11/05/2021

(AU The Guardian) Ashes To Ashes: Pentecostalism, The PM And The Climate Crisis

The Guardian - 

Scott Morrison’s recent speech to a Christian conference draws fresh attention to Pentecostal churches’ lack of climate evangelism
Scott Morrison at a Horizon church service in Sydney. Religious scholars say many Pentecostal Christians believe God will take care of the climate. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
Guardian Environmental Investigations
“We are called, all of us, for a time and for a season and God would have us use it wisely.”

Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister and a Pentecostal Christian, flew in on a taxpayer-funded plane to deliver those words to a church on the Gold Coast.

His sermon-like speech was given to the national conference of Australian Christian Churches – the umbrella body for the majority of churches in the country’s only Christian denomination showing growth: Pentecostalism.

Pentecostalism, including the more than 1,000 churches under ACC’s umbrella – which includes the Morrison family’s Horizon church in south Sydney – has, by some reports, the largest number of active churchgoers after Catholicism.

But when Morrison tells Pentecostals to use their season wisely, there are some religious scholars worried that acting on climate change has not been a feature of that season.

Speaking to Guardian Australia, some argue the historical guiding principles of Pentecostalism – its focus on personal salvation with a strong consumerist vibe – has not lent itself to conjuring a congregation of climate evangelists.

The Australian Religious Response to Climate Change has among its members organisations belonging to an array of faiths – from Catholics and Quakers to Buddhists and Muslims. Members have blockaded coalmining sites and campaigned hard for rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

“We have 41 member organisations,” says the ARRCC president and Catholic, Thea Ormerod. “None are Pentecostal. We have occasionally asked leaders in the Pentecostal tradition to sign on to our letters to government. They have declined the invitations.”

In March ARRCC organised more than 120 silent protests outside the offices of government figures. Jews, Christians, Buddhists and Muslims were among the activists. The protests were a short verse in a lengthening chapter of faith-based groups’ response to the climate crisis.

The Church of England has been pulling investments out of fossil fuel companies. The Pope says climate change is a “challenge of civilisation”. Islamic leaders have issued calls for a 100% renewable energy strategy.

In Australia, the National Council of Churches wrote to Morrison last week asking him to announce more ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

There is no grand body of research on what different Christian groups think about climate change, but what there is suggests that Pentecostals are among the least concerned.

According to 2016 research on Australian Christians “it appears to be Pentecostalism in particular where skepticism about the causes of climate change is prevalent”.

Other research has suggested that people belonging to faiths with a more literal view of religious texts – including Pentecostals and Evangelicals – were more likely to doubt the need to act on climate change. They were also less likely to think global heating was caused by humans.

‘The end isn’t coming tomorrow’

Dr Mark Jennings, an expert on the sociology of religion at the University of Divinity, says Pentecostalism is still shaking off its early incarnation as a denomination coloured by fears and hopes of an end times and a renewal ushered in by God.

“They started with the idea that the world would end soon and so this stuff [climate change] doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “That was from the origins of the movement, but now they are starting to be more comfortable with the idea the end isn’t coming tomorrow and those attitudes have adjusted.”

Jennings says Pentecostalism is not on its own in taking a strong cue from the Bible’s first chapter, Genesis, where the Christian God tells Adam and Eve to “fill the earth and subdue it”.

“They take that as the world being the property of humans and we should bring nature to subjugation,” he says.

Focus on personal salvation

Growth in Pentecostalism in Australia is part of a global boom of so-called charismatic Christians that now stands at 655 million people out of 1.5 billion Christians worldwide.

Ormerod says the apparent absence of many Pentecostals in speaking up about the climate crisis “has to do with how they tend, as a culture, to interpret the Gospel message”.

“They tend to believe God will take care of the climate,” she says. “Their focus overall is on personal salvation.” She worries that a prime minister “who shares Pentecostal beliefs puts Australians in further danger”.

Ormerod’s husband is Neil Ormerod, a retired professor of theology at the Australian Catholic University who had a 20-year association with ACC’s training and theology centre, Alphacrucis College.
It’s a form of religion for an individualistic modern consumerist age
He knows several Pentecostals concerned about climate change. But he says many tend not to see a link between between social and political contexts and their own personal salvation.

“It’s a form of religion for an individualistic modern consumerist age,” he says. “There is no critique of, say, modern neoliberal economics or the consumerist society.”

One Pentecostal leader with a public profile – albeit much smaller than Morrison’s – is James Macpherson, a pastor and vice-president on the executive board of Alphacrucis College.

Macpherson writes for the conservative magazine the Spectator, where climate science and environmentalists are an object of ridicule.

At the start of the global pandemic, Macpherson wrote how “leftists” and “environmental doomsayers” were pushing for a reaction to the Covid crisis that mirrored the “fabled climate emergency”.

He describes the public broadcaster, the ABC, as the “national purveyor of climate doom” and calls the teenage Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg the “goblin of doom”.
Pastors have been reflecting upon the concept of new creation ... not as a disposing of the old ... but actually as a transformation
The Rev Prof Jacqui Grey is the dean of theology at Alphacrucis. She says Macpherson is voicing personal opinions and writes in a personal capacity.

She accepts that there is an absence of strong voices for climate action among Pentecostals but puts this down to the relative youthfulness of the denomination (it has roots from the early 20th century) and the lack of a hierarchical structure that means most leadership is local.

Young Pentecostals, she says, are passionate about caring for the environment and there is change afoot.

The strong emphasis on achieving “personal salvation” is a “fair critique”, she says, but one the church’s theologians have been “rethinking”.

Some of that rethinking “is yet to be reflected in the everyday life of the church”, she says. “It is not just the individual, but the individual is part of the community both human and non-human.”

The Pentecostal movement has matured, she says, beyond the belief that an “end times” would come and Jesus would establish a new kingdom.

File photo of Hillsong church members. Former US congressman Bob Inglis says he has ‘found a receptiveness there’ on the need for climate action. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

“Scholars and pastors have been reflecting upon the concept of new creation to understand it not as a disposing of the old with a new and separate creation, but actually as a transformation.

“We are still working through the full implications of our understanding of faith and how that applies to many different social issues including climate change.”

One sign of a strong shift among Pentecostal theologians could come with the release of a special issue of the church’s academic journal – Australian Pentecostal Studies – which Grey edits. The June issue is dedicated to caring for the environment and climate change.

“As far as I know, no other Pentecostal journal globally has ever had a dedicated issue,” Grey says.

‘Young Christians want action’

That slow shift among Pentecostals will be gospel music to the ears of a former US Republican congressman, Bob Inglis.

Inglis was treated as heathen by Republicans when, in the early 2000s, he began to call for action on climate change and, later, a tax on carbon in a party shot through with climate science denial.

“It wasn’t the only heresy I committed, but it’s the most enduring,” he says.

The Christian from South Carolina now spends most of his time trying to convince the reluctant rump of Republicans that climate change is real, is human-caused, and it’s a Christian duty to act on it.

He says the idea “the Earth is going to burn up away and so it doesn’t matter” is prevalent among the Pentecostals he speaks to.

Inglis did a speaking tour of Australia in 2017, a few months after Morrison, then treasurer, held up a lump of coal in parliament, telling his leftwing opposition not to be scared of it.

Inglis met representatives from Hillsong – another large grouping of Pentecostals that has since broken away from ACC – and says “we found a receptiveness there”.

Australia is a special place for Inglis. A snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef with a scientist, he says, helped him see how marvelling in the corals and the ecosystem was, to him, a form of worship.

In the US, Inglis says, the most challenging hurdle he finds is the belief that because “God is sovereign” humans can’t be responsible for changing the climate.

“You can’t just dump into the air and say God cleans it up,” he says. “That’s not right. We have to be fully accountable and if we are, blessings flow from that accountability.

“Young Christians want action on climate change. It’s the older ones that have the hesitancy on action.”

In a statement, ACC said: “Caring for the environment and God’s creation is viewed as an important responsibility for all people, including the Church.”

Congregation members “reflect a broad demographic” and “there are certainly many who are strong advocates for environmental concerns and climate change within the Pentecostal church”.

“For the record, while the ACC does not have a specific policy regarding climate change, our Missions arm has a very strong environmental policy on Creation Care that serves our commitment to the nations we work in and includes our local communities in Australia.”

Guardian Australia has approached Morrison’s office for comment.

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(AU SMH) ‘The Media Uses It To Scare People’: Survey Detects Climate Change Scepticism In Young People

Sydney Morning Herald - Caitlin Fitzsimmons

More 16 and 17 year-olds believe the media has exaggerated the issue of climate change than recent school leavers and scepticism in this age group has grown in the past two years.

However, four out of five 16- and 17-year-olds in a recent survey do not believe the issue is exaggerated, while most polls show young people generally are overwhelmingly concerned about climate change.

The findings are from a wide-ranging report on Generation Z by research organisation Millennial Future, based on a nationally representative survey of 1018 Australians aged 16-20 conducted in April.

Maria Tynan, 17, says the media “just make it seem so bad that it seems completely unbelievable”. Credit: Nikola Kinder

In one question survey respondents were asked to agree or disagree with the statement: “I believe the science of environmental issues such as climate change has been exaggerated and is less of an issue than what we are led to believe in the media”.

Mission to save Sydney’s rarest eucalyptus species from extinction

Among the Generation Z minors (age 16 or 17), 21.7 per cent agreed the media exaggerated climate change.

This was significantly higher than 16.1 per cent for the Generation Z adults (aged 18 to 20) in the same survey or 17.2 per cent for Millennials (aged 21 to 38) who were asked the same question in a separate survey in January.

Scepticism appears to have increased over time - when the same research was done in 2019 only 16.1 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds agreed with the statement.

Only 13.4 per cent of young people in metropolitan areas believed the media had exaggerated the issue, compared with 22.1 per cent for young people in the regions. It also skewed male; for young women aged 16 to 20, it was 16.3 per cent, compared with 21.8 per cent for young men.

These reported differences are outside the poll’s margin of error.

Maria Tynan, 17, a student at St Francis De Sales Regional College in Leeton in the Riverina, agrees the media tends to exaggerate the severity of climate change.

“They take scientific information, and then they extrapolate on that and they just make it seem so bad that it seems completely unbelievable,” Maria said.

“This isn’t to downplay the severity of climate change or anything but the media uses it to make people scared, instead of focusing on what can be done about it.”

She said this was counter-productive because it pushed people into either denial or a sense of hopelessness.

Maria, who was a representative in the NSW Youth Parliament two years ago, went through “depression and despair” thinking about the issue of climate change when she was younger. She felt better after she researched the problem and realised we had so many of the solutions already with existing technology, let alone future inventions.

Hunter coal miners don’t have enough funds for land rehabilitation

Maria describes herself as “fairly optimistic this going to be something that humanity, like it always does, will push through”.

Associate Professor David Holmes, the director of the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, said effective climate communication combined the warnings about the risks with the solutions about how to fix it.

“The message of hope is that by reducing or eliminating the greenhouse emissions that we have today, which is largely a policy area, we can dramatically minimise the dangers that climate change poses to the whole planet,” he said.

Associate Professor Holmes said there had been targeted attempts to seed climate denial among young people and counteract the Greta Thunberg effect. For example, until last year US-based right-wing think-tank the Heartland Institute had funded a young German climate denier Naomi Seibt as an “anti Greta”.

Social researcher Rebecca Huntley, author of How to Talk About Climate Change, who has conducted her own research on climate change attitudes, said the Millennial Future survey was a good sample size, including the breakdown into the two age groups, and the findings could not be dismissed. But she said it also posed further questions.

“It’s not just measuring how people feel about climate change, but how the media reports on it,” Dr Huntley said. “There’s a high level of cynicism about the agenda of the media.”

Report co-author Tom McGillick said the average trust in media was slightly lower for 16-20 year olds than 21-38 year olds, but average trust in media was not falling as steeply as scepticism of climate change was climbing.

“My interpretation is that it’s a little of both, but primarily a growing scepticism of climate change independent of media cynicism,” he said.

Bailey Linton-Simpkins, who is in year 11, says: “I think what the media is presenting are the facts.” Credit: James Brickwood

Bailey Linton-Simpkins, 16, a student at Epping Boys High School in Sydney, said he was very concerned about climate change because we have known about the problem for so long and leaders have consistently failed to act.

“Based on me going to different sources and reading scientific reports, I think what the media is presenting are the facts, and they’re not being alarmist about it,” he said.

It stores pollution 30 times faster than forest. What is blue carbon?

But Bailey said his generation was definitely cynical about the media because “they’ve been trained that way”, with constant teaching about how the truth can be manipulated.

The Lowy Institute has run questions about attitudes to climate change in its polls for many years and will be releasing a standalone study later this month, though only polling Australians aged 18 and up.

Natasha Kassam, director of the Lowy Institute’s Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program, said the results consistently showed higher concern about climate change among younger Australians.

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(China CNN) China's Annual Emissions Surpass Those Of All Developed Nations Combined, Report Finds

CNN - Laura Smith-Spark | Ivana Kottasová

In this June 2017 file photo, a state-owned coal-fired power plant is seen in Huainan, China.

China's annual emissions exceeded those of all developed nations combined in 2019, the first time this has happened since national greenhouse gas emissions have been measured, according to a new report from the Rhodium Group.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to make his country carbon neutral by 2060, and climate policy is seen as a major area of cooperation -- and even competition -- between the United States and China.

But the new report highlights how difficult reducing China's impact on the climate could be.

According to the researchers, global emissions reached 52 gigatons of CO2-equivalent in 2019, an increase of 11.4% over the past decade. And China's share is growing fast.

While China's emissions were less than a quarter of developed country emissions in 1990, they have more than tripled over the past three decades, the report said. In 2019, they exceeded 14 gigatons of CO2-equivalent for the first time.

"China alone contributed over 27% of total global emissions, far exceeding the US -- the second highest emitter -- which contributed 11% of the global total," the report said. "For the first time, India edged out the EU-27 for third place, coming in at 6.6% of global emissions."

China is a large country, with a population of 1.4 billion, and up to now its per capita emissions have remained considerably lower than those in the developed world, the researchers note. But that, too, is changing fast.

"In 2019, China's per capita emissions reached 10.1 tons, nearly tripling over the past two decades," the report said.

While they remained lower in 2019 than the US -- 17.6 tons a person -- the report predicts that when full 2020 data is available, China's per capita output will have overtaken the OECD average of 10.5 tons, even as the emissions "from almost all other nations declined sharply in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic."

Nonetheless, China still has a way to go before it catches up with the total amount of carbon dioxide that has been spewed into the atmosphere by developed nations. The report notes that "since 1750, members of the OECD bloc have emitted four times more CO2 on a cumulative basis than China."

Greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere like a blanket, trapping radiation that would otherwise escape into space. This causes temperatures on Earth to rise, which is linked to more extreme weather, ice melt and a rise in sea levels. And the more carbon emitted into the atmosphere, the more the planet will warm.

Reinhard Steurer, a climate scientist and associate professor at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, told CNN that those in the West shouldn't be congratulating themselves just yet.

"A lot of the stuff we [in the West] consume is produced in China and the emissions are counted into the Chinese carbon emissions record," he said.

"If you take into account those consumption-based emissions, our record isn't that good... We should never really blame China as the worst emitter on earth, because quite a lot of their emissions go into our consumption."

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10/05/2021

(AU The Guardian) AGL Takes Greenpeace To Court Over Use Of Its Logo In ‘Biggest Climate Polluter’ Campaign

The Guardian - 

Energy giant objects to use of its logo on posters and online advertising that use phrases like ‘generating pollution for generations’

Protesters against AGL’s natural gas import terminal in Victoria. The company has launched legal proceedings to have its logo removed from a Greenpeace climate campaign. Photograph: Melanie Burton/Reuters

Energy giant AGL has launched legal action against Greenpeace Australia Pacific over a campaign that targets the company as Australia’s biggest corporate greenhouse gas emitter.

It comes after the environment group launched a report and campaign with posters and online advertising that feature AGL’s logo and phrases such as “generating pollution for generations” and “Still Australia’s biggest climate polluter”.

AGL has commenced legal proceedings in the federal court and is seeking to have its logos removed from the campaign, alleging copyright infringement.

Victoria blocks AGL's gas terminal on environmental grounds. Read more

Greenpeace Australia Pacific has labelled the legal bid an attempt to stifle organisations that highlight the damage fossil fuel companies are causing to the climate.

The environment group said it would argue it is fair use of the logo because the campaign featured it for the purpose of satirical criticism “of the dissonance between AGL’s public relations statements and its lack of action on climate change”.

A directions hearing is set down for Tuesday.

AGL has rejected the suggestion it is seeking to shut down public debate.

“AGL reserves its rights to defend its brand under Australian law,” a spokesman said.

“We have no intention to stifle public debate. The legal application seeks to prevent unlawful use of our brand as part of a third party campaign and is not intended to silence the campaign itself.”

Katrina Bullock, the general counsel for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said the case could be important in determining the extent to which charities and non-government organisations could run campaigns of the kind launched by Greenpeace “without fearing litigation”.

“Legal tactics like the ones AGL are using are the kind of tactic multibillion-dollar fossil fuel companies use … to try to tie up the resources of anyone who speaks out against them,” she said.

AGL says it will link bosses’ bonuses to lowering emissions. Read more
Glenn Walker, the senior campaigner for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said the legal bid was an attempt to sink the environment group’s campaign but “the truth is on our side”.

“AGL likes to slap a wind turbine on their ads to hide their dirty coal pollution, and now they’re trying to slap a lawsuit on us to keep us quiet,” he said.

“This is yet another attempt by the coal industry to stop grassroots organisations from exposing the damage that it is doing to the climate, to the environment and to human health.”

AGL is Australia’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter, reporting more than 40m tonnes of scope 1 emissions in 2019-20, more than double the next largest emitter.

Last year, AGL announced it would begin linking executive bonuses to lowering emissions from the start of the 2021-22 financial year.

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(AU Canberra Times) Australia Remains In A Climate Transition Muddle

Canberra Times - John Hewson

FRUSTRATING: Endless political point-scoring and blame-shifting is wasting precious time. Picture: Shutterstock

Author
Dr John Hewson AM is an honorary professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and is a former leader of the Liberal Party.
Anyone looking in on Australia's response to the climate challenge would be justifiably confused and dismayed.

Much worse if they had tuned in to Scott Morrison's comments to the recent Biden climate summit.

If they are able to cut through the rhetoric, spin, claim and counterclaim, misrepresentation and fake news of the so-called political climate wars - mostly point-scoring and blame-shifting with little genuine policy development or implementation - they would find themselves being buffeted around almost daily by a multiplicity of media reports of various targets, projects and technologies, with considerable difficulty determining their significance.

At best, they would be bemused and disturbed, by all this white noise in a country that has everything going for it to provide it with the best basics to lead the world in transition to a low-carbon society by mid-century.

We have enviable endowments of land, solar, wind, graphite, lithium and recyclable wastes, with the technologies to exploit them for the essential transitions across all sectors.

Rather than being tagged globally as a most conspicuous laggard in our response to climate, we could easily be a globally significant leader - an energy superpower.

It's a muddle, with several decades squandered at the cost of billions of dollars of investment and growth, and hundreds of thousands of jobs, yet leaving us exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme weather events, and the rapidly mounting costs of their impacts.

With the disturbing vacuum in national political leadership failing to put in place an effective longer-term strategy for the essential transitions, the states, businesses, households and key institutions have stepped up, attempting to fill the void.

For example, against Morrison's mere "preference" to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, the states, many businesses and key industrial and other organisations have adopted the target as a firm commitment.

Moreover, as Morrison sticks with the totally inadequate 2030 target to reduce emissions by 26-28 per cent - less than half what is required to achieve 2050 net zero - Victoria has now moved to 28-33 per cent by 2025, and 45-50 per cent by 2030.

While Morrison scaremongers about this, it is easily achievable with appropriate transition thinking and planning.

For example, Victoria could accelerate the closure of the coal-fired Loy Yang B and Yallourn power stations, and/or incentivise the transition of households from gas-fired heating and cooking.

It would be so much better if the responses were unified and consistent across the country, especially as actions taken by some may complicate the whole system.

For example, Australia has the highest and fastest rollout of roof top solar in the world. But this means that power prices often sink to zero or negative around midday, as with wind often at night, but rocket up in the evening and morning peaks.

This has changed the business model of solar and wind projects, especially as they can no longer count on the subsidy from the Renewable Energy Target.

The Australian Energy Market Operator is now recognising locational disadvantages by imposing marginal loss factors on their output.

Consequently, there is a considerable industry shake-up under way, with many of these projects now on the market at substantial discounts.

These projects now need to be made dispatchable with load-shifting storage.

Denying the commercial reality that solar and wind generation are cheaper, with negligible emissions, and are readily bankable and insurable, Morrison is pushing ahead supporting gas generation, potentially stranded assets.

At best, gas will only have a role as a "peaker", the limit of which has been put at about 200MW.

Yet we have seen federal and state government financial support for two much larger gas projects in Tallawarra and Kurri Kurri in New South Wales in just the last week.

Hydrogen has become the flavour of the moment, even though we are a long way from seeing it commercially viable at scale.

Green hydrogen is too expensive in power generation even if the government achieves its technology goal of $2/kg, foreshadowing a better future in transport, and as a diesel replacement.

The move towards 100 per cent renewables has been constrained by the fact that coal-fired power was built near coal mines, and solar and wind projects where the sun and wind were best - not actually where it was most needed.

The states are now competing in transition.

Australia desperately needs leadership - and a national and co-ordinated approach to the transition - across all key sectors, power, transport, regenerative agriculture, building codes and materials and industrial processes.

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(Newsweek) Australia Isn't Doing Enough To Address Climate Change | Opinion

Newsweek - 

Demonstrators hold up placards outside the Australian Open during a climate protest rally in Melbourne on Jan. 24. Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images

Author
Cat Woods is a freelance writer based in Australia. She writes on art, culture and travel for international publications, and regularly writes on music for both U.S. and Australian publications.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Australia should receive a mighty "F" for its failure to confront climate change—our churlish government is in denial.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison's blustering, factually questionable presentation at the recent Leaders Summit on Climate exposed to the world how embarrassingly ill-prepared Australia is for the social, economic and environmental impact of its reliance on coal and water-intensive agriculture.

Likely, the forests won't burn down, sea levels won't swallow up our neighbors in the Pacific and lead to major wars over scarce resources in Morrison's lifetime nor in the lifetime of his government, so who can blame him for being so disinterested in the plight of Australians now, and for generations to come?



A report by think tanks including the NewClimate Institute, the Climate Action Network and Germanwatch measured emissions, renewable energy, energy use and policy across 57 countries in 2019.

The resulting 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranked Australia as one of the worst, rating 0.0, on climate policy. The yearly report, published since 2005, is an independent monitoring tool used to track countries' climate protection performance.

The report noted the urgency of meeting targets, plans to reach those targets and genuine commitment to phasing out harmful use of fossil fuels—all relating to rising temperatures and increasing lack of predictability of seasons and weather.

Extreme weather in 2019, including Cyclone Idai which overwhelmed Mozambique, a record-breaking heatwave in India months later and the destructive bushfires in Australia all provide evidence of fundamental change in climate.

Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, made up of various emergency service agencies, departments and non-government organizations around Australia, said it will take decades to appreciate the economic costs of the 2020 bushfires on the economy.

"What we can safely say, with weeks left to go, is that these fires are by far Australia's costliest natural disaster," researchers Paul Reid and Richard Denniss said on Australia's academic editorial site, The Conversation. According to them, the cost of the bushfires was close to 100 billion Australian dollars.

Australia does not exist as an island though, if you'll forgive the pun. Our policies and actions—or inaction—on climate has direct consequences for other nations. The Pacific islands, our closest neighbors, are extremely vulnerable to climate change.

According to the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the direct results of sea temperatures rising due to ice caps melting include loss of coastal infrastructure—many islands in the Pacific are low-lying.

More intense storms, floods, cyclones and droughts are predicted, along with the failure of subsistence crops and coastal fisheries, loss of coral reefs and the spread of diseases like cholera, typhoid, malaria and dengue due to saltwater and floods contaminating freshwater supplies.

Morrison's speech at the Leaders Summit included the claim, "We are also providing $1.5 billion in practical climate finance focusing on our blue Pacific family partners in our region." This amount was already factored into the existing aid budget. It is not an additional amount.

In 2019, Australia ended its contributions to the U.N.'s Green Climate Fund, designed to enable richer nations assist low-income countries to cut their emissions.

Morrison's speech (and the dubious accuracy of his claims) did not impress Australian academics who focus on climate issues.

"[The prime minister should] stop misleading citizens and perplexing climate diplomats about Australia's climate policy performance by making up numbers that bear no relationship to the international recognized system of measuring national emissions under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change," said Robyn Eckersley, a political science professor at the University of Melbourne.

She shared how Morrison should address climate change.

"Acknowledge that Australia is especially vulnerable to climate change, and that the cost of early and aggressive action is cheap—with many co-benefits—when compared to the cost of not acting."

Eckersley said that Australia should stop subsidizing fossil fuels, develop a transition plan for all coal mines and coal-fired plants, enact climate legislation that includes interim and long-term targets based on advice from an independent statutory committee and commit to a target of 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035.

She also recommended Morrison reinstate contributions to the U.N.'s Green Climate Fund.

Professor Hilary Bambrick, head of school at the School of Public Health and Social Work at the Queensland University of Technology, shared similar thoughts. Her research focuses on the health impacts of climate variability and change.

"Australia is continuing to fail in climate leadership," she said. "Addiction to fossil fuels, demonstrated to the world by PM Morrison at the climate summit, is bad for climate and it's bad for our health.

We need to urgently ramp up our investment in clean renewable energy to have a healthy, livable future. Australia continues to spruik its woefully inadequate reduction targets and at the same time promote new fossil fuel developments in coal and gas.

If we don't make deep and urgent cuts to fossil fuel emissions, we will increasingly see catastrophes of the scale of, and beyond, the black summer fires."

As other nations rise to the challenge and intend to meet ambitious targets set by President Joe Biden for 2030, Australia's prime minister missed his opportunity to show the world that Australia is serious when it comes to combating climate change.

If only Australians voted leaders in on their policies beyond the next election.

Next year may be our chance to elect someone who is serious about addressing climate change.

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09/05/2021

(The Guardian) The Young People Taking Their Countries To Court Over Climate Inaction

The Guardian -  |  |  |  | Children and young adults around the world are demanding action from governments on global heating and the ecological crisis

Chinese climate activist Howey Ou on hunger strike in Lausanne, Switzerland, 19 April 2021.  Photograph: Laurent Gilliéron/EPA

Sofia Oliveira, aged 16

Sofia Oliveira is one of six young Portuguese people who have filed a lawsuit against 33 countries with the European court of human rights, demanding that governments do more to reduce emissions and safeguard their future physical and mental wellbeing. Last October the Strasbourg-based court granted the case priority status.

Sofia and her brother André

After we announced that we were six youths from Portugal who were suing 33 countries for not doing enough to reduce emissions and fight climate change, the response was bigger than anything I had imagined. Media called from around the world. And it made me so happy and hopeful.

I’ve been worried about climate change for a long time. When I was 11 years old, my younger brother André, who is also one of the young people in this case, had a terrible asthma crisis. The weather was hot and dry, and he was suffocating.

Here in Portugal the effects of climate change are increasingly visible: heatwaves that cause water shortages and affect food production, and violent wildfires that give us anxiety. Sometimes I think, if climate change is already so extreme, what will it be like in the near future if we do nothing about it? So one of the most important reasons I’m involved in this case is to help my little brother have a good future, along with my parents, myself and the next generation.

Right now, the courts have told the governments that they need to reply by the end of May. The 33 countries tried to have the case dismissed, but the court said no. And we were so happy. Imagine, 33 of the biggest economies in the world saying, “We don’t want this” and six youths saying, “We are going to do this.”

I think we might win the case. I hope the case will make things right, that it will make countries lower their emissions and stop using so many fossil fuels. This case is revolutionary – it has shown that together our voice is strong and can reach the whole world.

As told to Ashifa Kassam.

Saúl Amaru Álvarez Cantoral, 15

Saúl, who goes by his second name, Amaru, is one of seven Peruvian children who have filed a complaint against the Peruvian state for its alleged failure to adequately halt deforestation in the Amazon. They argue that their futures are severely compromised due to the climate crisis, particularly their right to enjoy a healthy environment, along with their rights to life, water, and health. The case was filed in December 2019, but has not progressed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Saúl Amaru Álvarez (second from right in blue shirt) and his co-plaintiffs outside court in Lima, Peru Photograph: Saúl Amaru Álvarez 

We filed this lawsuit because the state does not really develop national policies to protect the environment. By raising our voice as children and teens, we can make the state listen to us and develop more concrete measures to combat climate change.

We were inspired by Greta Thunberg and the idea that children and teenagers can make a difference. We believe that the young should raise our voices when the adults don’t, especially when our politicians are not the best.

In our Amazon, the main problem is deforestation. There are no measures to resolve this problem. The amount they cut down goes up every year, so if we don’t halt this problem now, it will get worse and worse and be more difficult to stop.

Since I was little, I was taught about the problem of pollution and climate change, but I never thought about taking action because I assumed that politicians would take care of it, or I should grow up and become a professional to make changes. Then I realised I could do something as a teenager without letting any more time pass – I could take action.

You can witness climate change. Adults always tell you what the weather was like before; the seasons, for example, are more uncontrolled. How can it be that one day it is hot and the next day it is cold?

We are waiting for a response to the lawsuit because it is a long process. Plus, we have a lot of problems in the country. We are constantly in crisis, so I think it’s not a priority at the moment.

I think we can win. I almost take it for granted that we will because our cause is a just cause. It’s the first lawsuit of its kind in Peru and I hope, for that reason, that it might be the beginning of something and the first of many more.

As told to Dan Collyns.

Anjali Raman-Middleton, 17

Raman-Middleton, who lives in south London, is one of the co-founders of the air pollution campaign Choked Up.

Choked Up campaign members Anjali Raman-Middleton (centre) with Nyeleti Brauer-Maxaeia and Destiny Boka-Batesa Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian 

I went to primary school with Ella Kissi-Debrah [who died as a result of air pollution] and, like her, grew up just off the South Circular road in London, so I have lived with the reality of air pollution all my life.

I met the three other founders of Choked Up – who are all young women of colour from south London – on the Advocacy Academy programme last year. It was great to meet people who, like me, felt so passionately about clean air and the environment and who also recognised how people of colour were being disproportionately affected by the environmental crisis – whether in the UK with air pollution, or in the global south with the impacts of climate change.

Too often our experiences are overlooked by an environment movement that is predominantly white and middle class. As young people of colour, we found that frustrating. But I am hopeful this can change because young people are becoming more aware of the intersectionality of climate justice.

There is a growing understanding that it is not just as simple as “solving or fixing” climate change – there is a whole system, a whole multitude of other issues around racial and social justice that are intertwined with the climate crisis. Choked Up aims to make those connections and foreground the experiences of young people of colour. We chose air pollution as our campaign because all four of us live in heavily polluted areas and see every day the often devastating impact it has on our communities.

As told to Matthew Taylor.

Jamie Margolin, 19

Jamie Margolin organised a youth climate march at 15 and co-founded the youth climate action movement This Is Zero Hour at 16. She is a plaintiff in the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit against the government in her home state of Washington, US.

Jamie Margolin. Photograph: Bojana Novakovic 
When I first started, I was kind of under the illusion that Democrat equals climate action. I didn’t understand that just because I lived in a blue state, it didn’t mean my leaders would automatically listen to me.

Well, I stepped out of that reality really quickly. I joined a lawsuit suing the state of Washington for denying my generation our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by continuing to worsen the climate crisis. But lawsuits take years. I couldn’t just wait around for the courts to do their thing.

It was a perfect storm – of absolute hell. There were the wildfires that blew over the city of Seattle, covering it in a thick layer of smog. It was really scary because the Pacific north-west is known for amazing air quality – it’s clean and crisp. Suddenly that was gone. I couldn’t breathe, to the extent that it hurt. And then there was Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Harvey, all of these climate disasters. And the last president pulled us out of the Paris climate accords. It was all of these things that came together.

This was before Fridays for Future, before Greta Thunberg started striking. Youth climate mobilisations were not in vogue. The Standing Rock movement, which was big at the time, was started by indigenous young people, so it’s not like young people weren’t mobilised. It just wasn’t something people paid attention to.

When I was 15 years old, I found other youth activists on social media, and we organised 25 youth climate marches, with the main one in Washington, DC. We also had a youth climate lobby day around the country. The movement has changed the culture. Things that were niche are now common knowledge. Greta and I are now legal adults. We have to understand there’s wisdom in each generation.

I identify as a lesbian. When you’re part of a marginalised community, you have to actively fight for justice for your community, while also fighting for climate justice. I’m in film school right now, and I’m not studying to make climate documentaries. The thing I’m super passionate about is LGBT representation in the media, and storytelling. People are often very surprised when I tell them my dream job is to write gay Disney princess movies.

I have dreams beyond just trying to stop the end of the world. No one wants to think about climate change. Everyone has other dreams. When I was a little child, I wasn’t like, “Some day I hope to narrowly escape planetary destruction.” That wasn’t my dream. But I’m doing this because I have to, for survival.

As told to Emily Holden.

Howey Ou, 18

One of China’s only youth climate activists to take part in Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion activities in recent years, before beginning to inspire a handful of others to take similar action.

Howey Ou: ‘Although we expect difficulty, we still dare to exist’ Photograph: Howey Ou

Ou Hongyi, also known as Howey Ou, demonstrates for climate action, even though demonstrations are forbidden in China without explicit approval of the authorities. In October, Howey sat alone in front of a hotel for more than 10 hours to protest about the lack of ambition in the hotel industry in China to reduce carbon emissions.

But while some youths in China have become energised by Ou’s activism, many attempts to take part in protests have been scuttled, including plans for protests on 19 March.

“Police interfered before the action happened,” Ou said. “Two activists I know of went to Chengdu, but their families were called and they warned them, or tried to scare them, to not take part. They were told to go to the Chengdu NGO management office to ‘provide information’ separately in the days before the action, then on Friday morning [19 March] they were taken to the police station for formal interrogation, required to sign documents, had their DNA samples taken, and were released that night. So they did not go out on the streets.

“The next week, when they returned home, the police met them at the train station like old friends, and they were visited again by police later in the week.”

“Other than these, I spoke with other students who organised at their schools but they now have no more intention to organise any Fridays for Future actions. They’ve been warned by their schools or had conflicts with their parents and stopped.”

She is currently in Europe, and recently went on hunger strike in protest at industrial policies there. She remains defiantly positive about the role that protest can play.

“This is not about how much suppression we received, but the bright part is that although we expect difficulty, we still dare to exist. We dare to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency, we dare to challenge the capitalist and consumeristic world. We refuse to be prisoners of injustice.”

As told to Michael Standaert.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative