20/01/2020

(AU) Behind The Smokescreen, The Coalition's Stance On Climate Change Hasn't Changed At All

The Guardian - 

If Scotty from Marketing and his coal-fired peers really believed in the climate crisis, they’d be doing something about it. Behind the smokescreen, the Coalition's stance on climate change hasn't changed at all.
The government’s actions over the past decade mean they have not earned the benefit of doubt, rather they have earned our total scepticism. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
The speed with which the conservative side of politics and the media has gone from assuring us climate change was not a problem, so we don’t need to worry about reducing emissions, to asserting that climate change is a problem, but we still don’t need to worry about reducing emissions, is breathtaking. Literally, given the levels of smoke still around.
You don’t get a cookie for saying you think climate change is real.
I’m sorry, you don’t. All you get is the capacity to say you have reached 1990 levels of comprehension – as that was when the first IPCC report was issued. You don’t get a prize for spending 30 years doing all you can to halt, undermine and dismantle action to reduce emissions, only to now say: “Hey, climate change is real.”
Consider that the Sydney Morning Herald this week ran a front page story headlined “Minister slams climate debate”, with the lead that “Australia’s bushfire crisis has prompted a blunt warning from Science Minister Karen Andrews to those she says are wasting time arguing about whether climate change is real”.
Oh good, that’s all sorted then.
But when you read on, you see nothing in her statement suggest one iota of a shift in the government’s position on emissions. She told the Herald: “My starting position in the discussion tomorrow will be that the climate has changed and it continues to change. We need to focus on the steps to adapt and mitigate the impact of those changes.”
The important point is she desires to mitigate the impact of the change, not to mitigate the actual change.
Right now the government is indulging in the equivalent of responding to polio by promising to invest in more iron lungs. And bizarrely, it is getting credit for it.
Adaptation is not mitigation.
The need for action on climate change is the need to reduce emissions
What is being said now is no different to what was said by Tony Abbott back when he was prime minister. In 2015, Abbott told parliament: “As far as the government is concerned, climate change is real. Mankind makes a contribution, and it is important to have strong and effective action to deal with it.
“We have met and beaten our Kyoto targets ... We are on track to meet and beat our current commitments to reduce emissions by 2020 by 13 per cent on 2005 levels.”
He then concluded: “I’m not going to put someone’s job at risk, a region’s, town’s future at risk, I’m not going to put up electricity prices to do it, I’m not going to put a tax on them to do it. I’m going to achieve it in the way we’ve met our Kyoto 2020 targets, meet and beat, and we’ve done that through better technology, through the policies we’ve put through the emissions reduction fund, and we’re going to continue to do that because it is really important.”
Oh sorry, that wasn’t Abbott, that was Scott Morrison in his interview with David Speers last Sunday.
If you can discern any difference in language between what Morrison is now saying and what Abbott said in 2015, then your level of reading between the lines has become so great you are seeing things that are not there.
Just because we all desire the Coalition to do something on climate change doesn’t actually mean they will.
Climate change protesters take to the streets in Sydney. Photograph: Steven Saphore/AAP
And their actions over the past decade mean they have not earned the benefit of doubt, rather they have earned our total scepticism.
The same goes for the conservative media. This week the NT News was getting praise for its front page, in which it stated: “What Australian needs now is real, affordable solutions – not armies of keyboard warriors.”
But aside from the pretty random sideswipe at keyboard warriors, the statement is the perfect representation of meaningless dribble designed to sound like a bold stance.
You know what is a real and affordable solution? Putting a price on carbon. And yet in the NT News editorial, the word emissions was not even mentioned, and I am prepared to bet my superannuation fund they would not suggest a price on carbon was an affordable solution.
Similarly the Daily Telegraph’s editorial on Thursday on “Moving climate debate forward” praised the government’s policy and demanded the ALP come clean with how much theirs would cost.
Give me strength.
It seems that moving forward is reenacting the exact same coverage that occurred during the last election.
You can’t say you agree with the science on climate change and then completely disregard the science that calls for the need to reduce emission by 45% from 2010 levels as soon as possible and to get to zero net emissions by at least 2050.
Saying you agree with the science of climate change but that you believe the government’s current plan is adequate is like saying you agree with vaccination, but you chose to only get one of your three kids immunised because, heck, that is more affordable.
The cheapest way to deal with the cost of climate change is to reduce our emissions and prevent, as much as is possible, further increases in global temperatures.
Dealing with climate change will be tough – people will lose jobs, the prices of some things will rise, but the cost of inaction is going to be much greater and more damaging – both to our economy and to our society.
Fortunately, the path to a vibrant emissions-free economy remains, and as Ross Garnaut has pointed out, such a shift will be extremely beneficial for our economy if we act now.
Indeed perhaps the most frustrating thing about the past decade is that not only have we have wasted a chance to reduce emissions, we have forgone the opportunity to set up our economy for the next 100 years.
Do not fall for the government’s spin. The need for action on climate change is the need to reduce emissions and to also take a leading role in that fight on the international stage.Climate Change
So when you hear someone in government say they believe in climate change, ask what they are doing about reducing emissions; everything else is spin.

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Long Shaped By Fire, Australia Enters A Perilous New Era

Yale Environment 360 - Fred Pearce

Australia has always been a dry continent where fire has played an important ecological role. But the latest massive conflagrations there are evidence that a hotter climate has thrust Australia into a new normal where fires will keep burning on an unprecedented scale. 
A firefighting crew works to control a blaze in Sydney, Australia in November. Brett Hemmings/Getty Images
Australia is sometimes called “the fire continent” because the ecology of the world’s driest inhabited land has been shaped by repeated burning. But even the fire continent has never seen anything like the recent conflagrations.
Bush fires have been raging in the southeastern states of New South Wales and Victoria for four months now. More than 38,000 square miles, an area the size of South Carolina, have burned. At least 28 people have died and some 2,000 houses in rural towns have been destroyed.
In Mallacoota, a coastal town in Victoria, 1,000 residents and tourists were rescued from the beach by the Australian navy as the flames closed in. Even the vineyards of the Adelaide hills, home of some of the country’s most prized and widely exported chardonnays and sauvignon blancs, have burned. Adding to the mayhem, state authorities in South Australia have been shooting thousands of camels to protect aboriginal communities besieged by herds of the feral animals searching for water.
But seemingly only the country’s climate-denial politicians are surprised. Australia’s meteorologists and fire chiefs had been predicting a record fire season for months. The weather watchers saw early in the year that Australia faced a fire-raising combination of natural rainfall cycles — notably fluctuations in sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean that brought high temperatures and drought to southeast Australia this year — and a very unnatural trend toward a hotter and drier climate. The ensuing blazes have attracted worldwide attention, in large measure because they are part of a pattern of intensifying fires from the Arctic to the Amazon.
Last year, Australia saw the six hottest days it ever recorded, maxing out at 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
Australia is among the countries most exposed to the gathering pace of planet-wide warming. Last year, Australia experienced its highest recorded temperatures, 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the late 20th century average, and 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above the early 20th century average — twice the global increase. The year also saw the six hottest days ever recorded in Australia, maxing out at 49.9 degrees C, or 122 degrees F.
Higher temperatures are ensuring that vegetation dries out faster and further in droughts, creating extreme fire risk. And the droughts have come. Australia’s average rainfall in 2019, at 10.9 inches, was 40 percent below the late 20th century average and 12 percent below the previous lowest. The resulting fires far exceeded in extent Australia’s most deadly bushfire disaster in February 2009, when 173 people died but only 1,700 square miles burned.
As the country has reacted in horror, meteorologists have said, in effect, “We told you so.” The rising fire risk was predicted by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s senior research scientist Chris Lucas, who warned 13 years ago that in southeast Australia “fire seasons will start earlier and end slightly later, while being generally more intense. This effect… should be apparent by 2020.”And so it has proved.
In a paper published last September with Sarah Harris of the Country Fire Authority in Victoria, Lucas reiterated that “anthropogenic climate change is the primary driver” of increased fire vulnerability. The analysis did not make a good fit with the posturing of the nation’s politicians, who in recent weeks have had to defend their notorious skepticism about climate change, continued support of fossil fuels, and failure to increase funding for fire services. In a radio interview in November, as the fires gathered pace, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack dismissed any link to climate change as “the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and woke capital-city greenies.”
Residents of Mallacoota in Victoria are evacuated by army personnel on January 3. Justin McManus/The Age/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Now, with Australians demonstrating in the streets against his policies, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been forced to concede the “greenies” were right all along. “We’re living in longer, hotter, drier summers,” he said in a recent TV interview. “This is obviously affected by the broader changes in climate.”
Australia is used to bushfires. Its history is littered with the havoc they can bring: Black Friday in 1939, when 7,700 square miles burned and 71 people died; Black Tuesday in 1967, when 1,020 square miles burned and 62 died; and Black Saturday in 2009. Much of its ecology, including its iconic eucalyptus forests, depends on regular fires,
Australia has more than 800 endemic eucalyptus species, comprising around three-quarters of its forests. Most species thrive in fire-prone areas with nutrient-poor soils. Their foliage is rich in oils that readily burn, releasing their seeds from woody capsules and creating areas of nutrient-rich ash where the seeds will germinate.
But, much as they need fire, too much fire can wipe them out. And this year it has been so hot and dry that the fires have spread into forests with eucalyptus species adapted to wetter conditions, according to David Bowman, a fire ecologist at the University of Tasmania. Whether they can recover will be a critical question for forest ecologists.
Equally uncertain is how wildlife is coping. Chris Dickman of the University of Sydney hazarded a guess — based on his previous assessment of animal densities done for the environmental group WWF Australia — that more than a billion mammals, reptiles, and birds could have perished already, either burned, starved, or eaten by predators such as raptors and feral cats that stalk fire zones.
“The fires… will certainly cause the extinction of some of Australia’s most iconic, fragile and beautiful inhabitants,” says an expert.
But Kate Parr of the University of Liverpool, an expert on assessing the impact of wildfires on wildlife, said the estimate was based on sparse field data. Moreover, it assumes no survivors, which may be unduly pessimistic. “Australia’s animals have a long and impressive history of co-existing with fire,” says Dale Nimmo of Charles Sturt University in New South Wales. Some have well-developed escape routines. Others hunker down in deep burrows and may go into temporary hibernation until the fires are gone and food sources start to return.
Singed koalas have featured strongly in TV reports of the fires. They may be individually vulnerable, but most koalas live outside the fire zones, says Ayesha Tulloch of the University of Sydney.
Nonetheless, the exceptional nature of the fires could overwhelm the best coping strategies. “The full effect of the fires… will certainly cause the extinction of some of Australia’s most iconic, fragile, and beautiful inhabitants,” says Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK. Among those at highest risk are endangered species that live mostly in the fire zones, including the eastern bristlebird; the long-footed potoroo, a rabbit-sized marsupial; and the silver-headed antechinus, a mouse-sized carnivorous marsupial only discovered in 2013.
Some foresters have argued that the ferocity of the recent fires is due, in part, to there being too much wood to burn. Rod Keenan of the University of Melbourne, who gets funding from the forestry industry, blames the megafires on the reluctance of the authorities to carry out preemptive controlled burning of dead wood early in the dry season. Forester Vic Jurskis, in a well-publicized open letter to the prime minister, blamed the reluctance on a “green influence on politics.”
A wallaby licks its burnt paws after escaping a bushfire near the township of Nana Glen in New South Wales in November 2019. Wolter Peeters/The Sydney Morning Herald via Getty Images
But that charge is misplaced. Ecologists have long since realized that it can be necessary to set fires to prevent fires. The United States learned the hard way in 1988, when Yellowstone burned, that preventing all fires is a recipe for storing up fuel for future megafires. And Australian environmental campaigners know it, too. In a policy paper drawn up in 2017, long before the present fires, Australia’s Green Party called for a “scientifically based, ecologically appropriate use of fire” as “an effective and sustainable strategy for fuel-reduction management that will protect biodiversity and moderate the effects of wildfire.”
The story of the Australian bushfires has gained international attention in part because it reflects a global pattern. Fires in the Amazon in August gained as many headlines as the Australian blazes. Similarly, extreme fires in the boreal forests of Siberia burned some 16,000 square miles, according to Greenpeace, with matching conflagrations in Alaska and western Canada. In 2018, California was struck by its deadliest and most extensive wildfires, covering 3,000 square miles and causing more than 100 fatalities. And in 2015, 10,000 square miles of Indonesian forests burned.
Researchers have affirmed that climate change is increasing the risks. A review published this week by British and Australian researchers concluded that “human-induced warming has already led to a global increase in the frequency and severity of fire-weather, increasing the risk of wildfire.” A 2015 global study by Bowman and colleagues looked at trends in the length of droughts. They found that the average “fire-weather season length” had increased by an alarming 19 percent between 1979 and 2013.
Yet despite the rising incidence of drought, the actual extent of fires around the world, though still around 1.3 million square miles every year, has been falling. One study found a 24 percent decline in the past two decades. This was in part due to a decline in deforestation in the Amazon after 2004 (a trend now reversed), and in part because many fewer fires are being set by farmers and pastoralists to clear bush in the increasingly densely populated savanna grasslands of Africa. “When land use intensifies on savannas, fire is used less and less,” says Niels Andela of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who led the research.
One solution is to learn from indigenous methods of using fire to manage the land.
More and more of the forest and bush fires that occur globally are due either to the deliberate clearing of forests for permanent agriculture — as in the Amazon and Indonesia — or because a changing climate is dramatically increasing the risk of wildfires. And there is growing evidence that these climate-induced fires are more intense and less amenable to control.
In short, there are fewer fires, but more wildfires.
So is there a way of mitigating the risks? One approach, say many ecologists, is to accept that all fires are not bad and to learn from indigenous methods of using fire to manage the land. In North America, “native people burned extensively,” says Lee Klinger, formerly at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and now an independent scientist who has studied fire regimes in California.
Before Europeans arrived, traditional burning ensured that there were many more fires in forests on the West Coast than today, he says. “But they burned more frequently, and so less destructively,” said Klinger. “There were ground fires, but not the canopy fires we see today.”
Australian researchers and aboriginal communities say much the same. Traditional aboriginal “fire-stick” farming certainly changed the ecology by setting small fires to clear land for cultivation. But many researchers say the effects could be beneficial. This “cool burning” maintained open grasslands, extended the range of fire-adapted species, and often increased local biodiversity by creating mosaics of different habitats. “Aboriginal burning was critical for the maintenance of habitats for small mammals,” according to Bowman, who has coined the term “pyrodiversity” to describe its biodiversity benefits.
Wildfires in Bairnsdale, Australia on December 30. Glen Morey / AP
The question now is whether even such intelligent means of fire management can hold back the flames. With climate change leaving the bush bone dry, and with temperatures soaring to levels much higher than local ecosystems are adapted to, the old ways may no longer work.
The question is especially pertinent for Australia. Most climate models predict that “Australia will warm faster than the rest of the world,” says Kevin Hennessy, climate researcher at the CSIRO, Australia’s national research agency. Global heating will also likely cause a continued decline in rainfall in southern Australia, resulting in longer droughts and many more days with severe fire danger.
But Australia’s current fires increasingly look like a harbinger of new conflagrations elsewhere. During a period of strong warming in the American West over the past half century, the number of wildfires covering more than 1.5 square miles has increased fivefold — a trend that the researchers link to higher temperatures and longer droughts, and expect to continue.
In Mediterranean Europe, where wildfires are an increasing summer threat from Portugal to Greece, researchers predict a 40 to 100 percent increase, depending largely on temperature increases. Few doubt that fires will also become more frequent in the boreal forests of the far north as the Arctic warms. Most recently, a paper published last week in Science argued that a lethal combination of deforestation and climate change will double the area burned annually by wildfires in the southern Amazon by 2050. Paulo Brando of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts titled his paper: “The Gathering Firestorm.”

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(AU) Can Scott Morrison Seize This Watershed Moment For Climate Policy?

Sydney Morning Herald - Rob Harris

Andrew Hirst, the no-nonsense Liberal Party federal director, had a blunt warning for cabinet ministers who were still swept up in shock of Morrison's May Miracle.
In the weeks following the Coalition's election victory, Hirst was invited to present his findings about why and how the government had won re-election, face-to-face with 23 men and women in the cabinet room.
Images of thick smoke blanketing Parliament House have put Australia at the centre of a new global debate on climate change. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The result was largely driven by economic reasons, those seated around the table recall him saying, and the victory should not be misrepresented by any other issue. It had not been a referendum on climate change, as some had billed it.
Hirst - who had a front-row seat during the past decade of the Coalition climate wars as a senior aide to both Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull - told the room global warming remained a significant issue to many voters, especially in inner-city electorates, and the party remained vulnerable on the topic.
A discussion followed that if the government was not going to dramatically change its policies, it needed to better communicate what it was doing to lower emissions and that it was taking the issue seriously.
Almost eight months on from Hirst's warning to ministers, the government is again confronting its climate divisions following devastating bushfires across Victoria and NSW.
Andrew Hirst, who served as deputy chief of staff to then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott, warned the election win was based on economics and wasn't a referendum on climate change. Credit: Andrew Meares
Images of the nation's capital, its Parliament obscured by smoke, has put Australia at the centre of a new global debate on the issue.
Pictures of Scott Morrison, then treasurer, holding a lump of coal in February 2017 have often accompanied footage of razed towns and charred rain forests.
And like leaders before him, Morrison is attempting to deal with the fallout, while trying to balance the party's "broad church" of moderates and conservatives, believers and deniers, and the voters from inner-city Higgins to regional Herbert.
But Liberal MPs in the cities and the bush are now reporting their offices have been bombarded with correspondence with complaints of government inaction during the past month. Many believe the expectation of climate action is now a concern of Morrison's own "quiet Australians".
Then-treasurer Scott Morrison with a lump of coal in Parliament in February 2017. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
"These are not the usual mass produced template emails from activists," one MP remarked.
"These are from mainstream mums who are anxious about the smoke and fearful about their kids' futures."
So like commentators and lobby groups, MPs are watching their Prime Minister's reaction as he deals with the biggest crisis since coming to power.
They, like the commentariat, are second-guessing every public comment and attempting to read between the lines. Will this be a watershed moment for climate policy? Or just a PR exercise?
In a series of interviews since the devastation, Morrison has stressed there is "no dispute" climate change was causing "longer, hotter, drier, summer seasons".
And at every opportunity he has been at pains to stress the government would "meet and beat" its Paris target of reducing emissions by 26-28 per cent compared with 2005 levels by 2030.
"We want to reduce emissions and do the best job we possibly can and get better and better and better at it. I want to do that with a balanced policy which recognises Australia's broader national economic interests and social interest," he told the ABC's David Speers on Sunday.
"In the years ahead we are going to continue to evolve our policy in this area to reduce emissions even further and we're going to do it without a carbon tax, without putting up electricity prices, and without shutting down traditional industries upon which regional Australians depend for their very livelihood."


Scott Morrison sat down with David Speers for an interview on his response to the Australian bushfire crisis.

But while Morrison talks up his intention to act on climate change and support new renewable technologies, colleagues wonder whether his rhetoric is being seen as empty while a handful of backbenchers continue to mouth their objections or publicly question the science of climate change.
The conundrum facing Morrison and his cabinet was on show through the pages of the national papers this week.
On Wednesday, Science Minister Karen Andrews - amid weeks of freelancing from Coalition climate contrarians - felt the need to declare the science on climate change was settled.
"Let's not keep having debates about climate change," the former engineer said.
"Let's accept that the climate has changed, the climate is changing and we need to look at what we're going to do about that."
The comment was aimed, in part, at NSW Liberal MP Craig Kelly, who in the days following the New Year's bushfire devastation thought it was be a good idea to appear on a high-rating British television show arguing climate change wasn't real.
In a show of support for Andrews, the following day six Liberals - Trent Zimmerman, Tim Wilson, Dave Sharma, Hollie Hughes, Andrew Bragg and Fiona Martin backed her up in the pages of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Bragg, who at 35 represents the Gen Y voter group, took to his Instagram with a simple message:
"Climate change is not a belief. It is based on a science. We have no time for conspiracy theories when there is so much to be done."
Hughes backed her colleague having lived much of her life near Moree, a drought-ridden town in western NSW.
"Karen is correct when she says every second spent discussing whether the climate is changing is wasted time – it's time that would be much better spent on mitigation and adaption strategy development," she said.
But on the same day an unnamed cabinet minister fired a warning shot on the front page of The Australian urging Morrison to maintain Coalition unity on climate and emissions targets.
"If we go back to talking about climate or targets or anything, the only climate that will change will be the climate in the party room. It'll blow the place up," the senior MP said.
The comments were backed up by Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who had already nailed his colours to the mast on Christmas Eve when he said Australians would be "fools" who'd "get nailed" unless they acknowledge there's a "higher authority" that needs to be respected.
"Single crusades in Australia will have absolutely zero effect on the climate or future bushfires. It'll only have an effect on the economy of Australia," Joyce said in the same front-page article.
This is the political reality Morrison, like Malcolm Turnbull before him, faces. One unnamed quote or rogue interview from a backbencher is enough to distract, discredit and derail any climate policy advancement.As one cabinet minister told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald: "What can he possibly do? Increase the emissions targets? The Right won't let him do that and neither will the Nats. No way. And despite the election win, I don't think he has the authority to do that."
Last month the Australian Election Study, produced by the Australian National University, found the proportion of voters nominating global warming and the environment as their top issue was at an all-time high.
While 93 per cent of Labor voters thought the issue to be important, two-thirds of Coalition voters considered the issue to be either quite important or very important.
Inner-city MPs in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane have been awake to this for some time. They observed the swings against them in May and worry what another year of bushfires will do to their election hopes.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg makes it known he drives an electric car in his seat of Kooyong, in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, for a reason.
South Australian senator Simon Birmingham was also keen to point out it was in important issue to him in his Alfred Deakin Institute Oration last September.
"It would be a mistake for anyone to try to claim an ideological mandate from this year's federal election beyond the majority-building commitments our parties made in areas of economic and national security," he said.
"In areas like protection from religious discrimination or much-needed commitments to emissions reduction, we must govern from the sensible centre, taking actions that are responsible and meaningful but in ways that are respectful to the diverse constituencies we represent."
It is why in the past two weeks Morrison and his cabinet ministers have rushed to spruik investment in renewables, emerging technologies such as hydrogen, carbon capture use and storage, biofuels, lithium production and waste-to-energy.
Some have taken heart from Morrison's indication the government could stop claiming Kyoto carry-over credits to meet its 26-28 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030, "if we are in a position where we don't need them".
But others believe the time for talk is now over.
"We say emissions are going down and they are going up. We say investment in renewables is higher than ever but it's falling because of the policy mess we have created," one Liberal MP said.
"At the moment they are running around like headless chooks, throwing money here, there and everywhere without any thought.
"It is little wonder we have no credibility on this issue."

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19/01/2020

Youth Activists Lose Appeal In Landmark Lawsuit Against US Over Climate Crisis

The Guardian - Lee Van der Voo

Court confirms government’s contribution to the issue, but judges find they lack power to enforce climate policy decisions
Youth protesters rally in support of a lawsuit brought on behalf of 21 youth plaintiffs against the US government over climate crisis. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images
The ninth circuit court of appeals ordered dismissal of a lawsuit brought by 21 youth plaintiffs against the federal government over climate crisis, citing concerns about separation of powers.
The case was brought against the government in 2015, charging that it sanctioned, permitted and authorized a fossil fuel system that compromised the youth plaintiffs’ civil right to property. It implied a constitutional right to a stable climate, and alleged that the government violated the public trust by failing to protect assets held in trust, notably the atmosphere.
The plaintiffs, now all between the ages of 12 and 23, also asked the US district court of Oregon to order the government to craft a climate remediation plan, one targeting scientifically acceptable standards to stabilize the climate.
On Friday, the ninth circuit court found, however, that the court lacked the power to enforce such a plan or climate policy decisions by the government and Congress, concluding “in the end, any plan is only as good as the court’s power to enforce it”.
Nevertheless, the court found that the record “conclusively establishes that the federal government has long understood the risks of fossil fuel use and increasing carbon dioxide emissions” and “that the government’s contribution to climate change is not simply a result of inaction”.
The court also found that the youth met the requirements for standing in the case and that some of the plaintiffs met the requirements for actual injury.
Levi Draheim, a 12-year-old plaintiff from Satellite Beach, Florida, the court found was injured by repeat evacuations from his home during worsening storms. Jaime Butler, 19, was injured by displacement from her home because of water security issues, separating her from relatives in the Navajo Nation, the court also found. The court also found that the plaintiffs proved their injuries were caused by the climate crisis.
Two of the three judges balked at the scope of change required to reverse climate breakdown, finding that halting certain programs would not halt the growth of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere or injuries to the plaintiffs.
“Indeed, the plaintiffs’ experts make plain that reducing the global consequences of climate change demands much more than cessation of the government’s promotion of fossil fuels. Rather, these experts opine that such a result calls for no less than a fundamental transformation of this country’s energy system, if not that of the industrialized world … given the complexity and long-lasting nature of global climate change, the court would be required to supervise the government’s compliance with any suggested plan for many decades.”
Kelsey Juliana, the lead plaintiff in Juliana v United States speaks at the supreme court in Washington DC. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Kelsey Juliana, the 23-year-old named plaintiff in Juliana v United States and a resident of Eugene, Oregon, said she was “disappointed that these judges would find that federal courts can’t protect America’s youth, even when a constitutional right has been violated”.
“Such a holding is contrary to American principles of justice that I have been taught since elementary school,” Juliana added. “This decision gives full, unfettered authority to the legislative and executive branches of government to destroy our country, because we are dealing with a crisis that puts the very existence of our nation in peril.”
“We will continue this case because only the courts can help us,” Draheim told the Guardian following the ruling. “We brought this lawsuit to secure our liberties and protect our lives and our homes. Much like the civil rights cases, we firmly believe the courts can vindicate our constitutional rights and we will not stop until we get a decision that says so.”
District Judge Josephine L Staton, in a lengthy dissenting opinion, argued that courts do have the authority to protect the young in the face of climate breakdown, and should, given the government’s inaction: “In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response – yet presses ahead toward calamity. It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses. Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the nation.”
The court ordered the case be remanded to the district court and dismissed.

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The Sad Truth About Our Boldest Climate Target

Vox - David Roberts

Limiting global warming to 1.5˚C is almost certainly not going to happen. Admitting that, need not end hope.
Activists in Berlin stood with signs calling for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at a rally that criticized Germany’s insufficient climate policy on May 29, 2019. Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Image
In the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the countries participating in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed to a common target: to hold the rise in global average temperature “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” The lower end of that range, 1.5˚C, has become a cause célèbre among climate activists.
Can that target still be met? Take a look at this animation from Carbon Brief:
No graphic I’ve ever seen better captures humanity’s climate situation. If we had peaked and begun steadily reducing emissions 20 years ago, the necessary pace of reductions would have been around 3 percent a year, which is ... well, “realistic” is too strong — it still would have required rapid, coordinated action of a kind never seen before in human history — but it was at least possible to envision.
We didn’t, though. We knew about climate change, there were scientists yelling themselves blue in the face, but we didn’t turn the wheel. Global emissions have only risen since then. Humanity has put more CO2 in the atmosphere since 1988, when climate scientist James Hansen first testified to Congress about the danger of climate change, than it did in all of history prior.
Now, to hit 1.5˚C, emissions would need to fall off a cliff, falling by 15 percent a year every year, starting in 2020, until they hit net zero.
That’s probably not going to happen. Temperature is almost certainly going to rise more than 1.5˚C.
A lot of climate activists are extremely averse to saying so. In fact, many of them will be angry with me for saying so, because they believe that admitting to this looming probability carries with it all sorts of dire consequences and implications. Lots of people in the climate world — not just activists and politicians, but scientists, journalists, and everyday concerned citizens — have talked themselves into a kind of forced public-facing optimism, despite the fears that dog their private thoughts. They believe that without that public optimism, the fragile effort to battle climate change will collapse completely.
I don’t think that’s true, but I can’t claim to know it’s not true. Nobody really knows what might work to get the public worked up about climate change the way the problem deserves. Maybe advocates really do need to maintain a happy-warrior spirit; maybe a bunch of dour doomsaying really will turn off the public.
But it is not the job of those of us in the business of observation and analysis to make the public feel or do things. That’s what activists do. We owe the public our best judgment of the situation, even if it might make them sad, and from where I’m sitting, it looks like the 1.5˚C goal is utterly forlorn. It looks like we have already locked in levels of climate change that scientists predict will be devastating. I don’t like it, I don’t “accept” it, but I see it, and I reject the notion that I should be silent about it for PR purposes.
In this post, I’ll quickly review how 1.5˚C came to be the new activist target and some reasons to believe it might already be out of reach. Then I’ll ponder what it means to admit that, what follows from it, and what it means for the fight ahead.

How 1.5˚C became the “last chance”
The new target adopted in Paris reflected a growing conviction among scientists and activists that 2˚C, the target that had served as a kind of default for years, was in no way “safe.” Climate change at that level would in fact be extremely dangerous. Thus the addition of “efforts” to hit 1.5˚C.
But it wasn’t until last year that the world really got a clear sense of how much worse 2˚C (3.6˚F) would be than 1.5˚C (2.7˚F), after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report on the subject. Its findings were grim. Even 1.5˚C is likely to entail “high multiple interrelated climate risks” for “some vulnerable regions, including small islands and Least Developed Countries.”
All of those impacts become much worse at 2˚C. (The World Resources Institute has a handy chart; see also this graphic from Carbon Brief.) Severe heat events will become 2.6 times worse, plant and vertebrate species loss 2 times worse, insect species loss 3 times worse, and decline in marine fisheries 2 times worse. Rather than 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs dying, 99 percent will die. Many vulnerable and low-lying areas will become uninhabitable and refugee flows will radically increase. And so on. At 2˚C, climate change will be devastating for large swathes of the globe.
In short, there is no “safe” level of global warming. Climate change is not something bad that might happen, it’s something bad that’s happening. Global average temperatures have risen about 1.3˚C from pre-industrial levels and California and Australia are already burning.
Still, each additional increment of heat, each fraction of a degree, will make things worse. Specifically, 2˚C will be much worse than 1.5˚C. And 2.5˚C will be much worse than 2˚C. And so on as it gets hotter.
The aforementioned IPCC report is the source of the much quoted notion that “we only have 11 years” to avoid catastrophic climate change (which I suppose now is “only 10 years”). That slogan is derived from the report’s conclusion that, to have any chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5˚C, global emissions must fall at least 50 percent by 2030.
That goal, a 10-year mobilization to cut global emissions in half, has become the rallying cry of the global climate movement and the organizing principle of the Green New Deal.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and others at a rally. Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
Being honest about 1.5˚C
Climate hawks, along with numerous recent scientific and economic reports (including the IPCC’s), emphasize that limiting global warming to 1.5˚C is still possible — physically and economically possible, with technology and resources we now possess.
And it’s true. As the IPCC showed, with sufficient torturing of climate-economic models, it is still possible to construct a pathway whereby emissions decline at the needed rate. Such scenarios generally involve everything going just right: every policy is passed in every sector, every technology pans out, we take no wrong turns and encounter no culs de sac, and climate sensitivity (the amount temperature changes in response to greenhouse gases) turns out to be on the lower end of scientific estimates. If we roll straight sixes for long enough, we can still win this.
he slogan meant to summarize this state of affairs has been around, with variations, for decades: “We have all the tools we need, all we lack is the political will.”
But political will (whatever that is) is not some final item on the grocery list to be checked off once everything else is in the cart. It is everything. None of the rest of it, none of the available policies and technologies, mean anything without it. It can’t be avoided, short-circuited, or wished away.
After all, it is possible to end global poverty in a decade, or even less. We have the technology to do so; it’s called money. The people who have more could give enough to those with less so that everyone had a decent life. Similarly, it’s possible to end global homelessness, habitat destruction, hunger, and war. The resources exist. All we lack is the political will.
But we haven’t ended those things. There are lots and lots of ways to reduce suffering that are possible, and have been possible for a long time, and we still don’t do them. We don’t even do a fraction of what we could to reduce immediate, visible suffering, much less the suffering of future generations and far-off populations. It turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to generate and effectively deploy the political power needed to secure beneficial policies (and hold them in place over time).
It’s not that progress hasn’t been made against a lot of large-scale problems. Global poverty and hunger have been declining. In the US, politics have radically shifted on issues like LGBTQ marriage and drug policy in recent years. Things can change quickly.
But global hunger is starting to edge up again, in no small part thanks to climate change. And climate change is different from those other large scale problems, for two reasons.
The trajectory to 1.5˚C, in red. Oil Change International
First, it’s not that progress is swinging around too slow, it’s that there’s very little progress at all. For all the frenzy around renewable energy in recent years, the best we’ve been able to do is slightly slow the rise in global emissions. We’re still traveling headlong in the wrong direction, with centuries of momentum at our backs.
Secondly and consequently, the level of action and coordination necessary to limit global warming to 1.5˚C utterly dwarfs anything that has ever happened on any other large-scale problem that humanity has ever faced. The only analogy that has ever come close to capturing what’s necessary is “wartime mobilization,” but it requires imagining the kind of mobilization that the US achieved for less than a decade during WWII happening in every large economy at once, and sustaining itself for the remainder of the century.
Emissions have never fallen at 15 percent annually anywhere, much less everywhere. And what earthly reason do we have to believe that emissions will start plunging this year? Look around! The democratic world is in the grips of a populist authoritarian backlash that shows no sign of resolving itself any time soon. Oil and gas infrastructure is being built at a furious pace; hundreds of new coal power plants are in the works. No country has implemented anything close to the policies necessary to establish an emissions trajectory toward 1.5˚C; many, including the US and Brazil, are hurtling in the other direction.
Just focusing on the US, there’s a more than 50/50 chance that President Donald Trump will be reelected in 2020, in which case we are all, and I can’t stress this enough, doomed. Even if Dems take the presidency and both houses of Congress, serious federal action will have to contend with the filibuster, then the midterm backlash, then the next election, and more broadly, the increasingly conservative federal courts and Supreme Court, the electoral college, the flood of money in politics, and the overrepresentation of rural states in the Senate.
The US, like many other countries, is balanced on a knife’s edge of partisanship, its growing demographics frustrated by structural barriers, its direction uncertain, and its policies and institutions increasingly unstable. Does a sudden and thorough about-face in social, economic, and political practice feel like something that’s in the offing this year? It doesn’t feel like that to me.
The difficulty of envisioning such a thing has led climate hawks like Al Gore to place their hopes on unpredictable social “tipping points,” invisible thresholds that, once breached, will allegedly yield radical change. (Back in 2012, Gore told me, “we’re not at the tipping point, but we’re much closer than we have been.”)
For as long as I can remember, people have been pointing out signs that such a tipping point is in the offing — counting the number of street protests, or the number of times TV news anchors saying the word “climate,” or the number of city officials endorsing 2030 goals — but global emissions just continue rising.
As I’ve written before, such tipping points are certainly possible. By their nature, they cannot be ruled out. Insofar as we have any hopes for rapid action, they rest there.
But hoping for a radical, unprecedented break in human history is very different from having a reasonable expectation that such a thing will take place. Lightning striking the same spot 100 times is possible. A roomful of monkeys with typewriters producing a Shakespeare play is possible. Human beings shifting the course of their global civilization on a dime is possible. But it probably won’t happen.
We’ve waited too long. Practically speaking, we are heading past 1.5˚C as we speak and probably past 2˚C as well. This is not a “fact” in the same way climate science deals in facts — collective human behavior is not nearly so easy to predict as biophysical cycles — but nothing we know about human history, sociology, or politics suggests that vast, screeching changes in collective direction are likely.

Coping with the tragic story of climate change
What bothers me about the forced optimism that has become de rigueur in climate circles is that it excludes the tragic dimension of climate change and thus robs it of some of the gravity it deserves.
That’s the thing: The story of climate change is already a tragedy. It’s sad. Really sad. People are suffering, species are dying off, entire ecosystems are being lost, and it’s inevitably going to get worse. We are in the midst of making the earth a simpler, cruder, less hospitable place, not only for ourselves but for all the kaleidoscopic varieties of life that evolved here in a relatively stable climate. The most complex and most idiosyncratic forms of life are most at risk; the mosquitoes and jellyfish will prosper.
That is simply the background condition of our existence as a species now, even if we rally to avoid the worst outcomes.
Yeah, it’s a bummer.
Tragedy isn’t the only story, of course, and it’s not necessarily the one that needs to be foregrounded. There’s can-do innovation and technology, there’s equity and green jobs, there’s national security, there’s reduced air and water pollution — there are lots of positive stories to tell about the fight against climate change.
But it would be shallow, and less than fully human, to deny the unfolding tragedy that provides the context for all our decisions now.
I know from conversations over the years that many people see that tragedy, and feel it, but given the perpetually heightened partisan tensions around climate change, they are leery to give it voice. They worry that it will lend fuel to the forces of denial and delay, that they are morally obliged to provide cheer.
I just don’t think that’s healthy. To really grapple with climate change, we have to understand it, and more than that, take it on board emotionally. That can be an uncomfortable, even brutal process, because the truth is that we have screwed around, and are screwing around, and with each passing day we lock in more irreversible changes and more suffering. The consequences are difficult to reckon with and the moral responsibility is terrible to bear, but we will never work through all those emotions and reactions if we can’t talk about it, if we’re only allowed chipper talk about what’s still possible in climate models.

Hope in the face of tragedy
Saying that we are likely to miss the 1.5˚C target is an unpopular move in the climate community. It solicits accus
ations of “defeatism” and being — a term I have heard too many times to count — “unhelpful.
Such accusations are premised on the notion that a cold assessment of our chances will destroy motivation, that it will leave audiences overwhelmed, hopeless, and disengaged.
But the idea that hope lives or dies on the chances of hitting 1.5˚C is poisonous in the long-term. Framing the choice as “a miracle or extinction” just sets everyone up for massive disappointment, since neither is likely to unfold any time soon.
As climate scientist Kate Marvel put it, “Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down.” Every bit makes it worse. No matter how far down the slope we go, there’s never reason to give up fighting. We can always hope to arrest our slide.
Exceeding 1.5˚C, which is likely to happen in our lifetimes, doesn’t mean anyone should feel apathetic or paralyzed. What sense would that make? There’s no magic switch that flips at 1.5˚C, or 1.7, or 2.3, or 2.8, or 3.4. These are all, in the end, arbitrary thresholds. Exceeding one does not in any way reduce the moral and political imperative to stay beneath the next. If anything, the need to mobilize against climate change only becomes greater with every new increment of heat, because the potential stakes grow larger.
Given the scale of the challenge and the compressed time to act, there is effectively no practical danger of anyone, at any level, doing too much or acting too quickly. The moral imperative for the remainder of the lives of everyone now living is to decarbonize as fast as possible; that is true no matter the temperature.
No one ever gets to stop or give up, no matter how bad it gets. (If you need a kick in the pants on this subject, read this essay by Mary Heglar.)
Preparing for the world to come
As a final, practical point, speaking frankly about the extreme unlikelihood of stopping at 1.5˚C (and the increasing unlikelihood of stopping at 2˚C) could affect how we approach climate policy.
To be clear, it shouldn’t have any effect at all on our mitigation policies. In that domain, “as fast as possible” is the only rule that matters.
But it should mean getting serious about adaptation, i.e., preparing communities for, and helping them through, the changes that are now inevitable. As the old cliché in climate policy goes, we should be planning for 4˚C and aiming for 2˚C instead of what we’re doing, which is basically the reverse, drifting toward 4˚C while telling ourselves stories about a 2˚C (and now, 1.5˚C) world.
Here in the US, we need to think about how to help Californians dealing with wildfires, Midwestern farmers dealing with floods, and coastal homeowners dealing with a looming insurance crisis.
All those problems are going to get worse. We need to grapple with that squarely, because the real threat is that these escalating impacts overwhelm our ability, not just to mitigate GHGs, but to even care or react to disasters when they happen elsewhere. Right now, much of Australia is on fire — half a billion animals have likely died since September — and it is barely breaking the news cycle in the US. As author David Wallace-Wells wrote in a recent piece, the world already seems to be heading toward a “system of disinterest defined instead by ever smaller circles of empathy.”
That shrinking of empathy is arguably the greatest danger facing the human species, the biggest barrier to the collective action necessary to save ourselves. I can’t help but think that the first step in defending and expanding that empathy is reckoning squarely with how much damage we’ve already done and are likely to do, working through the guilt and grief, and resolving to minimize the suffering to come.

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Water Wars: Early Warning Tool Uses Climate Data To Predict Conflict Hotspots

The Guardian - 

Tension over water scarcity is increasing across the globe. A new system flags up where this threatens to erupt into violence
Mali is one of the places the tool has predicted will face conflict over water scarcity in 2020. Photograph: Michele Cattani/AFP
Researchers from six organisations have developed an early warning system to help predict potential water conflicts as violence associated with water surges globally.
The Dutch government-funded Water, Peace and Security (WPS) global early warning tool, which was presented to the UN security council before it was launched formally last month, combines environmental variables such as rainfall and crop failures with political, economic and social factors to predict the risk of violent water-related conflicts up to a year in advance.
It is the first tool of its kind to consider environmental data, such as precipitation and drought, alongside socio-economical variables, a combination lacking in previous tools designed to predict water conflicts. It is available online for the public to use, but is aimed more specifically at raising awareness among policymakers, and people and parties in water-stressed regions.
The tool has already predicted conflicts that are likely to happen in 2020 in Iraq, Iran, Mali, Nigeria, India and Pakistan. Developers claim an 86% success rate in identifying conflict zones where at least 10 fatalities could occur. The tool currently focuses on hotspots across Africa, the Middle East and southeast Asia.
Growing global demand for water is already creating tensions – among communities, between farmers and city dwellers, between people and governments. Tensions are expected to increase as water scarcity becomes a reality for more people. According to the UN, as many as 5 billion people could experience water shortages by 2050.
Recent statistics from the Pacific Institute thinktank in California show that water-linked violence has surged significantly in the past decade: recorded incidents have more than doubled in the past 10 years, compared with previous decades.
“The machine learning model is ‘trained’ to identify patterns using historical data on violent conflict and political, social, economic, demographic, and water risk,” said Charles Iceland, senior water expert at the World Resources Institute, part of the WPS partnership.
He said: “It looks at over 80 indicators in all, going back up to 20 years. It is then able to use what it has ‘learned’ about the correlations among these variables to predict conflict or no conflict over the next 12 months, given current conditions.”
Jessica Hartog, a climate change expert with International Alert, a WPS partner, highlighted Iraq and Mali as two countries at risk.
Eastern Ghouta, Syria was formerly known as the breadbasket of Damascus. Photograph: Louai Beshara/AFP via Getty Images
Malian farmers, cow herders and fishermen have been caught up in a spat over the reduction of the Niger River’s water levels. Meanwhile, Iraqi protesters – already infuriated over lack of basic needs – took to the streets last year after more than 120,000 people were hospitalised after drinking polluted water.
“Water scarcity has affected both Iraq and Mali, largely due to economic development projects that reduce the water levels and flow in rivers – a situation made worse by climate change and increased demand due to population growth,” she said.
“In Mali we are concerned about the plans of the government and neighbouring countries to build dams, further expand Office du Niger [overseeing water management projects] and related irrigation channels, which will further affect the water availability in the inner Niger Delta. This will affect more than 1 million farmers, herders and fish[ers] who are fully dependent on the inner Niger Delta.”
In Iraq, Hartog said, a failure to address water concerns and improve water services “directly threatens Iraq’s fragile peace”.
In Syria, meanwhile, water scarcity and crop failure have prompted an exodus from rural areas to the cities, exacerbating the civil war. In Iran, residents in Khorramshahr and Abadan protested over polluted drinking water.
Susanne Schmeier, senior lecturer in water law and diplomacy at IHE Delft, which was also involved in the WPS project, said water problems alone do not create conflict or war, “but they can become ‘threat multipliers’ when combined with other grievances, such as poverty and inequality”.
“Once conflicts escalate, they are hard to resolve and can have a negative impact on water security, creating vicious cycles of conflict. This is why timely action is critical,” she said.
Iraq’s fragile peace is ‘directly threatened’ by water concerns, according to a climate change expert. Photograph: Haidar Mohammed Ali/AFP/Getty Images
Schmeier said violent clashes over water resources had occurred between local communities and between provinces within the same countries. “Violence is then exerted by non-state actors, potentially even illicit groups, or representatives of certain sectors.
“Such local conflicts are much more difficult to control and tend to escalate rapidly – a main difference from the transboundary level, where relations between states often limit the escalation of water-related conflicts.”
The WPS tool was developed in a collaboration between the Dutch foreign ministry and Deltares, IHE Delft, International Alert, The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, Wetlands International and World Resources Institute.

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