local employment group. He lists the local species: carbeen, casuarina, box trees, emu apple or grewi, brigalow and roly poly.
Mailler’s trees are bred so they don’t need drip irrigation and can survive with an occasional watering. He loves the work but says the loss of local vegetation around Moree is heartbreaking.
“It’s definitely changed. That was open grass country,” he says, gesturing towards the horizon to the east. “But it’s now crops, barley, wheat, chickpeas, lupins, cotton.
“They buy this wide machinery, and they say it’s too much of a problem to go round the trees so they get rid of them. It’s tragic.”
The north-west of NSW is ground zero for tree loss. In the Moree council area alone, 1,189 hectares – roughly the size of the greater Melbourne area – of woody vegetation was lost to cropping, pasture and thinning in 2017-18. Even more went in neighbouring council areas.
The situation is set to get worse in the next year. The NSW government has said it will not pursue cases against farmers who broke the old laws and it is planning to introduce regional plans, beginning with the north-west, that could further increase broad-scale clearing.
On a national scale, some experts have doubts about whether national greenhouse accounts accurately reflect the full impact of forest clearing and have called for the federal government to introduce a nationwide monitoring system on a par with that used in Queensland.
Even without that, Bill Hare, the chief executive and senior scientist with Berlin-based Climate Analytics, says a key message from the national emissions data published by the government is that it expects clearing to continue at current rates for at least the next decade.
Specifically, pollution from land clearing is projected to stay at about 46m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year to 2030, roughly equivalent to emissions from three large coal-fired power plants.
“That’s the bottom line,” Hare says. “This is significantly damaging the climate, as well as the natural environment, and Australia is not planning to do anything to stop it.”

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