25/11/2019

(AU) The Day That Plunged Australia's Climate Policy Into 10 Years Of Inertia

ABC News - Annabel Crabb

One man's plan would not only see the overthrow of his leader, it would blow apart Australia's two great political parties. (AAP, Emma Machan)


 Australia Talks
Australians ranked climate change as the number one problem for them personally in the Australia Talks National Survey. 
Ten years ago today, Andrew Robb arrived at Parliament House intent upon an act of treachery.
No-one was expecting him. Robb was formally on leave from the Parliament undergoing treatment for his severe depression.
But the plan the Liberal MP nursed to himself that morning would not only bring about the political demise of his leader, Malcolm Turnbull, but blow apart Australia's two great parties irrevocably just as they teetered toward consensus on climate change, the most divisive issue of the Australian political century.
They have never again been so close.
A decade later, according to the ABC's Australia Talks National Survey, climate change is a matter of urgent community concern. Eighty-four per cent of respondents said that climate change was real and that action was warranted. When offered a range of 19 issues and asked which were of gravest personal concern, climate change ranked at number one.
As bushfires ravage the landscape and drought once again strangles vast tracts of the continent, the inability of the Australian Parliament to reach agreement on how to answer the threat of climate change — or even discuss it rationally — may well be one of the drivers of another shrieking headline from the Australia Talks research: 84 per cent of respondents also feel that Australian politicians are out of touch with the views of the people they represent.
This is the story — told on its 10th birthday — of a political event that changed the course of a nation's history.

How bipartisan policy fell apart
Robb was on sick leave from his job as shadow minister for climate, managing the notoriously difficult transition from one anti-depressant medication to another.
In his absence, acting shadow minister for climate Ian Macfarlane had successfully negotiated, with the authority of Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, a deal with the Rudd government to land the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, or CPRS.
Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull speaks to shadow emissions trading spokesman Ian Macfarlane on the day the CPRS deal fell apart. (Alan Porritt: AAP)

The concept of an emissions trading scheme was — nominally at least — bipartisan policy at the time.
John Howard campaigned promising an ETS in 2007, and so did Kevin Rudd. The Greens were ferociously in favour.
But the detail of Rudd's plan created difficulties. The Greens wouldn't have a bar of what the Rudd government bowled up.
Even 10 years later, Rudd can still remember the tick-tock of the CPRS in pellucid detail.
I reach him by telephone in a nameless Chinese airport. He is about to be served something billed as a Japanese burger, he reports.
Kevin Rudd says negotiating with the Greens was a "a bullshit exercise". (ABC News: Tom Hancock)

"They wanted 40 per cent, which would have put us far and away above any other country in the developed world," Rudd says of the Greens.
"There was no scientific justification for a 40 per cent cut. They just knew it was 15-20 per cent higher than anyone else was prepared to offer. They designed it in a manner to cause the negotiations to fail. The negotiations with them were a bullshit exercise.
"And so we had to go to Plan B which was to negotiate with the Liberals."
Turnbull was of the view that a market mechanism was inevitable. He had Howard's advocacy of an emissions trading scheme as authority within the party.
And so it came to pass that on Monday, November 23, a deal was concluded between the government and the opposition that Turnbull resolved to put to his shadow cabinet and party room the following day.

Enter the quiet assassin
Robb obtained a confidential copy on the Monday afternoon. He says it horrified him.
"It was a total sell-out, but it was so cleverly crafted that it would look, to the less informed, like we'd won the lottery in the negotiations," Robb would later write in his memoir, Black Dog Daze.
He sat up until late that night in his Canberra flat, studying the detail of the deal, rereading Turnbull's public speeches, and composing an ambush.
As Robb arrived at Parliament House on November 24, shadow cabinet was already meeting to approve the CPRS agreement. Shadow ministers Nick Minchin, Eric Abetz and Tony Abbott were staunch opponents, but were in the minority. All that remained was for the party room to rubber-stamp the deal.
"Malcolm really played it pretty cleverly," says Robb now. "He got them all in a position where they didn't have enough information to contradict it so it was all going to go through in a morning. It was all set up, because he'd been negotiating with Labor for months."
"You fight fire with fire," Andrew Robb says. (AAP: Mick Tsikas)
Robb knew that he could not possibly telegraph to Turnbull that he was an opponent.
"I think his biggest regret, and subsequent verbal attacks, were because I didn't tell him," Robb says.
"I didn't want to do it like that. But you fight fire with fire."
What happened was this. Robb seated himself in a row near the front of the room, expressed his interest in speaking and waited for the call. Hours passed, as speakers selected by Turnbull spoke in support of the deal, interspersed with opponents who — unfamiliar with the detail — simply restated their generic reservations about outpacing comparable nations in addressing climate change. Robb couldn't catch Turnbull's eye.
He became anxious that Turnbull and his lieutenants — manager of opposition business Christopher Pyne and shadow cabinet secretary Michael Ronaldson — had twigged to his scepticism.

An extraordinary tactic
And so it was that Andrew Robb made one of the most extraordinary and — by most conventional measures — indefensible tactical decisions in the history of political chicanery.
Parliament House is no stranger to mental illness. Historically, its sufferers have covered their tracks, loath to be seen as vulnerable.
But this must be the only recorded occasion on which mental illness has been used as a tactic.
Robb ripped himself a scrap of paper and scrawled a note to Turnbull.
"The side effects of the medication I am on now make me very tired. I'd be really grateful if you could get me to my feet soon," he wrote.
Turnbull called Robb to speak soon after. He rose, and denounced the proposed scheme in forensic detail, his words carrying significant weight as the erstwhile bearer of the relevant portfolio.
The deal never recovered. The meeting went on for six more hours. Turnbull — a streetfighter when cornered — added the numbers of shadow Cabinet votes to the "yes" votes in the party room and declared that he had a majority.
The party room wasn't buying it. Turnbull was cooked.
Tony Abbott makes his way back to his office after defeating Malcolm Turnbull in the 2009 leadership ballot. (AAP: Glen McCurtayne)
One week and one day later — December 1, 2009 — a ballot was held for the leadership of the Liberal Party.
Tony Abbott — who nominated against both Turnbull and shadow treasurer Joe Hockey — won by a single vote.
The Abbott opposition was born, with its strident campaign against Labor's "great big new tax on everything".
The next day, the emissions trading scheme legislation went to a vote in the Parliament and was defeated soundly.
Both the Coalition and the Greens voted against.
The Rudd government relinquished its attempts to put a price on carbon. Rudd himself was overthrown mid-2010. Julia Gillard staked her political life on installing a carbon price, but lost it at the 2013 election in the face of Abbott's muscular anti-carbon-tax campaign.
Abbott installed his "Direct Action" model which survives to this day, despite Turnbull's subsequent prime ministership, during which he tried and failed to introduce the National Energy Guarantee, a legislative device aimed at establishing reliable supply and reduced emissions from the energy sector.
Julie Bishop noticed a wave of defiance within the Liberal party in 2009. (ABC News: Adam Kennedy)

'There were divided views'
Julie Bishop, who was deputy leader to Turnbull at the time of the 2009 meeting, says the turn history took that day "was about more than just climate change".
"It came down to a judgment about the political fortunes of the Liberal party," she says.
In the previous months, with Turnbull's knowledge, Bishop had canvassed the views of a great many Liberal MPs about which way the party should jump. It was a party room depleted by the 2007 defeat, intimidated by Rudd's vaulting popularity, and damaged by the consequences of the Howard government's overreach on Work Choices, its controversial industrial relations reforms.
What she discovered was a new wave of defiance gathering among the party's ranks.
"A minority believed that humanity hasn't had the claimed effect on the climate," she says.
"There were divided views. But the majority simply wanted to draw a line in the sand on the issue and they wanted to fight Rudd."

'You can still see the scars'
For Kane Thornton, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, the past 10 years are a tale of intense frustration.
"What happened back then has just so fundamentally shaped the direction and the context for climate and energy policy ever since," he says.
Kane Thornton, CEO of the Clean Energy Council. (ABC News)
"Even now, in discussion and debate you can still see those scars. Every political leader — across both major parties — has been very substantially impacted by this issue. Going right back to John Howard in 2007.
"What that means is that what is otherwise a very sensible and accepted approach — putting a price on carbon — is now so difficult that governments either aren't prepared to go there or it's done in such a way that there's such a narrow field of politically palatable options that it's almost pointless."
Rudd despairs of the contemporary impasse on climate policy.
"Where has the complacent country got to, where in the case of the major geostrategic risks washing over our shores — the climate change debate and the China debate — we seem to have reduced these issues to a juvenile slanging match rather than a mature debate?"
Visiting Sydney this week, the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, British-born Michael Liebreich, was brutal in his assessment of Australia's contemporary energy situation."It's unbelievable how you can have a country with such cheap solar power, such cheap wind power, frankly such cheap natural gas and yet you still have expensive power and an unreliable grid," he told ABC's AM.
"I mean, how do you do that? It's a government failure."
Turnbull, in an interview published yesterday by The Guardian, said the climate debate in Parliament was hostage to "insurgents" inside the Coalition.
"There are plenty of odd beliefs out there and conspiracy theories but what I have always struggled to understand is why climate denialism still has the currency that it has, particularly given the evidence of the impact of climate change is now so apparent, and it is particularly apparent to people living in regional and rural Australia," he said.
"Precisely what has been forecast is happening."

Dashed chances
Rudd believes that the CPRS — if legislated — would have stuck.
"Had the Greens and the others acted responsibly, we'd be 10 years into an adjustable carbon price which would have brought about the transition away from coal," he says.
Turnbull, too, has assured associates that if legislated, the CPRS would have become "part of the fiscal furniture, like the GST".
The Greens, incidentally, are so accustomed to being accused of blowing Australia's chances at an emissions trading scheme that they've taken out space on their website to address the charge.
The response reads:
"Here's the short answer: we voted against the CPRS because it was bad policy that would have locked in failure to take action on climate change.
"According to Treasury modelling, under the CPRS there would have been no reduction in emissions for 25 years. The CPRS was incredibly generous to polluters, allowed unlimited access to dodgy international permits and would have resulted in a carbon price of around $1 over the past decade.
"It simply would not it have led to any change in behaviour by big polluters, while any attempt to strengthen the scheme would have resulted in billion dollar compensation payouts to big polluters."
How did the UK do it?
In the UK, notwithstanding the compelling train wreck of Brexit, Westminster has somehow found time this year for bipartisan agreement to the target of a zero-emissions economy by 2050.
So why, in Australia, is climate still such a lancingly divisive issue?
"I think there's got to be something about how the issue was first dealt with," Kane Thornton says. "There was a tipping point where in this country this issue became highly contentious."
It was Margaret Thatcher who first brought the greenhouse effect to the broad attention of the British voting public; this was in the 1980s, when her temporary "green phase" coincided neatly with her forced closure of British coal pits amid an industrial war on militant miners' unions.
Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. (Reuters: Kieran Doherty)
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who governed in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, pushed an ambitious climate agenda in his party and suffered minimal internal damage compared to the Turnbull experience.
"I do reflect on where we would be right now if John Howard won the 2007 election with an ETS and a commitment to a higher but still modest [Renewable Energy Target]," Thornton says.
"My guess is we'd be in a very different position right now."
According to Julie Bishop, the strength of feeling on the issue within the modern Coalition is both economic and political in origin.
"Australia's economy has been built on the back of abundant supplies of low cost coal," she says.
"We've had the competitive advantage of being a coal-based economy.
"For some people, it's about that. That we're turning our backs on our own competitive advantage.
"For others, it's seen as symbolic of the divide between the economic wets and dries."

The one sliver of common ground
One shred of bipartisanship has survived the 10-year political impasse — the Renewable Energy Target (RET), introduced by John Howard in 2001 and expanded by the Rudd government with support from the Turnbull opposition to a mandatory 20 per cent of generation by 2020.
Back then, the RET was intended to work with the ETS; an industry policy for the emerging renewables sector, while the price on carbon set a longer-term investment signal.
Are you worried about climate change?
We asked 54,000 people about their lives. See what they told us — and how you compare.
But for 10 years now, the RET has batted on unaided, surviving a fairly serious attempt on its life by the Abbott government in 2015. The target for high energy users was met in September this year.
"The regrettable truth is that right now, the only policy mechanism that is effectively working on Australian carbon emissions reduction is the policy brought into effect by my government 10 years ago, and that's the mandatory Renewable Energy Target," Rudd says.
"It's the only instrument doing the heavy lifting."
Kane Thornton says the RET has provided a measure of certainty.
On this continent, renewables are growing at the fastest rate in the world, on a per capita basis — 10 times faster than the global average. Australia has seen $25 billion of investment in big wind and solar farms in the past two years.
"That's been driven fundamentally by the economics — that the cost of renewables just keeps coming down — it beats coal, gas and nuclear," Thornton says.
"Despite the policy wars, despite the brawling between the Commonwealth and the states, the fundamental economics have just kept trucking on."
Will anyone seize the opportunity
to be a leader during this crisis?
If our political conversation really is at a point when the culture war can't be downed in the face of a crisis, we really are in a lot of trouble, writes Laura Tingle
Households, too, have made a startling investment in renewables.
"Look at rooftop solar, which is up there as a world leader in terms of the numbers of households and small businesses that have taken it up," Thornton says.
"There are now over 2 million homes where the owners have said, 'well, energy prices keep going up and it seems really messy. I want to take some kind of control. I want to push on despite the chaotic politics around energy'."
The RET has delivered support for the growth of renewables. And the conventional resources sector is in a state of transition: BHP is reported to be moving ahead with plans to exit thermal coal, while coal giant Glencore has announced plans to limit production and Rio Tinto has removed its exposure to thermal coal entirely.

A sliding-doors moment
Andrew Robb conquered the black dog and subsequently served as trade minister in the Abbott government. When the prime ministership fell to Turnbull in September 2015, he was retained for several months as a cabinet minister by the man whose downfall he had hastened back in 2009.
Robb says while he is not proud of the method he employed, he has never entertained second thoughts about what he did that day.
"I've got absolutely no regrets because we've still got a lot of industries that we wouldn't have had otherwise," he says.
"We've got cleaner coal, cleaner everything. If you're going to wind down coal, we should be the last place to go, not the first. But there we were, opening the door to Africa and lots of places with no restrictions."
Andrew Robb says "democracy's an amazing thing". (AAP: Mick Tsikas)
Robb admits that his was an extraordinary intervention in a sliding-doors juncture of Australian political history.
"I've seen so often in my career where something monumental gets down to one vote. Then when the vote's taken, it sticks, and the world adjusts. It was the beginning of Tony — who won by one vote. Democracy's an amazing thing, really. And it does show you that if you've got half of the votes or just over half or just under, that can reflect community attitudes too," he says.
"This is not a fault of democracy, it's a fact."
He mentions that when he was a much younger man, he was "a great student" of the Club of Rome, an association of scientists, bureaucrats, politicians and public thinkers who in 1972 published the book Limits To Growth, warning that the world's resources could not withstand the depredations of ceaseless economic growth indefinitely.
Limits To Growth is still the highest-selling environmental book in the history of the world, having sold 30 million copies in more than 30 languages.
But Robb's early fascination with the work gave way to distrust of its conclusions and primitive computer modelling; he says its warnings of resource exhaustion and economic collapse towards the end of the 20th century were overstated.
"The thing they didn't talk about was technology. That you could find gas 300 kilometres offshore, for example, and find a way to bring it onshore. Because of this, the Club of Rome — which was quite a reputable group of people — looked more and more ridiculous as the years rolled on."
The Club of Rome has its critics and its defenders; Limits To Growth was commonly derided by the 1990s as a misguided Doomsday scenario, but has enjoyed something of a renaissance lately. The CSIRO published a paper in 2008 finding that the book's 30-year modelling of consequences from a "business as usual" approach to economic growth was essentially sound.
But what's not deniable is that this work influenced one young man who grew up to be one member of a parliamentary party with a singular role to play in one vote on a policy that would either change or not change the course of a country.
Democracy, he says, is an amazing thing.
Or an infuriating thing. Or mysterious. Or random.

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(US) Her Message About Climate Change: It’s Not Too Late

New York Times - Katie Robertson

Kate Marvel is committed to spreading the word about climate science. Her TED Talk on the subject drew more than a million viewers.
Kate Marvel teaching at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan. After earning a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, she decided to explore a field “that was more relevant to people’s lives and would make more of a difference.” Credit...Jackie Molloy for The New York Times
Kate Marvel is an energetic spokeswoman for climate science at a time when misinformation about climate change seems to be at its peak and world leaders appear confused about a way forward.
Dr. Marvel, an associate research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, has committed herself to clearly communicating to the public the facts about a changing climate through her writing and talks.
Her TED Talk in 2017 was watched by more than a million people and she writes the Hot Planet column for Scientific American. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and did postdoctoral research at Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

How did you become a climate scientist?
I got my Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cambridge. Then I got kind of frustrated with the field that I was in while I was in graduate school and I wanted to do something more applied. I wanted to do something that was more relevant to people’s lives and would make more of a difference. And I got a postdoc fellowship at Stanford, where they let me work on whatever I wanted as long as it had a science component and a policy component. I dabbled in a couple things and then I found climate science and I haven’t looked back since.

What was it that captured your attention?
I love that everything on the planet is connected. I love that things are both predictable and very complex. I say I went to grad school to study the whole universe and then I realized that this is the best place in the entire universe. Things like the fact that the rising air from the tropics sinks and when it sinks that’s where it creates the great deserts of the world. So we wouldn’t have deserts if it weren’t for the tropics. I think that’s beautiful.

Your TED Talk focused on the role of clouds in climate change. What are you researching right now?
My research goes in two directions. One is this question of what does climate change look like and is it happening. That means how is climate change affecting the variables that we care about. Not just temperature, but things like rainfall, globally and locally, things like cloud cover. So a lot of my research is focused on understanding the changes that we are experiencing and putting them in context.
I’m also interested in something called climate sensitivity, which is basically: How hot is it going to get? The number one reason we don’t know how hot it’s going to get is we don’t know what we’re going to do. We don’t know what emissions are going to look like. Even if we were to remove that uncertainty, we still couldn’t say with 100 percent confidence how hot it was going to get. That’s because there is a lot we don’t understand about a changing climate.

What does your day-to-day look like?
I’m teaching in the Columbia master’s program in climate and society right now. I’m just teaching one class. And then I am mostly focused on my research. I am basically a computational and theoretical scientist. I work with models, I work with satellite observations, I work with paleoclimate reconstructions to look at what the climate was like millions of years ago or thousands of years ago. I am not a field scientist, I don’t go out and collect samples. I love teaching, but I really love talking to other scientists. I’ve been incredibly lucky where I am pretty much supported to do whatever is interesting to me. So I’ve been able to work on a really wide variety of different projects that interest me.

We often hear about how few women there are still in science, both in colleges and in the industry. What would help to get more women into fields like yours?
There are definitely structural barriers: the structure of the academic career track, where generally you are expected to move to wherever there is a job and you are expected to be very portable. And you are expected to do short-term contracts, during the time when a lot of people are interested in building families and settling down. It can be a major disincentive for not only women but anyone who is not economically comfortable or has a certain degree of privilege. I think there is so much focus on “how do we get girls interested in science?” Girls are interested in science! We need to focus on systemic changes.
Dr. Marvel on the campus of Columbia University, where she teaches. Talking about climate change, she said, “We still have time to prevent that catastrophe.” Credit...Jackie Molloy for The New York Times
You’ve done a lot of writing and talks and have a public profile. Do you ever encounter sexism in that realm?
I’ve definitely had gendered pushback. But I also think being a woman in climate, being a woman scientist, I am in just fantastic company. The other women scientists who work in climate who have public profiles, they’ve all had pushback as well, but we support each other. I’m just incredibly fortunate to know a lot of these people. It definitely helps when people are calling you ugly things on the internet.

How do you approach people who are climate change skeptics?
The more I’ve been talking about climate change in public, the more I’ve realized my urge to counter that by giving people facts and figures and graphs and equations, that doesn’t really work. People don’t reject climate science because they need more facts. A lot of times, rejection of climate science comes from another place, it comes from “this is fundamentally conflicting with some deep organizational principle that I believe, the story that I tell myself that makes everything make sense.” I’m really not always going to be able to change someone’s mind. I’ve also been kind of forgiving myself; you’re not going to get to everybody.

Are we doomed? Is there hope?
We can be doomed, if we choose to be. I think it is true that our choices in this coming decade really, really matter. We have to take drastic action A.S.A.P. That is true. A lot of people say catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Climate change is inevitable; it’s already happening. But there is a difference between bad, disruptive and completely catastrophic. And we still have time to prevent that catastrophe.

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(AU) Centrism Is A Dead Weight In Australian Politics – And It's Dragging Us All Down

The Guardian - *

 Those wanting to appear reasonable and balanced are actually condemning us to inaction on the climate crisis
Centrists may deplore movements like Extinction Rebellion, but it’s activism that gets things done. Photograph: Olivia Vanni/AP
There is an invidious strain of centrism in Australian media and politics that is one of the most powerful forces against effective action on climate change.
It is a strain that has become more virulent in response to protests by Extinction Rebellion and the raised voices of those who care not to genuflect to the systems that have led us to the current crisis.
It is a strain that conservatives use to their advantage.
Two weeks ago, as New South Wales and parts of Queensland burned, the prime minister was at pains to argue that now was not the time to talk about climate change.
And the centrists agreed.
This week Scott Morrison was ready to talk about climate change and he had the script all prepared.
Morrison told the ABC’s Sabra Lane that “the suggestion that any way, shape or form with Australia accountable for 1.3% of the world’s emissions, that the individual actions of Australia are impacting directly on specific fire events, whether it’s here or anywhere else in the world, that doesn’t bear up to credible scientific evidence either”.
It’s a line straight out of the climate-change denial playbook.
No one is suggesting if we had a price on carbon there would be fewer bushfires, or it alone would significantly reduce global temperatures, but that does not mean Australia cannot make a difference.
Only on climate change do you ever hear conservatives argue we are powerless. Our economy is only around 1.5% of the world’s total GDP and yet we have no qualms in going to the G20 every year and pushing our agenda.
But on climate change? Sorry, we are impotent.
Except we’re not.
We are the 15th biggest emitter in the world, the biggest on a per capita basis among advanced economies. We have massive power, because we are wealthy enough to show what can be done. If we do nothing, it becomes a strong reason for anyone who emits less than us either in total or per capita to do the same.
And the problem is we are using what power we have to obstruct action on climate change.
Morrison argued that “if anything, Australia is an overachiever on our commitments, on global commitments, and for 2030, we will meet those as well with the mechanisms that we’ve put in place and we’ll ensure we do achieve that”.
What utter tosh.
Our Kyoto commitment is based on the dodgy counting of land use; and our commitment to Paris targets doubles down on that dodginess by using carry-over credits from the Kyoto target – something nations such as the UK are now fighting hard to have removed.
Our target is also well below what scientists say is needed to keep temperature rises below 1.5C.
Thirteen months ago the UN issued a report that concluded we have 12 years to do something to limit climate change, after which it will be too late to keep the rise in temperatures below 1.5C.
The science has not changed in that time; all that has is we now have only 11 years.
But this week it was reported that fossil fuel production by 2030 is set to be double that which is needed to keep temperature rises below 1.5C.
We are failing, and Australia’s own policy is ensuring that failure will continue.
But heck, pointing that out will seem biased, and so the centrist looks for a chance to appear balanced.
It is why they have grabbed onto the disruption of Extinction Rebellion and loud claims by the Greens – because the centrist loves nothing more than being able to tell both sides to calm down.
A clear example of this came this week from former ALP cabinet minister Craig Emerson, who wrote an opinion piece in the AFR denouncing tribalism that he argues is killing civil discourse.
In it he suggested that “national socialism is resurgent. But so is international green socialism – a variant of white supremacism”.
Yes, nothing like suggesting sections of the environmental movement are racists to get that civil discourse going.
Emerson suggested this white supremacism occurred when “well-off greens demand the races of Asia and Africa forgo economic development using fossil fuels to rectify the sins we white, affluent humans have inflicted on the planet”.
Yes “the races” of Asia and Africa.
Emerson didn’t help his case against tribalism by spending most of the week on Twitter berating Greens supporters and suggesting the ALP was the only major party doing anything good on climate change (if the ALP isn’t the biggest force of tribalism in Australian politics, I clearly need to invest in a new dictionary).
He further weakened his cause by suggesting that people were arguing that poorer nations needed to shift immediately to 100% renewable energy.
No organisation or person of any note is arguing this (although Emerson did find a random person on Twitter).
But worse, this argument that fossil fuels help poorer nations is a retread of the old argument that “coal is good for humanity” that Tony Abbott was pushing in 2014, and which was easily debunked at the time.
It was the same argument that saw coal mining companies argue to leaders of the G20 that coal was needed because the WHO had reported that 4 million people die prematurely from household air pollution because “nearly 3 billion people use primitive stoves to burn wood or biomass to cook and heat homes”.
Except what the WHO actually noted was that “around 3 billion people cook using polluting open fires or simple stoves fuelled by kerosene, biomass and coal”.
And yet Emerson’s article, which pushed specious arguments about demands for immediate change to renewables, which likened sections of the environmentalist movement to white supremacists, and which echoed lines from mining companies was met with gushing praise from some very senior journalists.
That’s because the column called for calm and reason, and centrists love calm and reason and love even more to praise anyone calling for it.
And so in the space of five years we went from an argument pushed by Tony Abbott and mining companies to encourage more coal mines being shown to be clearly fallacious to it now being praised as part of a reasonable approach.
This is because centrists care more about being seen to be neutral than whether that neutrality is worthy, or worrying if the centre has moved.
It is the force that has journalists and politicians arguing that we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good, and yet spending little time examining how good something has to be before the perfect becomes its enemy.
Not all extremism is equal and no force of social or economic change happened due to people refusing to make waves. It happened because people were prepared to go to prison, be attacked, and seek to disrupt those who would go about their lives ignoring the issue.
Centrists love the final vote that sees change occur – where politicians from both sides sit together and agree; they care only in retrospect for the work, suffering and effort over decades that leads to that change.
And they ignore that throughout those decades, the powerful in the media and politics actively prevented change occurring by spending more time calling for calm and reason than noting reality.
And so long as powerful journalists believe that arguments are worthy purely because they call for a middle ground, then ever will they be a force that prevents effective action on climate change.

 *Greg Jericho is a columnist for Guardian Australia

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24/11/2019

(AU) Australia Bushfires Factcheck: Are This Year's Fires Unprecedented?

The Guardian -  | 

Firefighters tackle the Gospers Mountain fire outside Sydney. Parts of eastern Australia have had record low rainfall in 2019, contributing to an unusually ferocious early bushfire season. Photograph: Dean Lewins/EPA
Australia has suffered a devastating early bushfire season with fires across several states burning through hundreds of thousands of hectares and destroying hundreds of properties with the loss of six lives.
New South Wales has been the most severely hit, with more than 1.65m hectares razed, an area significantly larger than suburban Sydney. All six deaths occurred in there and more than 600 homes were destroyed. At one point firefighters were battling a fire front about 6,000km long, equivalent to a return trip between Sydney and Perth.
In Queensland, 20 homes have been lost and about 180,000ha burned. In Victoria, where the bushfire season usually starts later, 100km/h winds fanned more than 60 blazes during an unprecedented heatwave on Thursday. The most extreme warning, a code red, was issued for the north-western and central regions. The state’s emergency services minister, Lisa Neville, compared it to “the worst conditions you’d see in February or March”.
Seven districts in South Australia were rated as being at catastrophic risk of fire on Wednesday as temperatures soared into the 40s. A blaze on the Yorke peninsula burned through about 5,000ha, damaging at least 11 properties and injuring 33 people. Western Australia has also experienced early bushfires in several regions, with fears of much worse to come over summer, and there were minor bushfires this week in Tasmania.

Is this unprecedented?
Australia has always had devastating bushfires, a point emphasised by some columnists and newspaper editorials, but scientists say the fire conditions this year are without parallel on several fronts.
Let’s start with the situation in NSW. Over the past 50 years, there have been just two calendar years in which more of the state has burned than this year: 1974 and 1984. With this year, those two were much larger than any other year, as this graph shows, based on data from the University of Wollongong’s centre for environmental risk management of bushfires:

NSW fires: total area burned
Showing the total area burned in hectares per year,
with a year-to-date figure for 2019
Guardian graphic
Source: Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfire

This year, which still has six weeks to run, sits fractionally behind 1984. Both are a long way behind 1974, when more than 3.5m hectares burned.
But scientists says fire conditions today are fundamentally different, and fundamentally worse in many ways, when compared with some of the fires experienced in the past.
The centre’s director, Ross Bradstock, says the 1974 fires burned through largely remote country mostly in the state’s far west, devouring green, non-woody herbaceous plants. The conditions were created by above average rainfall which produced ample fuel in outback grasslands.
By contrast, the fires in the east of the state this year have been fuelled by a lack of rain. The extent of the fires is in significant part driven by the amount of dry fuel available, some of it in highly unlikely places, and the amount of dry fuel is linked to the record-breaking drought.
Rainfall between January and August 2019 was the lowest on record in some areas, including the northern tablelands of NSW and Queensland’s southern downs. Parts of both states experienced record low soil moisture. As temperatures and wind speeds increased but humidity remained low, conditions were primed for small fires to become major conflagrations.

Drought in Australia
Rainfall deficiency from January 2017 to August 2019
Rainfall deficiency compares rainfall over a given period with the long-term average, and then determines if it is below average, and by how much. Here, you can see how bad the drought has been over a 32 month period with rainfall percentiles showing areas with the lowest rainfall on record, a severe deficiency in rainfall, or a serious deficiency.
Guardian graphic
Source: BoM



Bradstock says it has put NSW in uncharted territory: “For the forests and woodlands in the eastern half of the state, this is unprecedented.
“Natural features in the landscape which often impede fires, like these wetter forest communities, are just burning. There is likely to be long-term ecological and other environmental consequences.”
The director of the fire centre at the University of Tasmania, David Bowman, says the unprecedented nature of the fires this spring can be seen through their intensity and geographical spread across the country, noting at time of writing there were fires in five states.
The extent of the bushfire risk is illustrated through Bureau of Meteorology data of the cumulative forest fire danger index across winter.

Winter bushfire weather conditions, 2019
Showing the cumulative forest fire danger index (FFDI) for winter (June to August) 2019 compared with all winters since 1950. The FFDI combines measurment of rainfall, evaporation, wind speed, temperature and humidity, and the cumulative FFDI is the sum of daily values over the specified period.  
Guardian graphic
Source: BoM

The map shows the overwhelming majority of the country, with a few exceptions in Victoria, central Queensland and western Tasmania, experienced between “above average” and “highest on record” fire conditions in winter when compared with the average since 1950.
Bowman says the extraordinary nature of the fire season is clear on several measures: the extent of area burned, and the underlying dryness and poor air quality affecting people across the country. Smoke in NSW and Queensland has prompted a rise in people seeking emergency treatment for respiratory problems.
But as illustrative evidence he emphasises the areas affected in which fire has never or rarely burned in the past, including rainforests, wet eucalypt forests, dried-out swamps and organic matter in the soil where the water table has dropped.
He says one of the most striking images of the extreme fire conditions in recent weeks were those of a devastated banana plantation at Taylors Arm, west of Macksville, in northern NSW. He lists it alongside the loss of other landscapes – including Gondwana-era vegetation in the Tasmanian world heritage wilderness area that in some cases had not burned for more than 1,000 years – as evidence of change.
“There’s just layer upon layer upon layer of differences,” Bowman says. “If you narrow your frame you can say ‘nothing to see’. But if you broaden your aperture, it’s clear.
“I wrote a book on Australian rainforests. I’ve seen every Australian rainforest biome, and the fact that multiple versions of these ecosystems right around the country are burning all within the same couple of years … This is a really confronting warning light.”

What do other professionals dealing with fire say?
They largely back the scientists.
As has been widely reported, 23 former fire and emergency services chiefs from across the country have jointly warned climate crisis is making bushfires deadlier and the season longer, and called on the government to act.
Neil Bibby, former chief executive of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority and one of the 23, says: “It has been the last couple of years where we have been realising things have started to change and this is the new future … It will only get worse.”
The chief executive of the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council, Stuart Ellis, says this bushfire season already has an “enduring nature”. “[It’s] just relentless,” he says.
Andrew Gissing, an emergency management expert at the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and a consultant with Risk Frontiers, says an analysis of building losses from bushfire seasons back to 1925 suggests this season is already the third worst in NSW. In Queensland, about a third of all financial losses from burned buildings since 1925 have occurred this year.

Is this climate change in action?
No fire can be blamed on climate change alone, but Bowman says the rise in higher temperatures, extreme dryness, worsening fire seasons, extreme bursts of fire weather and behaviour and the spread of fire across the country all align with scenarios painted by climate change projections.
Greenhouse gas emissions have a clear impact on rising temperatures and, through that, an indirect link on increased dryness in eastern Australia. A recent study found the extreme temperatures that drove historic 2018 bushfires in northern Queensland were four times more likely to have happened because of human-caused climate change
In short, climate change can and does makes bushfires worse.
Bradstock says a range of published research has found escalating atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are increasing the risk of the type of fires affecting NSW’s eastern forests, but reducing the likelihood of a similar fire to that experienced in 1974.
The elevated scores on the forest fire danger index in winter this year meant not only that the risk of bushfires was significantly heightened as the warmer seasons began, but opportunities for hazard reduction burning had been limited in some parts of the country – although NSW authorities still managed to meet its annual target of 135,000ha of prescribed burning.
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, from the University of New South Wales’ climate change research centre, says studies by the CSIRO and others have found the fire season has got longer, particularly in eastern Australia, where it is starting earlier. This is expected to continue until 2050 at least.
“We know that catastrophic conditions are now more likely to occur, and into spring as well,” she says.
On this year, Bradstock says: “I guess the most concerning thing to emphasise is it’s not over. We’re not even into summer yet.”

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(AU) Why It's So Wrong To Play Down Australia's Role In Fighting Climate Change

Sydney Morning Herald - Patrick Suckling

Patrick Suckling was Australia’s Ambassador for the Environment.
He recently joined Pollination, a specialist climate investment and advisory firm.
One of the more solemn yet uplifting duties during my time as high commissioner to India was commemorating Anzac Day – 2.5 million Indian soldiers served in World War II.
Australia has made the Anzac spirit part of our national soul. Our contribution to total forces in World War II was around 1.3 per cent.
Never did I hear in Delhi nor can I imagine anyone thinking in the well attended Anzac commemorations around Australia that our effort was irrelevant.
Yet as Sydney this week ranked among the most polluted cities in the world and fires torched our communities and country, we heard rehearsals of the view that whatever Australia does on climate change is irrelevant because our emissions are only around 1.3 per cent of the global total, and that Australians pressing for climate action are merely virtue signalling.
Smoke haze from bushfires blanketed Sydney this week. Credit: Renee Nowytarger
Its companion is the argument that amid the tragedy of our bushfires now is not the time to talk about climate change.
This argument has its equivalent in the US where, in the aftermath of all too familiar mass shootings, it is distressing to hear comment that it is not the time to talk about gun control.
Like the bleaching of our Great Barrier Reef, the scorching of these fires is the face of the future in a heating world.
Yes, we have always had fires: but they will be worse because we will be hotter, and drier.
Scientists constantly work to validate their theories. That’s their method. For decades now they’ve rigorously tested the evidence on the threats of climate change; and it keeps mounting.
Once, we may have thought them lost in an abstract world. Now, around the world, increasingly we see and feel ourselves the trauma from climate change.
Australia is among the most vulnerable to climate change. That is why our Parliament ratified the Paris Agreement. It is in our national interest.
No one country can solve the challenge but each must play its part.
Countries with emissions under 2 per cent of the global total make up around 40 per cent of global emissions. This includes Germany whose leadership on the renewable energy revolution would not have happened had it thought itself irrelevant and balked.
If we shrink through self-ascribed irrelevance instead of stretching to influence concerted global action on climate change then we desert our national interest.
More than most, we need to be on the front foot: increasingly active at home and pressing for more action overseas.
Absent the strongest collective effort, we reduce the prospect of limiting global temperature rise; ensuring more ferocious fires into the future where we will be condemned by our children and theirs for not having done all we could, individually and collectively.
Already we see glimmerings in their  school strikes against us not having done enough in the past, or now.
Much of the world looks to us for leadership.
This is not only because we are one of the wealthiest and most capable, often punching well above our weight, but also because Australia is an environmental icon known for its outstanding natural beauty and stewardship of country – reaching back 60,000 years for our Indigenous peoples.
The Hillville fire that destroyed homes two weeks ago. Credit: Nick Moir
If we shirk it is hard to see why developing countries, now the major source of emissions growth, should listen or lift.
If we falter we weaken the Paris Agreement, where for the first time developed and developing countries alike are committed to increasing climate action and being held accountable.
We all need to do more but a good start has been made, for example, China looks like its emissions will peak well before its 2030 target, possibly before 2025.
Bolstering the gains won’t occur with a mindset of our own impotence.
We also risk not making the most of the extraordinary opportunities in climate action.
It’s not a question of emissions reduction or jobs and growth, as the UK is demonstrating, having reduced emissions 40 per cent while growing the economy 70 per cent.
It’s a matter of harnessing our considerable competitive advantages in transition to a lower-emissions, more climate resilient  global economy; as two of our best entrepreneurs showed this week by embarking on a $22 billion solar investment intended to supply power to Singapore, among other things.
One of our best minds – Ross Garnaut – has just published a book on Australia's potential in a low-carbon future that everyone should read.
To reach this potential and address the magnitude of the climate challenge we are facing we can no longer be equivocal, or dismissive.
The fires in all their fury are telling us we must recognise the full seriousness of what is in front of us and step up.
That needs a plan, with policies for coming decades; uncertainty is no guide for the massive investments required for clean, green economic transformation and a defeatist view of our relevance is no compass for Australia to be the agent of our destiny.
Ask the Anzacs.

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It’s not just Venice. Climate change imperils ancient treasures everywhere.

Grist - 

The future of the past
FILIPPO MONTEFORTE / AFP via Getty Images
Saltwater rushed into St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice last week, submerging marble tombs, intricate mosaics, and centuries-old columns.
A man was spotted swimming across St. Mark’s Square, normally bustling with tourists, as the highest tide in 50 years swept through.
The “Floating City” of bridges, vaporetti, and gondolas is hardly a stranger to high tides. Venetians are accustomed to acqua alta, or “high water,” arriving in the fall. But as the city’s foundation sinks and sea levels rise, the floods are getting worse.
The basilica has submerged six times over the last 1,200 years. Tellingly, four of those instances were in the last two decades.
The rising saltwater presents a threat to the city’s prized architecture, including wall paintings and frescoes from the Renaissance. Early estimates put the damage around $1 billion so far.
It’s a vivid testament to the risks climate change poses to many of the world’s cultural treasures. In a fitting irony, minutes after Venice’s regional council rejected measures to fund renewable energy and replace diesel buses with cleaner ones, the council’s chamber was swept by floodwaters.
Since 2003, the city has been working on an infrastructure project known as Mose (as in Moses) for protection against high tides, but it’s still not up and running, having been bogged down in scandal, cost overruns, and other delays.
Venice has plenty of company — some 86 percent of UNESCO World Heritage sites like Venice in coastal regions of the Mediterranean are at risk from flooding and erosion, according to a study last year in the journal Nature.
The fate of cultural heritage — including museums, historical landmarks, and archaeological sites — often gets ignored in conversations about how to adapt to an overheating planet, said Linda Shi, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University.
But it will likely play a bigger role in the coming years, she said, as people wake up to the threat. Last month brought the launch of the international Climate Heritage Network, a coalition of cities, tribes, businesses, universities, and other organizations that promise to recognize the harm climate change poses to iconic cultural places and harness “the power of cultural heritage for climate action.”
Many UNESCO World Heritage sites have survived wars, floods, and other disasters over the course of hundreds and even thousands of years.
Can they survive the climate crisis? Here’s a sampling of the landmarks at risk:
  • The statues of Easter Island
    The remote Pacific island, 2,200 miles off the coast of Chile, is known for its giant monolithic statues of heads carved more than a thousand years ago. (PSA, they’re not just heads — the rest of their bodies are buried underground.) The island’s coastline is rapidly eroding, and waves are beginning to lap at the statues and ancient burial sites.
  • The cedars of Lebanon
    The trees mentioned so often in the Bible are imperiled. The famous Forest of the Cedars of God is one of the most vulnerable sites in the world to climate change, which has brought hot and dry conditions inhospitable to the trees.
  • An ancient burial site in Russia
    The frozen tombs that are part of the Treasures of the Pazyryk Culture in Siberia risk thawing out — and therefore rotting — as temperatures rise. The site includes 2,500-year-old burial mounds and rock carvings from the ancient Scythian people.
  • Archaeological ruins in Tanzania
    At a 13th-century trading center called Kilwa Kisiwani, on a small island just off Tanzania’s coast, merchants handled a good chunk of the trade in the Indian Ocean — gold, perfumes, porcelain, and more — and spread Swahili culture far and wide. But the ruins could get washed away before archaeologists have more time to explore them.
  • The Stone Age villages of Scotland
    The Orkney Islands off Scotland’s north coast contain some of the oldest sites in the world, with some structures built around 5,000 years ago, before the Great Pyramid of Giza. Of the 3,000 archaeological sites on the islands, some have already crumbled under heavy rains and erosion, and roughly half are under threat.
  • Unique habitat in Yellowstone National Park
    Climate change is bringing ferocious fires and less snowfall to the greater Yellowstone region, which spans from Wyoming into parts of Montana and Idaho. Changing conditions could totally reshape its landscape, draining half of the area’s wetlands and turning its dense forests into open woodlands.
So what will get preserved, and what will the world lose? There’s a financial incentive to save Venice. Some 20 million tourists bring in billions of euros every year.
“We might be willing to pay to preserve places like Venice,” Shi said in a statement, “but few other cultural heritage sites and systems will benefit from such attention and funding.”
Many places are too remote to draw crowds, affording them a measure of protection. No tourists means no trampling. But it also means governments might not find the money to protect them. And that’s to say nothing of other legacies that tourists can’t visit, like oral histories and indigenous languages. They, too, could be submerged as communities are displaced by rising seas, hurricanes, and other climate disasters.

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