22/11/2016

Donald Trump’s First Staff Picks All Deny The Threat Of Climate Change

Think Progress - Natasha Geiling

Introducing the Five Horsemen of the Climate Apocalypse.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerry Broome
Ten days removed from the presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump has finally begun filling out his team, releasing a slew of offers for various high-level positions, from CIA director and attorney general to national security advisor.
Unlike the Departments of State or the Interior, these posts have less of a direct impact on domestic and international climate and energy policy. But climate change is a problem that permeates all policy realms — especially national security.
The Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier,” noting that it has the potential to exacerbate conflict and threaten national security. And in September, 25 military and national security experts — including former advisers to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — issued a report warning that climate change poses a “significant risk to U.S. national security and international security.” Middle East experts have suggested that the Syrian civil war is a contemporary example of a climate-driven conflict, one where widespread drought and crop failures helped tip the scale.
Trump, on the other hand, does not believe in the scientific consensus on climate change. He has called climate change a “hoax,” and has vowed to roll back nearly every single climate policy enacted under the Obama administration, from the Clean Power Plan to the Paris climate agreement.
So it should be no surprise that, when it comes to climate change, Trump’s first five advisers also reject the scientific consensus, as well as national security community’s warnings, regarding the dangers of global warming.
Here’s a rundown of Trump’s first five staff picks, and how they stack up on climate change.

Attorney General: Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
CREDIT: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions has a long history of denying climate science. In 2012, during a Senate hearing on climate science, Sessions refused to accept the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists believe that climate change is both happening and is driven by humans.
In 2015, during a hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed budget, Sessions grilled EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy on her climate and weather knowledge, despite the fact that McCarthy is a bureaucratic administrator, not a climate scientist. Sessions then wrote McCarthy a letter claiming that “although questions regarding the impacts of climate change were clear and straightforward, none of the questions received direct answers, and many responses contained caveats and conditions.” The fact that climate models are incredibly complex (a single atmospheric model can contain more than a million lines of code) doesn’t seem to convince Sessions that climate models usually require some amount of “conditions” or “caveats.”
In Congress, Sessions has repeatedly voted for policies that expand fossil fuel development and restrict regulations on greenhouse gases. He voted in favor of a measure that would prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, and has argued that carbon dioxide is not really a pollutant because it is “a plant food,” and that it “doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases.”

CIA Director: Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS)
CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
In  2010, Rep. Mike Pompeo rode into Washington on the coattails of the Tea Party movement, which saw a wave of ultra-conservative representatives elected to Congress. Pompeo has deep ties to petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch: He gained most of his wealth from a firm he founded with investment funds from Koch Industries, and relied heavily on campaign donations from Koch Industries’ PAC to power him through his primary and the general election.
The Koch brothers have actively disseminated misleading information about climate change for years, so perhaps it is no surprise that Pompeo chooses to deny the scientific consensus on climate change. In 2013, during an interview on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Pompeo said he thinks “the science [on climate change] needs to continue to develop.” He then continued by arguing, incorrectly, that there is still a great deal of debate among climate scientists about climate change (in reality, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists — 97 percent of them — believe that climate change is both happening and man-made).
“There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change,” Pompeo said. “There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.”
In Congress, Pompeo voted to open the outer continental shelf to oil drilling, and to restrict the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, and supported Americans for Prosperity's (a Koch-backed advocacy group) pledge opposing any kind of tax on carbon. He has a 4 percent lifetime score, as a representative, from the League of Conservation Voters.
Pompeo has also been a vocal critic of the Obama administration’s climate policies, lambasting the president for his opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and arguing that by supporting the U.N. climate agreement, Obama was “prepared to handcuff out nation’s economy for the sake of advancing his radical environmental agenda.” In reality, the Paris agreement was a stellar deal for the United States, requiring minimal action for a potentially very big economic payoff. Moreover, while certainly historic, the Paris agreement was far from “radical” — most climate scientists agree that the steps outlined in the agreement would still fail to get the world below the 2°C (3.6° F) warming threshold set by the agreement.

National Security Advisor: Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn
CREDIT: AP Photo/ Evan Vucci
Michael Flynn used to serve as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, until he was forced out in 2014 for allegedly being a bad manager who “left chaos in his wake,” according to NBC News. Since then, he has been a loyal Trump surrogate and was even floated as a potential vice presidential candidate.
Now, it appears Flynn will be Trump’s top national security advisor. And while his history of speaking on climate change is limited, it’s safe to say he likely doesn’t deem climate change the national security threat that the Department of Defense and multiple retired national security experts perceive it to be.
Flynn’s most notable statement about climate change came this summer, in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida. Weeks later, Obama traveled to Canada to discuss — among other things — climate change. Flynn went on Fox News to criticize Obama’s move, arguing that the president was more interested in climate change than national security.
“And here we have the President of the United States up in Canada talking about climate change,” Flynn said. “I mean, God, we just had the largest attack…on our own soil in Orlando. Why aren’t we talking about that? Who is talking about that? I mean, Fort Hood, Chattanooga, Boston, people forget about 9/11!”
Flynn does not seem to care that the Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier” and that prominent members of the national security community, like Dov Zakheim, who served in the Department of Defense under both Reagan and George W. Bush, have highlighted climate change as a risk to U.S. military operations.

Chief White House Strategist: Steve Bannon
CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Steve Bannon — who ran Trump’s campaign and has been named Chief White House Strategist — is many things. He is a racist whose appointment to the White House has been cheered by the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. He is a misogynist and bigot who has called women “dykes” and ran a website that disparaged Jews and minorities.
And on top of all of that, he is a climate denier and peddler of climate conspiracy theories. Breitbart News, Bannon’s conservative website, has tried to claim that climate change is a hoax created by activists, scientists, and renewable energy executives. Breitbart has published pieces calling NASA and NOAA scientists “talent-less low-lives.”
Bannon himself has accused the Pope of “hysteria” on climate change. He has called for unfettered fossil fuel extraction, arguing on a radio interview that there could be an “American renaissance, and an industrial renaissance in front of us, if we can just get the government out of our way.” James Delingpole, a British climate denier who Bannon recruited to write for Breitbart, told E&E News that “one of [Bannon’s] pet peeves is the great climate change con.”
Bannon has also argued that Obama’s focus on climate change has come at the expense of national security — which, again, runs counter to the Department of Defense’s own opinion on the matter.

White House Chief of Staff: Reince Priebus
CREDIT: AP Photo/John Locher
Reince Priebus, whom Trump poached from the Republican National Committee to become his Chief of Staff, shares the opinion of others on this list that climate change is not a threat to national security.
“Democrats tell us they understand the world, but then they call climate change, not radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to national security,” Priebus said during the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference. “Look, I think we all care about our planet, but melting icebergs aren’t beheading Christians in the Middle East.”
When former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) made a connection between climate change and the conflict in Syria during an interview with Bloomberg in July of 2015, Priebus called the comments “absurd” and argued that “it’s abundantly clear no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe.”
As RNC chair, Priebus oversaw an organization whose platform criticizes “Democratic party environmental extremists.” It calls the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution.” It rejects crucial international climate agreements, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, and calls for shifting environmental policy from the federal level to the states.

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21/11/2016

Climate Change in Trump’s Age of Ignorance

New York Times - Robert N. Proctor*

Richard Baker/Getty Images        
Stanford, Calif. — THE good news got pretty much drowned out this month: Yes, 2016 is on track to become the hottest year on record, but thankfully also the third year in a row to see relatively flat growth in global greenhouse gas emissions. With global economic growth on the order of 3 percent a year, we may well have turned a corner toward a sustainable climate economy.
The bad news, of course, is that the world’s wealthiest nation, home to many of the scholars scrambling to reverse global warming, has elected a new president with little or no interest in the topic. Or an active disinterest. Donald J. Trump is surrounding himself with advisers who are likely to do little to challenge his notion of climate change as a Chinese hoax. People like to think of us as living in an age of information, but a better descriptor might be “the age of ignorance.”
How did we get into this predicament? Why are we about to inaugurate the most anti-science administration in American history?
As a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970s and early 1980s, I was astonished to find how little concern there was for the beliefs of ordinary Americans. I was in the history of science department, where all the talk was of Einstein and Darwin and Newton, with the occasional glance at the “reception” of such ideas in the larger literate populace.
I had grown up in a small town in Texas, and later in Kansas City, where the people I knew often talked about nature and God’s glory and corruption and the good life. At Harvard, though, I was puzzled that my professors seemed to have little interest in people outside the vanguard, the kinds of people I had come from, many of whom were fundamentalist Christians, people of solid faith but often in desperate conditions. Why was there so little interest in what they thought or believed? That’s Point 1.
Point 2: Early in my career as a historian, I was further bothered by how little attention was given to science as an instrument of popular deception. We like to think of science as the opposite of ignorance, the light that washes away the darkness, but there’s much more to that story.
Here my Harvard years were more illuminating. I got into a crowd of appropriately radicalized students, and started to better understand the place of science in the arc of human history. I learned about how science has not always been the saving grace we like to imagine; science gives rise as easily to nuclear bombs and bioweapons as to penicillin and the iPad. I taught for several years in the biology department, where I learned that cigarette makers had been giving millions of dollars to Harvard and other elite institutions to curry favor.
I also started understanding how science could be used as an instrument of deception — and to create or perpetuate ignorance. That is important, because while scholars were ignoring what Karl Marx dismissively called “the idiocy of rural life” (Point 1), tobacco and soft drink and oil companies facing taxation and regulation were busily disseminating mythologies about their products, to keep potential regulators at bay (Point 2).
The denialist conspiracy of the cigarette industry was crucial in this context, since science was one of the instruments used by Big Tobacco to carry out its denial (and distraction) campaign. Cigarette makers had met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City on Dec. 14, 1953, to plan a strategy to rebut the evidence that cigarettes were causing cancer and other maladies. The strategy was pure genius: The claim would be that it had not been “proved” that cigarettes really cause disease, so there was room for honest doubt. Cigarette makers promised to finance research to get to the truth, while privately acknowledging (in a notorious Brown & Williamson document from 1969) that “Doubt is our product.”
For decades thereafter, cigarette makers poured hundreds of millions of dollars into basic biomedical research, exploring things like genetic and viral or occupational causes of cancer — anything but tobacco. Research financed by the industry led to over 7,000 publications in peer-reviewed medical literature and 10 Nobel Prizes. Including consulting relationships, my research shows that at least 25 Nobel laureates have taken money from the cigarette industry over the past half-century. (Full disclosure: I’ve testified against that industry in dozens of tobacco trials.)
Now we know that many other industries have learned from Big Tobacco’s playbook. Physicians hired by the National Football League have questioned the evidence that concussions can cause brain disease, and soda sellers have financed research to deny that sugar causes obesity. And climate deniers have conducted a kind of scavenger hunt for oddities that appear to challenge the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists.
This latter fact might be little more than a historical quirk, were it not for the fact that we’ll soon have a president whose understanding of science is more like that of the people in the towns where I grew up than those scholars who taught me about Darwin and Einstein at Harvard.
We now live in a world where ignorance of a very dangerous sort is being deliberately manufactured, to protect certain kinds of unfettered corporate enterprise. The global climate catastrophe gets short shrift, largely because powerful fossil fuel producers still have enormous political clout, following decades-long campaigns to sow doubt about whether anthropogenic emissions are really causing planetary warming. Trust in science suffers, but also trust in government. And that is not an accident. Climate deniers are not so much anti-science as anti-regulation and anti-government.
Jeff Nesbit, in his recent book, “Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the G.O.P.,” documents how Big Tobacco joined with Big Oil in the early 1990s to create anti-tax front groups. These AstroTurf organizations waged a concerted effort to defend the unencumbered sale of cigarettes and petro-products. The breathtaking idea was to protect tobacco and oil from regulation and taxes by starting a movement that would combat all regulation and all taxes.
Part of the strategy, according to Mr. Nesbit, who worked for a group involved in the effort and witnessed firsthand the beginning of this devil’s dance, was to sow doubt by corrupting expertise, while simultaneously capturing the high ground of open-mindedness and even caution itself, with the deceptive mantra: “We need more research.” Much of the climate denial now embraced by people like Mr. Trump was first expressed in the disinformation campaigns of Big Oil — campaigns modeled closely on Big Tobacco’s strategies.
We sometimes hear that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but a “repeat” is perhaps now the least of our worries. Judging purely from his transition team, Mr. Trump’s administration could be more hostile to modern science — and especially earth and environmental sciences — than any we have ever had. Whole agencies could go on the chopping block or face deliberate evisceration. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan may be in jeopardy, along with funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Grumblings can even be heard from Europe that if the Paris climate accord is abandoned, the United States may face carbon taxes on its export goods. Ignorance and its diabolic facilitator — the corruption of expertise — both have real-world costs that we ignore at our peril.

*Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford and the author of “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition.”
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As Doctors, We Are Worried About Climate Change

Fairfax - Dr Marianne Cannon* | Dr Joseph Ting*

Health professionals are already treating the symptoms of climate change.  Photo: Leigh Henningham
We are already treating the symptoms. Doctors, standing alongside nurses and other health professionals, are on the frontline in treating people with injuries and disease from severe weather events – such as droughts, bushfires and heatwaves - plus water borne illness… the list goes on.
Worse is coming and that's why for the past 20 years, the health and medical community has tried to raise public awareness of this issue. Unfortunately, the clearly documented and growing health effects aren't often spoken about in Australia. In part, this is due to scarce funding, a hostile political environment and the formidable size and scope of the "modelling exercise" required to begin to describe what will happen if pollution continues at current rates.
However, whilst climate change and health research in Australia is limited we only need to look to our recent history as a portent of things to come.
During the 2009 heatwaves that preceded the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria there were double the number of deaths from heat related illness as there were from the bushfires. Those most at risk are the very old, very young, people with chronic disease and those on  illicit or prescribed medications that mask heat-related stress, as well as those working outdoors or already exposed to high temperatures. It's been documented that asthma presentations to hospitals also increase on such days as well as in dust storms. This is without taking into account the smoke haze created by prescribed burns which are used to prevent bushfires from raging out of control.
When a cyclone or (as occurred recently in Adelaide and Brisbane) a wild storm hits, the health effects are widespread, severe and difficult to deal with. Nor are they confined to the day itself. In disaster preparation an event that cripples health infrastructure is referred to as a "complex disaster". This might mean there are hospitals without power, or people with chronic disease unable to access medications. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is one example.
While Australia has one of the best disaster response systems in the world, it is dependant on states and territories backing each other up to cope. It is unclear whether even our systems are robust enough to manage as these extreme weather events become more intense and occur more often.
Even without factoring in climate change we know more and more patients will add to the strain on our hospital system as the population increases and ages. We might find new, innovative ways of treating more patients but ultimately we – the health workforce – is a limited resource. It's not difficult to envisage our health system capacity (compounded by staff absenteeism) becoming overwhelmed.
By nature, the medical profession is conservative and doesn't like conflict or making a fuss. We like to be absolutely sure before we do. While you might find varying opinions within the health and medical community about their personal responsibility and action on climate change everyone is uniform in accepting the evidence that shows this problem is only getting worse. Notably, many medical and nursing colleges (and the Australian Medical Association) have formal position statements on climate change.
So where is the urgency - particularly given the less than ten year timeframe towards a "positive feedback loop" situation? This refers to certain tipping points that - once reached – mean exponential and potentially irreversible change. This also happens in serious illness, where even the fittest and healthiest bodies can fail when the primary "insult" (ie trauma, infection) is so large it overwhelms you.
This is where some uncertainty exists about possible changes in the climate system ie what will it look like when the complex web of interactions occurs. The only thing that's certain is it will be everyone's problem.
So, what must be done? Even the most cynical health professional agrees that prevention is better than cure, and while we still have a chance we must try to avoid disaster.
There is much to learn from other countries. For example, the National Health Service in the UK has a sustainability unit that's dramatically cut emissions from health care. Some local private hospital networks have already seen fit to take this pathway. A global network with strong connections in Australia, the Global Green and Healthy Hospitals initiative features many examples of healthcare services leading by example by cutting emissions, and improving population health at the same time.
In national climate policy, Australia lag behinds many wealthy and not so wealthy countries. This is an opportunity missed! Just think of the health benefits of leafy, pedestrian- and cycle-friendly towns and cities, where people are more active and breathing cleaner air.
Health care professionals want to see rapid change, and that's why many of us are advocating for a national strategy on climate change and health in Australia – exemplified by the attendance of many health and medical leaders at a recent roundtable in Parliament House.
This approach offers us the opportunity to co-design policies with government and political parties that ensure health implications are considered when deciding how to tackle climate change – and imbuing such talks with the sense of urgency that the science dictates. We are worried not only for our patients, but also for ourselves and our families.
The cure is known – it's time to act.

 *Dr Marianne Cannon and Dr Joseph Ting are emergency physicians based in Brisbane.

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Climate Change In Pictures: Photographs From Around The World Show Droughts, Floods And Melting Ice

The Independent - Ian Johnston

The effects of global warming are being felt from Antarctica to Iceland and from France to India
An  exhibition of photographs showing the effects of climate change around the world is currently on display at the United Nations climate summit in Morocco.
The images show the melting of ice in Antarctica and Iceland, devastating droughts and floods in Pakistan and dwindling water in reservoirs in France.
A total of 100 photographs are on display at the conference in Marrakech, where the likes of US Secretary of State John Kerry have viewed them.
Children and teenagers took 75 of the pictures, chosen by US-based photography charity, the Lucie Foundation, as part of a competition, while 25 others were selected by the National Geographic magazine.
Hossein Farmani, founder of the Lucie Foundation, said: "We managed to see the changes in the world through the eyes of the children and teenagers, who are very sensitive in their reflections of such changes.
"'How has your community been affected and how have you adapted?' was one of the questions we asked them and we received some very compelling answers."
Henry Dallal, the founder of the competition, said: "I am really pleased that our global youth competition on climate change initiated at COP21 in Paris has attracted many entries.
"I hope this initiative continues to create awareness on climate change among the youth of the world.
"We are glad to receive this much support from friends, and thanks to the Lucie Foundation and National Geographic's 'Your Shot' for making this exhibition come to life in the blue zone in Marrakech for COP22."
Young people from a total of 33 countries, also including Yemen, Cameroon and Cambodia, took part in the competition.

11 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change
A group of emperor penguins face a crack in the sea ice, near McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Kira Morris

Amid a flood in Islampur, Jamalpur, Bangladesh, a woman on a raft searches for somewhere dry to take shelter. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to sea level rise, which is expected to make tens of millions of people homeless by 2050. Probal Rashid

Hanna Petursdottir examines a cave inside the Svinafellsjokull glacier in Iceland, which she said had been growing rapidly. Since 2000, the size of glaciers on Iceland has reduced by 12 per cent. Tom Schifanella

Floods destroyed eight bridges and ruined crops such as wheat, maize and peas in the Karimabad valley in northern Pakistan, a mountainous region with many glaciers. In many parts of the world, glaciers have been in retreat, creating dangerously large lakes that can cause devastating flooding when the banks break. Climate change can also increase rainfall in some areas, while bringing drought to others. Hira Ali  

Smoke – filled with the carbon that is driving climate change – drifts across a field in Colombia. Sandra Rondon

A river once flowed along the depression in the dry earth of this part of Bangladesh, but it has disappeared amid rising temperatures. Abrar Hossain

Sindh province in Pakistan has experienced a grim mix of two consequences of climate change. "Because of climate change either we have floods or not enough water to irrigate our crop and feed our animals," says the photographer. "Picture clearly indicates that the extreme drought makes wide cracks in clay. Crops are very difficult to grow." Rizwan Dharejo 

A shepherd moves his herd as he looks for green pasture near the village of Sirohi in Rajasthan, southern India. The region has been badly affected by heatwaves and drought, making local people nervous about further predicted increases in temperature. Riddhima Singh Bhati 

A factory in China is shrouded by a haze of air pollution. The World Health Organisation has warned such pollution, much of which is from the fossil fuels that cause climate change, is a "public health emergency". Leung Ka Wa 

Water levels in reservoirs, like this one in Gers, France, have been getting perilously low in areas across the world affected by drought, forcing authorities to introduce water restrictions. Mahtuf Ikhsan

Not a symptom or a cause of climate change, but a cloud lit by the sunset to create the impression of a giant fireball over Tunisia. Majed Noumi  
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20/11/2016

If Trump Quits, California Could Apply To Join UN Climate Talks

Climate Home - Ed King

Head of state senate says legal brains are exploring ways in which golden state could be represented if Trump pulls nation from Paris Agreement
(Pic: Kai Lehmann/Flickr - https://www.flickr.com/photos/kailehmann/28558087315/)
If  Donald Trump pulls the US out of the UN climate process in early 2017, the world’s sixth largest economy could try and fill the sizeable hole it leaves.
Asked by Climate Home on Thursday if the golden state could replace the United States, California senate leader Kevin De Leon said it was an “option that I want to keep open”.
Legal experts at Harvard and Yale were already researching if a sub-national body could join the UN climate talks he said, but added this would be a “political decision”.
“We will continue to be active in the international movement to address climate change,” said De Leon, who branded Trump’s threat to the UN process as a “jobs killer”.
“To the extent the UN wants to coordinate with work we are doing we are more than willing to take part in these discussions,” he added.
Traditionally only states have been members of the UN climate body, although there are exceptions to the rule such as the EU and the Holy See.
A spokesperson for the UN climate body appeared to nix California’s chances, telling Climate Home that “only national governments” could join.
But the UN convention on climate change appears to allow for some flexibility: “Any body or agency, whether national or international, governmental or non-governmental, which is qualified in matters covered by the Convention, and which has informed the secretariat of its wish to be represented at a session of the Conference of the Parties as an observer, may be so admitted unless at least one third of the Parties present object.”
Still, Jake Schmidt, head of international climate policy the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading US NGO, said Governor Jerry Brown’s administration “should definitely consider it”.
“I’m sure there are creative ways to continue US engagement since the American pubic is clear it wants climate action,” he added.
The West Coast state is the country’s second largest emitter after Texas, and has long led on pushing tough climate targets.
Last year lawmakers voted for 40% greenhouse gas cuts below 1990 levels by 2030, and are also supporting a raft of vehicle emission standards tougher than the rest of the US.
In the past week the Californian delegation met with ministers from China, Germany, Canada and Mexico said Ken Alex, head of the state’s planning and research department.
“There is exceptional interest around the world to see California, Vermont and Washington [state] to continue their efforts,” he said, referring to the three states that sent representatives to Marrakech.
According to California environment head Matt Rodriguez around 10-12 US states representing 30% of the country’s economy are set to actively oppose Trump’s plans to quash climate laws.
These include Washington state, New York state, Oregon, New England and Vermont, while a total of 36 states have already developed climate plans and renewable energy targets.
“There has been a economic transition in the US that is not changing,” he said. “Even Texas – it has the most renewables in the country – but they are not talking about it as climate change.”
“This is great time to be involved in state and regional action… we now need to be a voice of consistency,” said Deborah Markowitz, head of natural resources in Vermont.
US Secretary of State John Kerry
John Kerry made his valedictory speech to the UN climate process in his role as US secretary of state on Wednesday, telling delegates that despite Trump’s threat, support at state and city level for climate action was significant.
“It isn’t a partisan issue for mayors from New Orleans to Miami, who are already working hard to manage sunny-day floods and stronger storm surges caused by climate change,” he said.
“It isn’t partisan for liberal and conservative business leaders alike who are investing unprecedented amounts of money into renewables, voluntarily committing to reduce their own emissions, and even holding their supply chains accountable to their overall carbon footprint.”

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On Climate Change Policy, Neither Time Nor Trump Are On Turnbull's Side

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

Australia cannot hail the Paris accord as a turning point and simultaneously rejoice in a great long-term economic future for coal
A Climate Analytics report has found that developed countries will have to stop burning coal for electricity by 2030. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP
When Malcolm Turnbull was dumped by the Liberal party in 2009 because he refused to renounce support for emissions trading, the man now about to assume responsibility for implementing Donald Trump’s evisceration of US climate change policy was elated.
Myron Ebell, a veteran warrior against action on global warming, wrote on his “competitive enterprise institute” blog that “toppling Turnbull was a necessary step” in defeating Australia’s cap and trade scheme. And he understood exactly who deserved credit.
“A number of Liberal members have risked their careers to stop cap-and-trade, including Cory Bernardi and Nick Minchin as well as Tony Abbott. They should all be honored for their courageous stand,” Ebell enthused.
Trump, who has claimed the “concept” of global warming was concocted by the Chinese to hurt American manufacturing, has vowed to withdraw from the Paris climate change treaty, abolish the Environment Protection Authority’s climate policy role, scrap Barack Obama’s centrepiece Clean Power Plan and dismantle any curbs on fossil fuel developments.
Trump’s transition to government website says: “We will streamline the permitting process for all energy projects, including the billions of dollars in projects held up by President Obama, and rescind the job-destroying executive actions under his Administration. We will end the war on coal, and rescind the coal mining lease moratorium ... and conduct a top-down review of all anti-coal regulations issued by the Obama Administration.”
Ebell, whose organisation has had financial links to the coal industry, is widely reported to be in charge of that transition at the EPA.
IMAGE
Little wonder that his “honored” friends in Australia are elated.
Abbott declared Trump’s election would “put climate change into a better perspective” and diminish the “moral panic” about global warming. Presumably the better perspective is one where we don’t do very much about it, and the “morality” not worth panicking about is the idea that we should not leave our children a world experiencing dangerous and irreversible change.
And since the Liberal party dumped Turnbull the first time, some new conservatives have arrived who would also probably earn Ebell’s praise.
One of them is the man Turnbull has now appointed as resources minister, the Liberal National party senator Matt Canavan.
From the moment he took up the portfolio, Canavan has talked up the “uncertainties” of climate science.
And soon after Trump’s election, Canavan was hailing it as a budgetary boon for Australia, in part because coal mining would be able to continue unconstrained.
“Donald Trump is good for fossil fuels, good for steel and good for Australia,” he told the Australian.“President-elect Trump was very clear in his support for the coal mining sector, whereas President Obama had taken steps to restrict expansion of the coal industry,’’ he said.
“The newly elected president has said he’ll rescind those regulations and that’s having an effect on world markets.”
But at exactly the same time, Turnbull was announcing that Australia would go ahead and ratify the Paris agreement, despite some of his own backbenchers declaring that Trump’s victory had rendered the deal “cactus”.
The Paris pact, Turnbull declared, was “a watershed and a turning point”.
Problem is, it’s only a turning point and a watershed if nations do what they promised – that is, constrain global warming to “well below 2C”, which requires them not only to meet the greenhouse emissions reductions already pledged but also to increase them over time to actually meet that aim.
And that requires the phasing out, over time, of coal.
The latest world energy outlook from the conservative International Energy Agency shows that under the scenario necessary to meet the existing Paris targets (still not enough to limit warming to 2C), fossil fuels decline from 67% of the energy mix to 24%, and 16% of that 24% is carbon capture and storage, the viability of which remains uncertain.
A Climate Analytics report has found that developed countries will have to stop burning coal for electricity by 2030, China by 2040 and the rest of the world by mid-century in order to meet commitments made in Paris.
To underline the obvious, we really cannot simultaneously hail the Paris agreement as a turning point and rejoice in a glorious long-term economic future for the coal industry. Except that is exactly what the Turnbull government is doing.
There are many difficult choices facing Australia as a Trump administration upends the existing world order.
And the Turnbull government was already stretching credulity with its insistence that it could meet the Paris targets, despite the emissions reduction fund probably running out of money next year and its suggestion that a looming policy review won’t impose any new requirements on industry.
But, as in so many other ways, the ascent of Trump is polarising things, forcing a choice between the agenda of Ebell and Abbott, and the ever more urgent efforts to do something about global warming. We cannot keep pretending.
Back when Ebell celebrated his ousting, we knew where Turnbull stood. He wouldn’t lead a party that wasn’t as committed to action on global warming as he was. Now he does, but those who overthrew him believe that despite his return to the leadership, they have him tamed. Time is running out for him to prove otherwise. And Trump’s radical reverse gear on climate makes it even harder for his government to continue its obfuscation.

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IEA Says Australia’s Coal Plans Don’t Match Climate Realities

Renew Economy - 

The International Energy Agency has again questioned Australia’s commitment to extract thermal coal from huge new reserves in Queensland, saying the economics of these remote projects are “increasingly questionable”.
In its latest World Energy Outlook, the conservative Paris-based organisation says it is clear that thermal coal demand in China peaked three years ago and is declining, and the fate of new Australian thermal coal provinces are increasingly dependent on what happens in India.
Under the IEA’s central policy scenario, which assumes that the world does nothing more to address climate change, coal demand in India is expected to rise.
But if the Paris climate change agreement to keep average global warming below 2°C is met, then the IEA says India’s power system mix will change rapidly: Solar will become the biggest single source of electricity by 2035, and the share of unabated coal-fired generation will shrink from more than 75 per cent now to just 7 per cent.

This graph above illustrates the difference in effort between the IEA’s central policy scenario (upon which the Australian government appears to rely) and the 450 Scenario that Australia and the rest of the world have signed up to as part of the Paris accord.
It is not the first time that the IEA has questioned the economics of the vast coal projects in the Galilee and Surat Basins.
Back in 2013, the IEA said low coal prices raised concerns about the economic feasibility of projects in the Galilee Basin and said “coal in its current form is simply unsustainable.”
Now, little more than a week after the Paris agreement came into force, the IEA’s analysis suggests that the only hope for Australia’s coal mines is if the world ignores that global pact.
But even then it has caveats. Coal imports, it notes, are politically unpopular in India and policy-makers – such as the country’s energy minister – have repeatedly stated their intention to reduce or eliminate coal imports.
And coal is now creating huge pollution issues in Indian cities, just as it did in China, which has now cut back significantly on coal use and all but halted imports.
“A scenario in which India successfully and persistently reduces its imports cannot be discarded,” the IEA says, even of its central “new policies” scenario, where no further action on climate change is taken beyond the pledges already made.
“In light of the declining import trend in China, the need to tap new deposits in Australia’s Surat and the remote Galilee Basins becomes increasingly tied to the trajectory foreseen for coal imports in India,” the IEA notes.
“A tapering of India’s imports would make the economics of remote projects that require infrastructure development increasingly questionable.”
In its 450 scenario, where the world does take action to limit warming to 2°C, the use of thermal coal in India power stations is dramatically reduced – falling to 10 per cent of total generation from its current levels of 75 per cent.
By 2040, renewable energy accounts for 57 per cent of total generation (solar 15 per cent, wind 15 per cent), despite the fact that overall demand will have tripled as the economy grows and all houses are connected to the grid.
Gas makes up most of the remainder. Around 130GW of fossil fuel capacity – almost entirely coal-fired generators – is retired by 2040.
Interestingly, because of the falling cost of solar, daytime prices will be below $30/kWh – far below current prices for coal power. Around one-third of the solar is located on rooftops.
Such a scenario, of course, is at complete odds with the Australian government outlook.
Its future energy plans are based on the Energy White Paper prepared by the Abbott government, under the auspices of former energy minister Ian Macfarlane, who now heads the mining lobby in Queensland. Despite supposedly framing an energy plan out to 2040 and beyond, it took no account of climate change.
Indeed, at the current climate conference in Marrakech, and barely one week after Australia ratified the treaty, energy minister Josh Frydenberg was lobbying US energy minister Ernest Moniz about the actions of big US donors to environmental groups in Australia fighting the Galilee projects.
The Coalition government – and the Queensland Labor government for that matter – argues that environmental groups are the biggest threat to the coal projects, and is introducing a series of laws in an attempt to combat their influence, including rules about their funding and spending, and curbs on their ability to take legal action.

But as the IEA report illustrates, the biggest threat to the project economics are the realities of the global coal trade, and the need to combat climate change, and for India to maintain clean air in its cities.
“The lesson here for governments and investors is simple – that those who exit fossil fuels and embrace solar and wind will reap financial rewards and avoid major stranded-asset risks,” says Tim Buckley, senior energy analyst with IEEFA.
“This will remain so regardless of recent political upheaval in the US.
“In the unlikely event that short-term tailwinds for the US coal sector continue and a slowdown sets in on renewable energy deployment as a result of the new presidential administration, the IEA analysis shows that emerging economies are now well placed to assume global low-carbon technology leadership.”
The IEA view on coal is not the only embarrassment to the Turnbull government. As we reported on Wednesday, the IEA made a mockery of Australia’s scare campaign against renewable energy, saying it was likely that renewables would account for nearly 60 per cent of total electricity generation around the world by 2040.
The Turnbull government has argued that policies aiming for 50 per cent renewable energy by 2050 are “reckless” and unattainable. But the IEA trajectory shows that is exactly where a solar and wind-rich country like Australia will need to be.
If the world is to reach its ambition of capping global warming by 1.5°C, then the transition will need to be even quicker and all “unabated” fossil fuel generation will need to be retired by 2040.
Australia this week was ranked among the worst performing countries on climate change policies by at least two different independent analyses.

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