Lethal Heating

09/09/2016

Obama On Climate Change: The Trends Are ‘Terrifying’

New York Times - Julie Hirschfeld Davis | Mark Landler | Coral Davenport

MIDWAY ATOLL — Seventy-four years ago, a naval battle off this remote spit of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean changed the course of World War II. Last week, President Obama flew here to swim with Hawaiian monk seals and draw attention to a quieter war — one he has waged against rising seas, freakish storms, deadly droughts and other symptoms of a planet choking on its own fumes.
Bombs may not be falling. The sound of gunfire does not concentrate the mind. What Mr. Obama has seen instead are the charts and graphs of a warming planet. "And they're terrifying," he said in a recent interview in Honolulu.
"What makes climate change difficult is that it is not an instantaneous catastrophic event," he said. "It's a slow-moving issue that, on a day-to-day basis, people don't experience and don't see."

In an exclusive interview on his legacy, President Obama speaks to The Times's Mark Landler and Coral Davenport on climate change while visiting Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Photo by A.J. Chavar/The New York Times.

Climate change, Mr. Obama often says, is the greatest long-term threat facing the world, as well as a danger already manifesting itself as droughts, storms, heat waves and flooding. More than health care, more than righting a sinking economic ship, more than the historic first of an African-American president, he believes that his efforts to slow the warming of the planet will be the most consequential legacy of his presidency.
During his seven and a half years in office, Mr. Obama said, a majority of Americans have come to believe "that climate change is real, that it's important and we should do something about it." He enacted rules to cut planet-heating emissions across much of the United States economy, from cars to coal plants. He was a central broker of the Paris climate agreement, the first accord committing nearly every country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Air Force One over Midway Atoll, which Mr. Obama visited last week to expand the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Credit A.J. Chavar/The New York Times

But while climate change has played to Mr. Obama's highest ideals — critics would call them messianic impulses — it has also exposed his weaknesses, namely an inability to forge consensus, even within his own party, on a problem that demands a bipartisan response.
He acknowledged that his rallying cry to save the planet had not galvanized Americans. He has been harshly criticized for policies that objectors see as abuses of executive power and far too burdensome for the economy.
That has made Mr. Obama's record on climate curiously contradictory, marked by historic achievements abroad and frustrating setbacks at home. The threat of global warming inspired Mr. Obama to conduct some of the most masterful diplomacy of his presidency, which has bound the United States into a web of agreements and obligations overseas. Yet his determination to act alone inflamed his opponents, helped polarize the debate on climate change and will carry a significant economic cost.
Mr. Obama chalks up the contradictions both to politics and to the amorphous, unseen nature of the threat.
"It feels like, 'Meh, we can put this off a little bit,'" he said.
The president spoke in a cottage on a Marine base that overlooks Kaneohe Bay in his home state, Hawaii. Angry waves crashed on the rocks below the house, the sea churned by one of two hurricanes spinning close to the island. Hawaii, as one of Mr. Obama's climate advisers pointed out, normally does not get back-to-back hurricanes.
"When you see severe environmental strains of one sort or another on cultures, on civilizations, on nations, the byproducts of that are unpredictable and can be very dangerous," Mr. Obama said. "If the current projections, the current trend lines on a warming planet continue, it is certainly going to be enormously disruptive worldwide."

'All Bets Are Off'
Eight years ago, when Mr. Obama ran for president against Senator John McCain of Arizona, both men had essentially the same position on global warming: It is caused by humans, and Congress should enact legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions and force polluters to buy and trade permits that would slowly lower overall emissions of climate-warming gases.
But in the summer of 2010, a cap-and-trade bill Mr. Obama had tried to push through Congress failed, blocked by senators from both parties.
"One would have hoped for transformational leadership, in the way J.F.K. would have done it," said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

A coal-burning power plant in Buchanan County, Va. Mr. Obama has introduced rules that could force hundreds of such plants to close. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times

That domestic defeat was compounded by failure on the world stage after efforts to enact a highly anticipated United Nations climate change treaty in Copenhagen fell apart in 2009.
By the fall of 2010, Tea Party "super PACs" supported by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch had seized on cap-and-trade as a political weapon, with attacks that helped Republicans take control of the House.
Polls showed that few Americans thought of climate change as a high public policy priority, and the percentage of voters who accepted the reality that it was caused by humans had tumbled.
"There is the notion that there's something I might have done that would prevent Republicans to deny climate change," Mr. Obama said. "I guess hypothetically, maybe there was some trick up my sleeve that would have cast a spell on the Republican caucus and changed their minds."
In fact, some Republicans, including Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, were willing to go forward with a more limited climate bill that would have restricted emissions only from power plants. But the president's own party would not unify even around that, with Democrats from industrial and coal states digging in against him. Ironically, Mr. Obama would end up with regulations that narrowly target power plant emissions.
"The White House wanted 60 votes on climate, and they weren't interested in Republican votes," Mr. Alexander said in an interview. "Now it's back to power plant only. The lesson here is that if people who want a result would be a little bit more flexible, they might actually get one."
In defeat, the president appeared cowed. Campaigning against Mitt Romney in 2012, he barely mentioned climate change.
But soon after Election Day, Mr. Obama interrupted a broad discussion with historians about the country's challenges with a surprising assertion. Douglas Brinkley, a historian who attended the session, recalled, "Out of nowhere, he said, 'If we don't do anything on the climate issue, all bets are off.'"
Mr. Obama, who understood that a legislative push would be fruitless, told his advisers to figure out how to enact deep emissions cuts without Congress. They found a way through the Clean Air Act of 1970, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations on dangerous pollutants.
In 2014, Mr. Obama unveiled the first draft of what would become the Clean Power Plan: a set of Clean Air Act rules that could lead to the closing of hundreds of coal-fired power plants.
The move enraged critics, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, whose state relies heavily on coal.
Another critic, Laurence H. Tribe, likened the rules to "burning the Constitution" — a charge that might have stung, since Mr. Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar, was a mentor to Mr. Obama at Harvard Law School.
Mr. Obama dismissed the criticism as the voice of Mr. Tribe's client, Peabody Energy, the nation's largest coal company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in April. "You know, I love Larry," he said, but "when it comes to energy issues, Larry has a history of representing fossil fuel industries in big litigation cases."
The legality of the climate rules is likely to be decided by the Supreme Court, the composition of which depends on the outcome of the presidential election. Deep-pocketed corporations will not give up the legal fight easily, even after a Supreme Court decision, and Republicans in Congress will continue their legislative attacks. If the rules survive, they will almost certainly cost the coal industry thousands of jobs.
"What we owe the remaining people who are making a living mining coal is to be honest with them," Mr. Obama said, "and to say that, look, the economy is shifting. How we use energy is shifting. That's going to be true here, but it's also going to be true internationally."

Scrutinizing the Science
Few people would have described Mr. Obama as a climate evangelist when he ran for the White House in 2008. While he invoked the rising seas and heating planet to thrill his young supporters, he did not have the long record of climate activism of Al Gore or John Kerry, who is now his secretary of state. Like many things with Mr. Obama, his evolution on climate was essentially an intellectual journey.
Mr. Obama immersed himself in the scientific literature, which left little doubt that the planet was warming at an accelerating rate. "My top science adviser, John Holdren, periodically will issue some chart or report or graph in the morning meetings," he said, "and they're terrifying."

Unusual weather events like the floods that inundated Louisiana last month are occurring more frequently. Credit Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

The morning Mr. Obama unveiled the final version of the Clean Power Plan last year, he summoned his senior climate adviser, Brian Deese, to the Oval Office. Mr. Deese expected that the president would hand him some last-minute changes to his speech. Instead, he brought up an article in the journal Science on melting permafrost.
The research not only documented faster increases in temperatures, but also drew direct links between fossil fuel emissions and extreme weather.
Mr. Obama scrutinized reports like the 2014 National Climate Assessment, which tied climate change to events like flooding in Miami and longer, hotter heat waves in the Southwest.
"More and more, there are events that are happening that are astoundingly unusual, that knock your socks off, like the flooding in Louisiana," said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. "Those are the kinds of events where it's becoming possible to draw attribution."
Benjamin J. Rhodes, one of the president's closest aides, recalled Mr. Obama talking about "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," Jared Diamond's 2005 best seller, which explored the environmental changes that wiped out ancient societies like Easter Island and discussed how modern equivalents like climate change and overpopulation could yield the same destruction.
The president's Pacific roots also came into play. In Honolulu last week, he told a meeting of Pacific Island leaders that few people understood the stakes of climate change better than residents of their part of the planet. Crops are withering in the Marshall Islands, he noted. Kiribati is buying property in another country for the day that its own land vanishes beneath the waves. And villagers in Fiji have been forced from their homes by high seas.
Shifting monsoon patterns in South Asia could affect a billion people who depend on low-lying agriculture, Mr. Obama said in his interview.
"If you have even a portion of those billion people displaced," he said, "you now have the sorts of refugee crises and potential conflicts that we haven't seen in our lifetimes."
"That," he added, "promises to make life a lot more difficult for our children and grandchildren."

Joining Forces With China
Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton never seem to tire of telling the story of Copenhagen: In December 2009, with the climate conference on the verge of failure, the two learned of a meeting of the leaders of Brazil, China, India and South Africa, from which they had been pointedly excluded. Elbowing their way past a Chinese security guard, they crashed the meeting, and over the course of 90 minutes of tense negotiations with the abashed leaders, they extracted an agreement to set goals for lowering emissions.
The Europeans, who had been cut out of the talks, derided the deal as toothless, but Mr. Obama learned from the experience. A global climate accord could not simply be a compact among developed economies, he said. It had to include the major developing economies, even if they resented being held to standards that had never applied to the club of wealthy nations. And any agreement had to be led by the two largest emitters, the United States and China.
Mr. Obama set about persuading President Xi Jinping of China to join the United States in setting ambitious reduction targets for carbon emissions. Tensions were already high over China's hacking of American companies, and the United States was balking at China's slow-motion colonization of the South China Sea. A casual, get-acquainted summit meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi at the Sunnylands estate in California in June 2013 had failed to break the ice.

Mr. Obama with President Xi Jinping of China in California in June 2013. Despite their differences, the two leaders have worked together on landmark agreements to address climate change. Credit Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

But the meeting did produce one headline: an agreement to explore ways to reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, known as HFCs, potent planet-warming chemicals found in refrigerants. In hindsight, it would prove significant. The final international accord on the chemicals is expected to be ratified next month in Rwanda.
"It was a place Obama and Xi found some common ground," said John D. Podesta, a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton whom Mr. Obama recruited to lead his climate efforts in his second term. (Mr. Podesta is now the chairman of Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign.)
Mr. Podesta and Todd Stern, the State Department's climate envoy, began arduous negotiations with China. They were backed by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama, who sent Mr. Xi a letter with a proposal in which the United States would pledge to increase its target for reducing carbon emissions by 2025 if the Chinese pledged to cap and then gradually reduce their emissions.
China had historically resisted such agreements, but the air pollution there had become so bad, Mr. Obama noted, that the most-visited Twitter page in China was the daily air-quality monitor maintained by the United States Embassy in Beijing.
"One of the reasons I think that China was prepared to go further than it had been prepared to go previously," Mr. Obama said, "is that their overriding concern tends to be political stability. Interestingly, one of their greatest political vulnerabilities is the environment. People who go to Beijing know that it can be hard to breathe."
The Chinese were also swayed by Mr. Obama's announcement in 2014 of his regulations to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants, which gave Mr. Kerry and his team of climate diplomats the leverage they needed in months of meetings with China. On Nov. 11, 2014, after a quiet stroll across a bridge in the Chinese leadership compound beside the Forbidden City, Mr. Xi and Mr. Obama sealed their agreement.
"By locking in China," Mr. Obama said, "it now allowed me to go to India and South Africa and Brazil and others and say to them: 'Look, we don't expect countries with big poverty rates and relatively low per-capita carbon emissions to do exactly the same thing that the United States or Germany or other advanced countries are doing. But you've got to do something.'"
A little more than a year later, in Paris, the United States led negotiations among 195 countries that resulted in the most significant climate change agreement in history. And this past weekend in Hangzhou, China, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi formally committed their two nations to the Paris accord. For Mr. Obama, it was not just redemption for Copenhagen, but a vindication of his theory of the United States' role in the world.
"There are certain things that the United States can do by itself," Mr. Obama said. "But if we're going to actually solve a problem, then our most important role is as a leader, vision setter and convener."

An Ambitious, Divisive Legacy
To his successor, Mr. Obama leaves an ambitious and divisive legacy: a raft of new emissions rules that promise to transform the United States economy but are likely to draw continuing fire from Republicans, and an aggressive — some say unrealistic — pledge made in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050.

Mr. Obama in a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, left, during the climate talks in Paris in December. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

All of this, he acknowledges, could be undone at the ballot box. "I think it's fair to say that if Donald Trump is elected, for example, you have a pretty big shift now with how the E.P.A. operates," he said.
Mrs. Clinton has embraced Mr. Obama's go-it-alone approach, promising to meet and in some cases exceed his goals without trying to pass cap-and-trade legislation. She is proposing marquee projects like installing 500 million solar panels by 2020 and giving states and cities $60 billion to invest in energy-efficient public transportation and buildings.
"It will be first-order business," Mr. Podesta said.
But Mrs. Clinton will face the same partisan fire Mr. Obama has. He noted that, like him, Mrs. Clinton had been pilloried in coal country for acknowledging that coal mining would have a declining role in a 21st-century economy. Mr. Obama's bet is that as his regulations get woven into the fabric of the economy, they will be harder for anyone to unwind. He says that his successor should promote past victories, including those of Republicans like Richard M. Nixon and George Bush.
For his part, Mr. Obama said he planned to stay active in fighting climate change in his post-presidential life. During his tour of the wildlife on Midway, he paused to make an improbable remark.
"My hope," he said, "is that maybe as ex-president I can have a little more influence on some of my Republican friends, who I think up until now have been resistant to the science."

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08/09/2016

Here’s What China, U.S. Just Committed To On Climate

Climate Central - John Upton

The leaders of the U.S. and China committed their nations to the fight against global warming on Saturday when they handed arcane but momentous documents to the United Nation's top official.
The documents stated that the U.S. and China are ready to join a new global warming pact, putting it on course to potentially become international law before the end of 2016.
Largely because of global warming, this year is expected to be the hottest year on record, beating a heat record set last year, which beat the record set the year prior.
"We have a saying in America — that you need to put your money where your mouth is," President Obama said during the joint media appearance in China before G20 meetings began. "And when it comes to combatting climate change, that's what we're doing, both the United States and China. We're leading by example."
Leading — but how? The legal details are wonky but critical. Their story begins in Paris, and it doesn't end in China. Let us explain.

What's the Paris agreement?
Finalized during U.N. talks in Paris in December, the agreement sets out steps that each country will take to tackle global warming. China and the U.S. are the world's worst climate polluters, and the actions they have pledged are seen as crucial to the success of the pact.

Pres. Obama shakes hands with UN official Ban Ki-moon on Saturday and hands key paperwork to him. Credit: How Hwee Young/Reuters

In Paris, the U.S. agreed to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution it releases in 2025 to about a quarter below its 2005 levels. China agreed to halt the growth in its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 — something it appears to have already achieved.
Even if those and other nations' promises under the Paris agreement are kept, global temperatures may yet soar well above 2°C (3.6°F) compared with pre-industrial times — roughly twice the amount of warming recorded so far. Further climate negotiations in the years ahead will aim to keep warming below that dangerous level.

What did Obama just do?
To formally join the Paris agreement, a country must file an "instrument of ratification" with the United Nations. This is a signed letter or document confirming that a country is ready to start living up to its commitments under the pact.
America could have sent a bureaucrat to U.N. headquarters in New York to quietly file such a letter. Instead, Obama handed America's instrument of ratification directly to U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon in front of the world's press before meetings in China.
The high-profile ceremony was designed to send a signal to the world that its two biggest climate polluters remain committed to working together to solve the climate crisis, such as by supporting and promoting solar and wind energy, which could encourage others to do the same.

Is the Paris agreement an international treaty?
The Paris agreement is a binding treaty under the UN. But Americans use the word "treaty" to describe an international agreement that the U.S. Senate has agreed to join. Since Obama hasn't sought the blessing of the Senate for the new climate pact, the White House has been shying away from the use of the word "treaty."

Has the U.S. joined the Paris agreement now?
By submitting its instrument of ratification, the U.S. has indicated that it is ready to join the Paris agreement. After a number of other countries have done likewise, the agreement will "take force."

What does take force mean?
Once an international agreement takes force, countries agree to begin enforcing the rules of it within their own borders. The UN is an organization, not a government, and it can't force the U.S. or any other country to take measures to protect the climate. But countries that flout global agreements risk being ostracized or punished through embargoes and trade agreements.

When will the Paris agreement take force?
If at least 55 countries, collectively producing at least 55 percent of global climate pollution every year, file their instruments of ratification by Oct. 7, then the Paris agreement will take force for those countries before the next round of climate talks, scheduled for November. That currently seems likely.
"Entry into force is important, because if that were to fail, or be long delayed, that would sap confidence in the Paris process," said David Victor, an international relations professor at UC San Diego. "It's a visible sign of progress."
If the Paris agreement takes force before the November talks, countries that have joined the agreement by that time will huddle during the negotiations in a new decision-making committee. That would give those countries more influence than others over how the agreement will be implemented during the years to come.

Why isn't the Senate involved?
Under U.S. law, international agreements only require Senate approval if they force changes to domestic laws. In part because about half of the Senate publicly doubts climate science, the Paris agreement was legally crafted to allow Obama to sign it without Senate approval.
"More than 90 percent of international agreements the U.S. has joined have followed the same executive process the president just completed for the Paris Agreement, and did not require a trip through the Senate," said Alex Hanafi, an attorney at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.
Some aspects of the Paris agreement are legally binding — such as requirements that countries publish information about their pollution levels each year, and what they're doing to try to reduce that pollution.

French leaders and UN official Ban Ki-moon applauding after a global climate agreement was struck in Paris in December. Credit: UNFCCC/Flickr

These are already requirements under existing U.S. law, and they could give other countries confidence that Americans are living up to their promises.
"Transparency is critical to accountability in international agreements," Hanafi said. "The force of international law to compel countries to comply with their agreements is limited."
Other aspects of the Paris agreement are not legally binding. Most notably, hitting a pollution target that a country set for itself under the agreement remains entirely voluntary.
Not only do non-binding pollution goals circumvent the potential need for Senate approval of the Paris agreement, many experts say they could lead to better results. That's because the approach encourages countries to aim for difficult goals without fear of being punished if they fail.

What's Obama's hurry?
As greenhouse gases have piled up in the atmosphere, climate change has shifted from being a theory about a future threat to a hazardous fact of modern life. Temperatures have risen nearly 2°F since pre-industrial times, and the effects on droughts, heatwaves and floods are becoming clear around the world.
But this is about more than just science and the fate of humanity. Obama is working to establish a climate legacy before he leaves office in January. Democrats facing reelection are finding broad, if tepid, electoral support for efforts to slow global warming.
Although Obama seemingly paid little attention to climate change during his first term, climate action has been a defining focus of his second term. Obama's diplomats played crucial roles in encouraging other countries to show high levels of ambition during the Paris negotiations.
There's also the question of Obama's successor. If voters elect Democrat Hillary Clinton, America's newfound global leadership on climate action is unlikely to change much. If Republican Donald Trump is voted into office, the U.S. could quickly abandon that leadership, as Trump has said global warming is a hoax.

Could a Trump administration withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement?
If the Paris agreement takes legal force this year, it would be difficult for the U.S. to withdraw from it before four years have passed — the length of a presidential term. Of course, that doesn't mean that a Trump administration would be forced to take climate change seriously.
"Speculation on this point comes with a huge dose of uncertainty because of Mr. Trump's unpredictability," said Robert Stavins, a Harvard economics professor who is an expert on global environmental agreements.
As president, Trump "could simply not work hard to achieve" America's goals under the Paris agreement, Stavins said. He could also appoint a Supreme Court justice who would help to invalidate the federal pollution rules that are key to achieving America's commitments.
Even without withdrawing from the Paris agreement, "Trump could all but ensure that the U.S. [climate pledge] would not be achieved," Stavins said.

Could the Paris agreement end up saving the world?
The new agreement puts global pressure on countries to clean up their heavy industries and to protect the climate, but it contains huge gaps. It doesn't directly affect international shipping or aviation, both of which are heavy polluters, for which separate agreements are being pursued. Efforts to reduce a potent type of climate pollution released from refrigerators and air conditioners are being pursued through negotiations under yet another agreement.
"Of course, the Paris Agreement alone won't solve the climate crisis," Obama said on Saturday. "But it does establish an enduring framework that enables countries to ratchet down their carbon emissions over time, and to set more ambitious targets as technology advances."

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Pacific Pariah: How Australia’s Love Of Coal Has Left It Out In The Diplomatic Cold

The Conversation - Wesley Morgan

Australia has sought to water down climate declarations made through the Pacific Islands Forum. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will have some explaining to do when he attends the Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting in Pohnpei, Micronesia, this week.
Australia's continued determination to dig up coal, while refusing to dig deep to tackle climate change, has put it increasingly at odds with world opinion. Nowhere is this more evident than when Australian politicians meet with their Pacific island counterparts.
It is widely acknowledged that Pacific island states are at the front line of climate change. It is perhaps less well known that, for a quarter of a century, Australia has attempted to undermine their demands in climate negotiations at the United Nations.
The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – organised around an annual meeting between island leaders and their counterparts from Australia and New Zealand – is the Pacific region's premier political forum. But island nations have been denied the chance to use it to press hard for their shared climate goals, because Australia has used the PIF to weaken the regional declarations put forward by Pacific nations at each key milestone in the global climate negotiation process.
In the run-up to the 1997 UN Kyoto climate summit, Pacific island leaders lobbied internationally for new binding targets to reduce emissions. However, that year's PIF leaders' statement was toned down, simply calling for "recognition of climate change impacts".
Likewise, in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen talks, Pacific island countries called for states to reduce emissions by 95% by 2050. But at that year's PIF meeting in Cairns, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, convinced leaders to scale back the proposed target to 50%. Pacific media branded the outcome "a death warrant for Pacific Islanders".
Ahead of last year's Paris summit, Australia again exercised its "veto power" over Pacific climate diplomacy. Over the preceding years Pacific island leaders had made their climate positions quite clear, both at UN discussions in New York and in a string of declarations including the Melanesian Spearhead Group Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, the Polynesian Leaders' Declaration on Climate Change, and the Suva Declaration on Climate Change.
Nevertheless, the official climate declaration issued after last year's PIF in Port Moresby was significantly weaker in several key areas. Most notably, it failed to call for global negotiations to limit global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels. This is a threshold that Pacific island states have consistently argued should not be crossed, because that would threaten the very existence of low-lying states such as Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands.
These countries are understandably very unwilling to compromise on this position. At the Port Moresby meeting, Kiribati President Anote Tong suggested that Australia should leave the forum altogether if it was not prepared to back the islands' positions in global climate negotiations.
There is little doubt that Australian attempts to gag its Pacific island neighbours in these negotiations have aroused anger in the region. This has been compounded by the fact that Australians are among the world's highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters and the Australian government is committed to increasing exports of the dirtiest source of emissions – coal.

Pacific perspectives on Australia's coal addiction
If Pacific islands are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, there is little doubt that most of the world's coal must stay in the ground. No serious policymaker disputes the basic fact that our carbon budget is severely limited. There is no scenario in which building new coal mines, and expanding existing ones, is compatible with effectively tackling climate change.
Pacific island governments are calling for a global move away from coal. In September 2015, the Pacific Islands Development Forum (a new regional body that meets without Australian representation) called for an urgent international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil-fuel-extracting industries, particularly new coal mines.
Leaders from the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu issued a similar statement on the sidelines of the Port Moresby summit. President Tong wrote personally to world leaders before the Paris talks, asking them to support the moratorium.
Australia's view could scarcely be more different. It is the world's largest coal exporter, and both major political parties are financially backed by the coal lobby. Rather than move away from coal, the government is seeking to expand exports dramatically, with public subsidies and taxpayer-funded infrastructure.

Australia wants to keep its coal rolling. CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

These exports are still largely shielded from discussions about Australia's contribution to climate change. Because Australian coal is burned in China, Japan and elsewhere, the emissions are ascribed to those nations.
In 2016 Australia will export around 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, embodied in coal. By some estimates, over the next five years Australia's "carbon exports" will overtake those from Saudi oil.
Australia's coal addiction has implications for its relations with Pacific island neighbours. For a start, it has undermined any claim that decisions made at the Pacific Islands Forum represent the "true" Pacific voice on climate change.
The ramifications may go deeper still. While Pacific leaders still accept the need to meet with their wealthier and more powerful neighbour – Australia is a crucial partner in times of natural disaster and a key source of development aid – joint decisions made at the PIF are beginning to ring hollow. Island states are increasingly using other multilateral forums to pursue their interests.

Pacific leadership and global climate diplomacy
To be sure, Pacific island states have long pursued independent diplomatic strategies to tackle the root causes of climate change. The first UN proposal for multilateral climate action – which later became the Kyoto Protocol – was proposed in 1994 by Pacific diplomats working through the auspices of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).
Twenty-one years later, Pacific leaders were again crucial in securing the Paris Agreement, the first truly global agreement for tackling climate change. Last week US President Barack Obama told Pacific island leaders in Hawaii that agreement would have been impossible "without the incredible efforts and hard work of the island nations".
Pacific island states have been able to exercise global climate leadership despite Australia's efforts. How Pacific island countries pursued recent climate diplomacy is instructive. In the lead-up to the Paris talks, Pacific ambassadors to New York met regularly as the Pacific Small Island Developing States (P-SIDS) grouping, where previously they were more likely to meet under the auspices of the PIF.
Last year, the P-SIDS ambassadors wrote a "zero draft" of a Pacific island declaration on the global climate change negotiations, which ultimately became the strongly worded Suva Declaration on Climate Change. It had been finalised at the 2015 Pacific Islands Development Forum leaders' meeting and released just days before the watered-down Port Moresby statement. Unsurprisingly, Pacific states pursued the Suva position once they arrived in Paris.
These tactics proved crucial to the advancement of Pacific islands' position in the global climate talks. But Pacific states also acted on their own. Remarkably, the Marshall Islands was almost single-handedly responsible for the successful negotiation of an ambitious Paris Agreement.
Six months before the December Paris conference, the Marshall Islands government convened a series of private meetings that paved the way for the formation of a "high-ambition coalition" of climate-progressive states. By the second week of the summit, this group had swelled to include the United States, the European Union and more than 100 other countries. This coalition ultimately had a crucial say in formalising the agreement's 1.5℃ goal.

The Marshall Islands helped to galvanise what became an inexorable push towards a 1.5-degree target in Paris. Reuters/Jacky Naegelen

In the months before the Paris talks, Australia was not invited to join the high-ambition coalition. It attempted to join right at the summit's tail end, but was later snubbed by coalition members at the Paris deal's signing ceremony in New York in April.
There seems little doubt that Australia was left out in the diplomatic cold precisely because its climate "ambitions" are so dismally low. Indeed, when Australia announced its intended emissions targets for the Paris Agreement, the Marshall Islands' foreign minister, Tony de Brum, complained that if the rest of the world followed Australia's lead, his country, and other vulnerable nations on Australia's doorstep, would disappear.
The contrast could not be starker. While Pacific leaders are praised for their efforts to develop global climate solutions, Australia faces ignominy. Unless Australia changes direction, it will continue to be seen as an irresponsible middle power – a rogue state undermining global efforts to tackle climate change.
Australian governments will also find it increasingly hard to convince Pacific island countries they are a friend as well as a neighbour.

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Partisan Polarization On Climate Change Is Worse Than Ever

Vox - David Roberts

America, basically. (Shutterstock)

A month before the 2008 presidential election, sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright (of Oklahoma State and Michigan State, respectively) published a prescient study on the rapidly growing partisan gap on issues of environmental and climate protection.
They concluded by speculating that a win by Sen. John McCain, an outspoken climate champion, could represent "a sea change among Republican Party leadership on the issue of climate change," whereas an Obama victory "could see Republican trends toward increased skepticism continue for the next several years.
Well, we know how that turned out.
Now Dunlap and McCright (along with Oklahoma State's Jerrod Yarosh) have updated their study, giving us a fresh look at public opinion on climate change at the end of the Obama era.
The findings are dismal, if not very surprising: Polarization only accelerated after 2008, the gap between the parties is wider than ever, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.

The large and growing partisan gap on climate change
Let's look at some charts from the study, and then we'll have a think about what it means for US politics.
First, here's a chart showing how League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores, which track the voting records of members of Congress, have changed over time.