20/10/2018

‘Not Happy’: Australia Must Act On Climate, Says Former Kiribati Leader

The Guardian - 

Anote Tong, allegedly insulted by Australian minister, says inaction means Canberra risks losing its status in Pacific region
Former Kiribati president Anote Tong is advocating for robust action on climate change. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP 
Anote Tong has had quite a week. The former president of Kiribati has been in Australia to advocate for more robust action on climate change, which threatens to wipe out his Pacific home within a matter of decades as sea levels rise.
But on Wednesday he got caught up in controversy when reports emerged that Australia’s environment minister, Melissa Price, allegedly told him it was “always about the cash” when Pacific Islands leaders came to Australia.
It’s about lives, it’s about the future
Anote Tong
As a result, Tong has become hot property. When we meet in the late afternoon the next day he has been on the go since 4am with interviews and meetings.
While Price’s alleged comments have given him prominence, they have also threatened to derail his message about the impact of climate change on Kiribati and what countries such as Australia should be doing to help.
Tong says he did not hear the comments Price is alleged to have made at a restaurant. “I do have a hearing problem. I’m a free diver and I lost my hearing [in one ear],” he says. “If it was true that those were the comments then I would not be happy.”
Mostly, Tong just wants to move on. “We’ve gone beyond that, I don’t want to go back. I’ve had a call from the minister, which I thought was very gracious of her to do that, just saying if I have offended you in any way I assure you it was not my intention.”
Tong has other criticism for the environment minister and her colleagues. He was angered by their reactions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report last week, which said the world had just 12 years to limit global warming to a maximum of 1.5C. Price said it would be “irresponsible” for Australia to commit to phase out coal by 2050, while the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, said Australia would not change policy based on the recommendations of “some sort of report”.
“I was not happy. I was very disappointed when the credibility of the report was being questioned, because there is no alternative science being put forward and what’s at stake is not minor,” said Tong. “It’s not about the marginal rise in price or reduction in price of energy, it’s about lives, it’s about the future.”
If Australia, which has been criticised by its Pacific neighbours for failing to take more concerted action to reduce emissions, does not change its tone, Tong says it is in danger not only of losing its position as a regional leader but of being welcome in regional organisations at all.
“When countries in the region do things that are not proper, like have a coup, we expel them from the regional body … When you believe somebody is destroying your future and your home, what should you do?”
For Kiribati, the impacts of climate change are being felt acutely, with increased storms and flooding. Rising sea levels mean it is inevitable the island will disappear, says Tong. “If it doesn’t happen in 20 years’ time, it’ll happen in 50 years’ time or in 100 years’ time.”
When people have to leave Kiribati, Tong does not want them to leave in an emergency situation or as climate change refugees – a term he dislikes. Instead, he says, governments should be training people in countries such as Kiribati that are feeling the brunt of climate change so they can get jobs elsewhere, which Tong calls “migration with dignity”.
“We have more than enough time to make our people qualified,” he said. “It has already worked. We had a Kiribati-Australia nursing initiative, where our young people were trained in Queensland and they found jobs in Australia.”
By one estimate from an Oxfam report last year, the sea-level rise resulting from 2C of warming could submerge land that is currently home to 280 million people. Each year from 2008 and 2016 an average of 21.8 million people were reported as newly internally displaced by extreme weather disasters such as cyclones.
Tong says Kiribati and other countries like it are “owed” the resources to train their people so they can relocate. “If I drop a tree on your home and I come to you and say ‘where are you going to live?’ [you’re] going to say: ‘I’m going to live with you until my home is fixed.’ That’s the normal thing, isn’t it? Otherwise I think I take you to court. Now we don’t have that remedy, but I think the principles are essentially the same.”

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After Nobel In Economics, William Nordhaus Talks About Who’s Getting His Pollution-Tax Ideas Right

New York Times - Coral Davenport

A few governments — notably, parts of Canada and South Korea — have adapted his ideas in ways that frame them as a financial windfall for taxpayers.
“Things change over the long run,” said William D. Nordhaus. “What is toxic or opposed in one generation gradually becomes accepted in the next.” Credit Monica Jorge for The New York Times
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — William D. Nordhaus, the Yale economist who shared the Nobel in economic science this week, has pointed words for some of the experiments so far with his theories on taxing polluters to fight climate change.
“It was a catastrophic failure in the European Union,” he said just days after not only being awarded the Nobel, but also seeing his life’s work embraced in a landmark United Nations assessment of the global threat of climate change. That document, approved by more than 180 nations, described Professor Nordhaus’s ideas as essential for slowing the carbon dioxide emissions that are rapidly warming the atmosphere.
But in other places around the world — notably, parts of Canada and South Korea — politicians have adapted the idea in ways that not only show signs of working, but that also reframe it not as a tax, but as a financial windfall for taxpayers. Other governments, including China and some individual states in the United States, are also testing different ways to force companies to pay to pollute.
In short, the world is becoming a laboratory for theories that Professor Nordhaus developed decades ago, when global warming was an abstract future threat. By contrast, this week’s United Nations report amounts to a stark warning of immediate risk.
The report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that if greenhouse gas emissions continued unabated, the atmosphere would warm up to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by 2040, leading to irrevocable damage including severe food shortages, coastal inundations and the displacement of tens of millions of people as soon as 2040. If the planet keeps warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the effects could include devastating floods and droughts and the permanent loss of the world’s coral reefs.
The Nobel, which Professor Nordhaus shared with the New York University economist Paul M. Romer, was widely perceived as a rebuke to President Trump, who has called climate change a hoax and sought to roll back the United States’ existing climate change policies. It is also seen as a broader challenge to powerful Republican political voices in the United States, among them the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch and the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who have attacked lawmakers who support a carbon tax, making it among the most volatile ideas in American politics.
On Wednesday, Professor Nordhaus discussed his carbon pricing theories and the political landscape. The exchanges have been edited and trimmed.

Why is carbon pricing seen as political poison in the United States?
It’s been caught up in the politics, and it just happens that this particular policy is one that has faced the wrath of a whole group of thinkers. Grover Norquist, energy companies, it’s the Koch brothers and their foundations, it’s people using fair tactics and foul tactics — it’s been caught up as one of the issues in the Great Divide.
This anti-tax movement has been so powerful and so harmful in the United States. There have been a large number of conservative economists in the United States who have endorsed the idea of a carbon tax.

Where has carbon pricing been successful? Where has it failed?
We learned with the European Union that once you go beyond the simple, idealized version of carbon prices and into implementation, it’s a very different thing. One of the things we found out: One of the problems with cap and trade [a system in which governments place a cap on countries’ carbon-dioxide pollution and companies then pay for, and trade, credits that permit them to pollute] is that it is dependent on predicting what future emissions will be. But if those projections are wrong, the system fails.
With the E.U., their projected carbon emissions were high, but the actual carbon emissions were low, and the carbon price fell drastically, from $30 to $40 per ton down to single digits. So the price was so low it did not have an effect in lowering emissions. It was flawed design. If the models had predicted too few emissions, and the price had gone to $1,000 per ton. we would have had a different problem.
The carbon tax has different problems, but not this one. The price of carbon is independent of the amount of emissions.
When I talk to people about how to design a carbon price, I think the model is British Columbia. You raise electricity prices by $100 a year, but then the government gives back a dividend that lowers internet prices by $100 year. In real terms, you’re raising the price of carbon goods but lowering the prices of non-carbon-intensive goods.
That’s the model of how something like this might work. It would have the right economic effects but politically not be so toxic. The one in British Columbia is not only well designed but has been politically successful.

What went wrong when President Obama tried to implement a carbon price in 2009?
I did not talk to Obama about this directly, but I spoke with many of his advisers over the years.
One of my very, very few disappointments in Obama when he was president is that he did not come out in favor of carbon tax. I’m sure he did the political calculus on this. He should have come out and talked not just about climate change and its dangers but how to use a carbon tax to fix it. He was a great speaker a great educator but this is one where he let us down, I think.
Professor Nordhaus said the problem of carbon taxes was political, rather than one of economics or feasibility. Credit Monica Jorge for The New York Times
How do you think a carbon tax could get bipartisan support?
Things change over the long run. What is toxic or opposed in one generation gradually becomes accepted in the next. Social security took a long time. It was opposed for many, many decades but since Reagan is has been widely accepted.
On carbon taxes, people’s views have changed from being very hostile, to conservative economists embracing this, to the I.P.C.C. saying, this is the approach.
I have to be hopeful that, if we continue to work on this, the public will get there on the science, and make an exception to the toxicity of taxes. It will help if it’s tied to something popular — if, as a result of the revenue from a carbon tax, you get a check in the mail, or it funds health care.
In terms of implementation, it’s not much more difficult to implement than a gasoline tax. Gasoline taxes are very easy to implement.

But gasoline taxes are also politically toxic.
Only in this country! In other countries, people are grown-up, and they can live with taxes.
The problem is political, rather than one of economics or feasibility. It’s because it’s used as a weapon. At some point, I’m hopeful that grown-ups will take over and we will do what is necessary. I hope so. If we don’t, then things will just get worse and worse.

Do we have enough time to avoid the warming that will bring severe and damaging effects of climate change?
It’s not going to happen in time for 1.5 degrees. It’s very unlikely to happen for 2 degrees. We’d have to be very pessimistic about the economy or optimistic about technology for 2 degrees. If we start moving very swiftly in the next 20 years, we might able to avoid 2 degrees, but if we don’t do that, we’re in for to changes in the Earth’s system that we can’t begin to understand in depth. Warming of 4, 5, 6 degrees will bring changes we don’t understand because it’s outside the range of human experience in the last 100,000 to 200,000 years.
We’ve been going backward for the last two years. Maybe we can stop going backward and start going forward.

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Here’s 123 Things Our Leaders Did To ‘Confront’ Climate Change

New Matilda - 


 A recent ReachTel poll commissioned by Greenpeace Australia found that for the voters of Wentworth – former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s old seat – tackling climate change was their number one priority. Here's a list of Liberal Party decisions on climate change over the last five years.

Tony Abbott eats an onion. Just because.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott
  1. Abolishes key ministerial positions of climate change and science – 16 September 2013
  2. Abolishes the Climate Commission – 19 September 2013
  3. Denies there is a link between climate change and more severe bush fires and accuses a senior UN official of “talking through their hat” – 23 October 2013
  4. Abolishes the Antarctic Animal Ethics Committee which ensured research on animals in the Antarctic complies with Australian standards – 8 November 2013
  5. Cuts 600 jobs at the CSIRO – 8 November 2013
  6. Abandons Australia’s emission reduction targets – 12 November, 2013
  7. Downgrades national environment laws by giving approval powers to state premiers – 9 December 2013
  8. Removes the community’s right to challenge decisions where the government has ignored expert advice on threatened species impacts – 9 December 2013
  9. Approves the largest coal port in the world in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area – 10 December 2013
  10. Approves Clive Palmer’s mega coal mine in the Galilee Basin which opponents say will severely damage Great Barrier Reef – 11 December 2013
  11. Overturns the “critically endangered” listing of the Murray Darling Basin – 11 December 2013
  12. Scraps the COAG Standing Council on Environment and Water – 13 December 2013
  13. Starts dismantling Australia’s world leading marine protection system – 13 December 2013
  14. Axes funding for animal welfare – 17 December 2013
  15. Defunds the Environmental Defenders Office which is a network of community legal centres providing free advice on environmental law – 17 December 2013
  16. Scraps the Home Energy Saver Scheme which helps struggling low income households cut their electricity bills – 17 December 2013
  17. Cuts funding to the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Programme which makes it mandatory for large energy-using-businesses to improve their efficiency –17 December, 2013
  18. Requests the delisting of World Heritage status for Tasmanian forests – 21 December 2013
  19. Breaks his promise to provide a customs vessel to monitor whaling operations in the Southern Ocean – 23 December 2013
  20. Defunds all international environmental programs, the International Labour Organisation and cuts funding to a range of international aid programs run by NGOs such as Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE Australia and Caritas – 18 January 2014
  21. Exempts Western Australia from national environment laws to facilitate shark culling – 21 January 2014
  22. Appoints a climate change skeptic to head a review of our renewable energy target – 17 February 2014
  23. Blames carbon pricing for the closure of Alcoa smelters and rolling mills and the loss of nearly 1,000 jobs, despite the fact the company states it had no bearing on their decision – 19 February 2014
  24. Axes funding earmarked to save the Sumatran rhinoceros from extinction – 28 February 2014
  25. Cuts hundreds of jobs at the CSIRO – 14 March 2014
  26. Cuts 480 jobs from the Environment Department which help protect places such as Kakadu, Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef – 7 April 2014
  27. Scraps the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) which was set up to support new and emerging renewable technologies and in doing so breaks an election promise – 13 May 2014
  28. Axes industry and community clean energy programs including the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, the National Low Emission Coal Initiative, Energy Efficiency Programmes, the National Solar Schools Plan, Energy Efficiency Information Grants and Low Carbon Communities – 13 May 2014
  29. Cuts Australia’s Animal Welfare Strategy – 13 May 2014
  30. Rips a further $111.4 million over four years out of the operating budget of the CSIRO – 13 May 2014
  31. Reduces funding to the Australian Institute for Marine Science – 13 May 2014
  32. Breaks a promise to have one million more solar roofs across Australia and at least 25 solar towns – 13 May 2014
  33. Breaks a promise to spend $2.55 billion on the Emissions Reduction Fund by committing less than half this amount in the budget – 13 May 2014
  34. Terminates the Office of Water Science research programme – 13 May, 2014
  35. Slashes the Biodiversity Fund – 13 May, 2014
  36. Scraps the National Water Commission – 13 May, 2014
  37. Axes the carbon tax with no viable policy to address climate change or Australia’s emission targets – 17 July, 2014
  38. Repeals the mining tax on the profits of big coal and iron ore companies – 2 September 2014
  39. Cuts spending on science and innovation to the lowest levels since the data was first published – 07 October, 2014
  40. Describes coal as “good for humanity” while opening a coal mine in Queensland – 13 October, 2014
  41. Refuses to contribute to the fund Green Climate Fund, which Abbott described the year before as “socialism masquerading as environmentalism” – 17 November, 2014
  42. Cuts  CSIRO funding, which means that CSIRO will lose 1/5 of its workforce  – 24 November, 2014
  43. Cuts the Climate Adaptation Outlook Independent Expert Group – 15 December 2014
  44. Cuts the Biological Diversity Advisory Committee – 15 December 2014
  45. Abolishes the Subcommittee on Animal Health Laboratory Standards – 15 December 2014
  46. Abolishes the Antarctic Science Advisory Committee – 15 December 2014
  47. Abolishes the Emissions Intensive–-Trade Exposed Expert Advisory Committee –15 December 2014
  48. Disbands the Commonwealth Environmental Water Stakeholder Reference Panel – 15 December 2014
  49. Abolishes the COAG Standing Council on Environment and Water – 15 December 2014
  50. Abolishes the Bureau of Meteorology Water Accounting Standards Board – 15 December 2014
  51. Abolishes the National Marine Mammal Scientific Committee – 15 December 2014
  52. Disbands the National Marine Mammal Advisory Committee – 15 December 2014
  53. Abolishes the National Landscapes Reference Committee – 15 December 2014
  54. Abolishes the Technical Advisory Committee for the Coal Mining Abatement Technology Support Package – 15 December 2014
  55. Abolishes the Marine Council – 15 December 2014
  56. Appoints a climate skeptic who praised Rupert Murdoch as the “starting point for green innovation” to the position of Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment – 21 December 2014
  57. Cuts $12.5 million from the National Heritage Trust – 12 May 2015
  58. Establishes a Commissioner for Wind Farms – 24 June 2015
  59. Slashes the renewable energy target – 24 June 2015
  60. Intense lobbying keeps Great Barrier Reef off UNESCO’s world heritage in-danger list despite many government decisions which threaten it – 2 July 2015
  61. Directs the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to stop investing in wind power – 12 July 2015
  62. Bans the Clean Energy Finance Corporation from investing in roof top solar panels and other small scale solar energy – 12 July 2015
  63. Reduces Australia’s carbon emissions reduction target – 11 August 2015
  64. Tries to introduce laws to stop citizens exercising their legal rights to stop big developments that damage the environment – 19 August 2015
Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. (IMAGE: Veni, Flickr).
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull
  1. Approves Carmichael coal mine – 16 October 2015
  2. Environment Minister Greg Hunt claims selling India Australian coal will cut carbon emissions – 10 Dec 2015
  3. Approves Abbot Point Coal Terminal expansion – 22 December 2015
  4. Presides over a drop in Australia’s ranking on the Environmental Performance Index of 10 places – 28 January 2016
  5. Approves logging in Murray Valley National Park – 28 February 2016
  6. Tries to loan Adani $1 billion to build a railway link to the Carmichael mine and promises to “fix” native title problems – 11 April 2017
  7. Describes Labor’s emissions trading scheme as “jobs destroying”, a handbrake on the economy, leading to “much higher energy prices.” – 27 April 2016
  8. Says coal will be important for “many, many decades to come” – 25 October 2016
  9. Seeks changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to stop conservation groups challenging environmental ministerial decisions – October 31, 2016
  10. Says “if anyone had a vested interest in showing you that you could do really smart, clean things with coal, it would be us” – 1 February, 2017
  11. Opens $5 billion infrastructure fund for “clean-coal” power stations – 3 February 2017
  12. Hires Sid Marris, former head of climate and environment at the Minerals Council of Australia, to be his climate and energy adviser – 3 February 2017
  13. Scott Morrison brings a lump of coal to question time and says “This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.” – 9 February 2017
  14. Ignores advice that renewable energy was not to blame for South Australian blackouts – 13 February 2017
  15. Oversees 3.4% rise in emissions within 12 months and 7.5% increase since the Abbott-Turnbull government scrapped the carbon price – 01 March 2017
  16. Diverts funds from Clean Energy Finance Corporation to fund coal with carbon capture and storage – 31 May 2017
  17. Stops releasing pollution data that used to be announced on a quarterly basis – 7 July 2017
  18. Attacks South Australian renewable energy policy as “ideology and idiocy in equal measure” – 14 August 2017
  19. Lobbies AGL to delay closure of ageing Liddell coal power station for another five years – 5 September 2017
  20. Dumps Clean Energy Target – 17 October 2017
  21. Plans to reduce environmental spending to less than 60% of 2013-2014 budget – 13 December 2017
  22. Data released in the week before Christmas shows highest greenhouse gas emissions on record when land use change emissions excluded – 19 December 2017
  23. This data shows emissions increasing to 2030 and beyond – 19 December 2017
  24. Declares climate policies are a big success – 19 December 2017
  25. Climate policy review loosens the safeguard mechanism that sets limits on pollution – 19 December 2017
  26. Government fails to list a single piece of critical habitat for protection despite 1800 species and ecological communities being identified as threatened in Australia – 6 Match 2018
  27. Backs Pauline Hanson’s motion for new coal-fired power stations – 27 June 2018
  28. Turnbull’s signature emissions reduction policy, the National Energy Guarantee, described as having ‘no benefit’ to emissions – 18 July 2018.
  29. Personally approves $443m fund for Great Barrier Reef Foundation, an organisation with ties to BHP, Shell and Peabody Energy – 31 July 2018.
  30. Removes emissions reduction target from National Energy Guarantee – 20 August 1018
Scott Morrison is sworn in as the 30th Australian Prime Minister.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison
  1. Appoints Angus Taylor, long-time campaigner against the Renewable Energy Target and a fierce critic of wind energy, as Minister for Energy – 26 August 2018
  2. Appoints Melissa Price, a former general counsel for Crosslands Resources, which owns the Jack Hills iron ore project in Western Australia, as Minister for the Environment – 26 August 2018
  3. Appoints Matt Canavan, who doubts the importance of climate change mitigation and is a strong advocate of Adani’s Carmichael coal mine but dismisses the battery storage facility, the Hornsdale Power Reserve, as the “Kim Kardashian of the energy world”, as Minister for Resources – 26 August 2018
  4. Angus Taylor indicates more taxpayer money for existing coal and gas – 30 August 2018
  5. Revealed that the Marine Park Authority had to scale back surveys in 2017, a year of massive coral bleaching, due to lack of government funds – 2 September 2018
  6. Angus Taylor says there is too much wind and solar in the electricity grid – 5 September 2018
  7. Tries to water down climate change resolution at Pacific Islands forum – 6 September 2018
  8. Union tells Senate inquiry that 87% of members who work in threatened species management in the environment department and other government agencies thought Australia’s effectiveness in protecting critical habitat was poor or very poor – 7 September 2018
  9. Resources Minister Matt Canavan says Paris agreement “doesn’t actually bind us to anything in particular” and doesn’t stop Australia building new coal plants – 7 September 2018
  10. PM says National Energy Guarantee “is dead” – 8 September 2018
  11. Tony Abbott advocates scrapping of renewable energy subsidies – 11 September 2018
  12. Report shows Australia’s transport emissions rose 3.4% from December 2016-December 2017 – 13 September 2018
  13. Angus Taylor announces Morrison government won’t be replacing the renewable energy target “with anything” beyond 2020 – 18 September 2018
  14. Approves private tourism development with helicopter access in Tasmanian world heritage wilderness – 31 August 2018
  15. Morrison says Australia will meet its Paris emissions targets “at a canter” despite no emissions reductions policies and statements from the Energy Security Board to the contrary – 5 September 2018
  16. Australia receives bottom three ranking for environmental policy among wealthy nations – 18 September 2018
  17. Government tells Great Barrier Reef scientists to focus on projects which make the government look good and encourage more corporate donations – 26 September 2018
  18. Releases data showing March quarter increase in emissions of 1.3% on a Friday afternoon, which was a public holiday in Victoria and the same day as the release of the banking sector royal commission interim report – 28 September 2018
  19. Describes $444m Great Barrier Reef Foundation grant as the “right financial decision” – 1 October 2018.
  20. Data reveals 770,000 hectares (three times the size of the ACT) of forests in the Great Barrier Reef catchment zone have been cleared since Tony Abbott was elected in 2013 – 4 October 2018.
  21. Senate inquiry into threatened species told Australia’s environment laws have been “white-anted with loopholes” and hears of “massive and pervasive non-compliance with legislation” – 8 October 2018
  22. PM rules out providing more money for global climate conferences and “all that sort of nonsense”– 8 October 2018
  23. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack says Australia should “absolutely use and exploit its coal reserves” despite IPCC warnings of climate catastrophe and says Australia wouldn’t change climate policy because of “some sort of report” – 9 October 2018
  24. Matt Canavan responds to the IPCC calls for phasing out coal by 2050 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change by saying “many argue that coal markets are in structural decline when nothing could be further from the truth” and “our coal is the envy of the world and we should promote it proudly” – 9 October 2018
  25. Melissa Price responds to the IPCC report by saying “every year there’s new technology with respect to coal and what it contributes to emissions. So I think to say it’s got to be phased out by 2050 is drawing a very long bow” – 9 October 2018
  26. Angus Taylor says the government would “not be distracted from our goal of lowering power prices for Australian households and small business” and “coal will continue to play a vital role in our energy mix, now and into the future” – 10 October 2018
  27. Former Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg responded to the grave IPCC warnings with “If we take coal out of our energy system, the lights will go out on the East Coast of Australia” – 9 October 2018
  28. Chairman of Coalition’s backbench energy committee Craig Kelly says the government needs to axe renewable energy subsidies – 16 October 2018
  29. Melissa Price reported to have told the former president of Kiribati at a dinner in Canberra ““I know why you are here, it’s for the cash. For the Pacific, it’s always about the cash. I have my cheque book here, how much do you want?” then accused of misleading Parliament over it – 17 October 2018
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19/10/2018

Pacific Nations Aren’t Cash-Hungry, Minister, They Just Want Action On Climate Change

The Conversation - 

Environment Minister Melissa Price is accused of insulting Kiribati’s former president, saying he was only in Australia “for the cash”. Lukas Coch/AAP
Environment Minister Melissa Price has been trending on Twitter this week – and not for any good environmental reasons.
Price was introduced to the former president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, during a dinner at a Canberra restaurant hosted by Labor Senator Pat Dodson. Tong has brought global attention to his country because of the existential challenges it faces from climate change and rising sea levels.
According to Dodson, Price made what many have deemed an insulting comment to Tong:
I know why you’re here. It’s for the cash. For the Pacific it’s always about the cash. I have my chequebook here. How much do you want?
Others at the restaurant verified Dodson’s version of the incident. For his part, Tong said he has some hearing problems and others closer to Price could better hear what she said.

IMAGE

My response on Twitter was that in Kiribati, it’s rude to call out bad behaviour in public.
Maybe Price thought she was making a good Aussie joke. Or maybe she’d observed other members of her party laughing at the expense of the Pacific and wanted to crack one like the rest of the boys.
Peter Dutton’s foray into comedy in 2015 springs to mind. In response to a quip by then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott about how islanders are not good at being on time, Dutton said:
Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.
Water lapping at the door apparently doesn’t translate into concern over climate change and global warming – a matter of urgency for the low-lying island nations in the Pacific.
Rather than share the concerns of Pacific leaders on this issue, some Australian politicians have chosen to trivialise them and accuse Pacific nations of only being interested in a cash grab.
Just last month, Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald also accused Pacific nations of swindling money from Australia to address the effects of rising sea levels. The Sydney Morning Herald reported him saying:
They might be Pacific islanders, but there’s no doubting their wisdom and their ability to extract a dollar where they see it.
If Macdonald had been listening to the Canberra speech last month by Dame Meg Taylor, the secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, he would have heard a very different message:
It is absolutely essential that we work together to move the discussion with Australia to develop a pathway that will minimise the impacts of climate change for the future of all … including Australia.
So far this call has fallen on deaf ears.

Australia’s history of phosphate extraction
Australians know well how polite and friendly Pacific people are. Flights to Fiji during school holidays are packed with families seeking sun, sand and true island hospitality. But both the shallow view of the Pacific as a paradise, and political slurs of cash-hungry islanders, reveal a deep Australian ignorance of Pacific histories, environments, peoples and cultural values, and of Australia’s projects of colonial extraction in the region.
For over a century, Australia has had an intense social and cultural relationship with Oceania, paralleling its economic and geo-strategic interests, and not just with Papua New Guinea or Melanesian states.
From the start of the 20th century, Australian mining companies began extracting phosphate as fast as they could from Nauru and Banaba island (in what is now Kiribati) in order to grow the country’s agricultural industry.
Australian mining officials and workers on Banaba. National Archives of Australia/Author provided
And grow it did, exponentially, while consuming the landscapes of much smaller Pacific islands. Pacific phosphate – and the superphosphate fertiliser it produced – was the magic dust of Australian agriculture. Little could have been grown here without it, as Australia has always been “a continent of soils with a low plant nutrient supply”.
But decades of phosphate mining on Banaba stripped away about 90% of the island’s surface. By the late 1970s, when the mining operations ended, 22 million tons of land had been removed. The island wasn’t rehabilitated and all the mining infrastructure was left to rust and decay.
Many Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji over the years, including my grandfather. It was a migration that foreshadows future relocations that many Pacific islanders face due to climate change.
It’s hypocritical for Australian leaders to accuse the Pacific of being solely after money, when Australia exploited Banaba and other Pacific islands in this way. At a time, when the future of many Pacific nations is under threat, a little compassion, responsibility and real action on climate change is in order, not jokes or barbs at islanders’ expense.

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The Morrison Government’s Biggest Economic Problem? Climate Change Denial

The Conversation - 

The government’s stubborn commitment to coal is alienating it from its natural supporters in the business community. Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND
Last week Peter Costello accused Malcolm Turnbull of failing to develop an economic narrative to unite the Coalition. Turnbull promised this when he challenged Tony Abbott for the leadership of the Liberal Party, but, said Costello, it never came, and the result is a government struggling to manage deep differences over social issues. There was “jobs and growth”, but this is really just a goal without much of a story about how to get there, except for the company tax cuts.
The big question, though, is why the government does not have a coherent economic narrative.
One possible answer is that it has been too preoccupied with social issues such as religious freedom and before that, same-sex marriage, to give the economy sufficient attention. There is something in that.
But this does not get to the heart of the problem, which is the inability of the Coalition to face the reality of climate change and its stubborn determination to live in a parallel universe of business as usual. It is climate change denial that is preventing the government from developing a coherent economic narrative.
To be sure, those who doubt the seriousness of climate change are now more likely to describe themselves as sceptics rather than outright deniers, but the effects are the same. Doubting the risks of climate change, opposing serious counter measures and believing in coal’s long-term future is an identity issue for many Coalition politicians.
Then-treasurer Scott Morrison brings a lump of coal to question time in February 2017. Climate change denial is holding back the government from a clear economic strategy. AAP/Mick Tsiakis
As an identity issue, it is largely impervious to evidence, as we saw in government ministers’ hasty dismissal of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report – before they had even read it, one suspects. Identity issues are also resistant to the normal processes of bargaining and compromise with which many political conflicts are resolved. The National Energy Guarantee was the last of the government’s energy policies to founder on the suspicion that a market mechanism might damage coal. Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s Clean Energy Target met the same fate.
So now, some members of the party of private enterprise and the free market, which argued for and oversaw the privatisation of most of Australia’s power utilities, are seriously advocating that the government develop a coal-fired power station. Barnaby Joyce has been at it again in recent weeks.
When AGL announced the planned closure of its ageing Liddell coal-fired power station last year, the government strenuously tried to dissuade it, keep it running for longer or to sell it to rival power company Alinta. The pressure was very public on AGL to “do the right thing”, but also private, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ringing AGL Chairman Graeme Hunt. It was to no avail, and AGL persisted with its commercially based decision to close the plant and invest instead in the generation of renewable energy, as it had every right to do.
To state the obvious, the stubborn commitment to coal is pulling the government’s economic policy towards the sort of state socialism it is supposed to abhor. No wonder it is having difficulty developing a coherent economic narrative.
Further, it is alienating the government, and the Liberal Party in particular, from its natural supporters in the business community. With the collapse of the NEG, the government has no energy policy to provide certainty to business and investors. The focus of the new minister for energy, Angus Taylor, has contracted to reducing power prices for consumers. Climate policy has been shifted back into the portfolio of the Minister for the Environment, separating energy from emissions and further demonstrating the identity denialism that distorts the government’s economic narrative. Faced with doubts about Australia’s capacity to meet its agreed to Paris targets, the government blithely says we are “on track”.
But most big business outside the fossil fuel industries is not in denial about the real risks of climate change, nor the imperatives of international action. Since Turnbull walked away from the NEG in a vain attempt to appease his critics and save his leadership, the Australian Industry Group and the Business Council of Australia have both been discussing ways to “go it alone” on emissions reduction.
Australian Financial Review journalist Phil Coorey last week quoted a member of the Business Council of Australia’s Energy and Climate Change Committee:
Someone has got to do something. This has to be industry-led unless government wants to take over the markets.
Industry needs certainty to invest, and to maintain and create the jobs that are central to the government’s focus on “jobs and growth”. That certainty needs to last beyond the tenure of one government or even two, and have bipartisan support.
Yet the government is unwilling to provide that certainty. As Angus Taylor told an AFR National Energy Summit last week:
There is no room for bipartisanship when we have a 26% [reduction target] and the other side has 45%.
But because climate policy has become an identity issue for some members of the Coalition, and they fight on it tooth and nail, is has been removed from the normal processes of policy formation.
No wonder the government can’t develop a coherent economic narrative.

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Dutch Court Upholds Urgenda, Says Government Must Reduce Emissions

Climate Liability News - Ucilia Wang

Urgenda Foundation celebrates Dutch court ruling upholding emissions reductionsPlaintiffs celebrate a Dutch appeals court ruling upholding the historic Urgenda decision that the Netherlands must reduce emissions to protect its citizens. Photo credit: Urgenda Foundation
An appeals court in the Netherlands upheld a historic ruling that requires the Dutch government to reduce emissions in the name of protecting the rights of its citizens.
The Hague Court of Appeal on Tuesday denied the request of the government to overturn the lower court ruling in Urgenda Foundation v. The State of Netherlands, which ruled in 2015 that the Dutch government must reduce emissions 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.
The plaintiffs in the case, the Urgenda Foundation and a group of 886 citizens, cited the European Convention on Human Rights as a basis of their complaint, a novel approach that has inspired other cases around the world. They also pointed to data showing that the government has had limited success in cutting emissions so far—only  13 percent, leaving only two more years to reach 25 percent.
“The court said climate change is a grave danger, and the action of the government is violating the rights of it citizens,” said Dennis van Berkel, legal counsel of the Urgenda Foundation in Amsterdam.
“The European Convention on Human Rights applies to other countries. But it’s not just about specific provisions. It’s about the universality of the ruling, where the court says humans have a fundamental rights to be protected from this danger,” van Berkel said.
The ruling will also likely have a significant impact beyond Europe. Internationally, climate lawsuits are increasingly popular as the impacts of climate change grow more visible and damaging.
Since the case was filed in 2013, similar lawsuits have popped up in countries including the U.S., Norway, Pakistan, Ireland, Belgium, Colombia, Switzerland and New Zealand.
These lawsuits are trying to hold either governments or fossil fuel companies accountable for the effects of climate change. Many seek policy actions to cut emissions and limit fossil fuel development; others ask for compensation to help communities deal with damages from climate impacts like intense wildfires, hurricanes and threats to public health.
A U.S. case that is headed to trial in Oregon later this month has survived numerous legal challenges from the Department of Justice, which is trying to have the case halted. The government attorneys filed its latest motion to delay the case last Friday.
The case, Juliana v. United States, was filed in 2015 by 21 young plaintiffs who argue that the government’s support of fossil fuel development has exacerbated climate change and violated the public trust doctrine as well as their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property. The case has surprised scholars in how far it has advanced.
“The rights from the European Convention on Human Rights very much resonate in the constitutional rights that the federal court in Oregon has established,” Van Berkel said.
The Urgenda ruling came a day after the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a dire warning about the need to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels by 2030. That target was added to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement as a concession to island countries that will absorb the heaviest impacts of more intense hurricanes, sea level rise and other natural disasters. The agreement set 2 degrees Celsius as the primary goal.
Scientists for the IPCC report acknowledged that they had underestimated how the difference of 0.5C could unleash significantly more destruction to the wildlife and the environment and affect humans in the process as more droughts and floods lead to public health crisis and food shortage. The world has already warmed 1 degree C since pre-industrial times.
The IPCC report, coupled with the Urgenda ruling, will help to frame the U.N. negotiations on climate change in Poland this December, said Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington, D.C.
“You have a court decision immediately after the IPCC report that said relying on hypothetical technology is not a responsible answer to the crisis of climate change. That’s tremendously significant,” Muffett said.
Van Berkel said the new IPCC report underscored the urgency for the Dutch government to not only act but to cut emissions more than 25 percent, which is at the low end of the range to keep temperatures from rising 2C. The government had pledged to cut emissions by 30 percent but when it was slow to implement those policies, the Urgenda lawsuit was filed.
After losing the case in the lower court three years ago, the government announced it would start to implement policies to cut emissions by 25 percent, which the plaintiffs in the Urgenda case argued was the minimum that the government needed to undertake. But the plan it put in place, such as phasing out all coal power plants, was still more about hitting long-term goals beyond 2020, and the latest court ruling told the government it needs to hit the short-term goal, van Berkel said.
Despite promising it would lower emissions, the government said at the time it would  appeal because it disagreed with the court’s opinion that the government had a “duty of care” to protect the environment for its people. That phrase formed the heart of the decision that established a legal obligation to cut emissions. The government argued that the court shouldn’t interfere with its ability to set climate policies.
“For the Dutch government, the Urgenda procedure is not about climate policy. Instead it is about the basic question whether it is legitimate for an independent legal court to judge on government policy and in doing so, change that policy,” Paul van der Zanden, a spokesman for the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, wrote in an email after the appeals court ruling.
The government is considering whether to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Van der Zanden said regardless of the appeal, the government will work to meet the 25 percent reduction, which he said is “feasible” by 2020.
“The Dutch government is fully committed to execute this verdict,” he said.

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As The Fracking Protesters Show, A People’s Rebellion Is The Only Way To Fight Climate Breakdown

The Guardian - 

Our politicians, under the influence of big business, have failed us. As they take the planet to the brink, it’s time for disruptive, nonviolent disobedience
Illustration by Bill Bragg 
It is hard to believe today, but the prevailing ethos among the educated elite was once public service. As the historian Tony Judt documented in Ill Fares the Land, the foremost ambition among graduates in the 1950s and 60s was, through government or the liberal professions, to serve their country. Their approach might have been patrician and often blinkered, but their intentions were mostly public and civic, not private and pecuniary.
Today, the notion of public service seems as quaint as a local post office. We expect those who govern us to grab what they can, permitting predatory banks and corporations to fleece the public realm, then collect their reward in the form of lucrative directorships. As the Edelman Corporation’s Trust Barometer survey reveals, trust worldwide has collapsed in all major institutions, and government is less trusted than any other.
As for the economic elite, as the consequences of their own greed and self-interest emerge, they seek, like the Roman oligarchs fleeing the collapse of the western empire, only to secure their survival against the indignant mob. An essay by the visionary author Douglas Rushkoff this summer, documenting his discussion with some of the world’s richest people, reveals that their most pressing concern is to find a refuge from climate breakdown, and economic and societal collapse. Should they move to New Zealand or Alaska? How will they pay their security guards once money is worthless? Could they upload their minds on to supercomputers? Survival Condo, the company turning former missile silos in Kansas into fortified bunkers, has so far sold every completed unit.
Most governments, like the UK, Germany, the US and Australia, push us towards the brink on behalf of their friends
Trust, the Edelman Corporation observes, “is now the deciding factor in whether a society can function”. Unfortunately, our mistrust is fully justified. Those who have destroyed belief in governments exploit its collapse, railing against a liberal elite (by which they mean people still engaged in public service) while working for the real and illiberal elite. As the political economist William Davies points out, “sovereignty” is used as a code for rejecting the very notion of governing as “a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials”.
Nowhere is the gulf between public and private interests more obvious than in governments’ response to the climate crisis. On Monday, UK energy minister Claire Perry announced that she had asked her advisers to produce a roadmap to a zero-carbon economy. On the same day, fracking commenced at Preston New Road in Lancashire, enabled by the permission Perry sneaked through parliament on the last day before the summer recess.
The minister has justified fracking on the grounds that it helps the country affect a “transition to a lower-carbon economy”. But fracked gas has net emissions similar to, or worse than, those released by burning coal. As we are already emerging from the coal era in the UK without any help from fracking, this is in reality a transition away from renewables and back into fossil fuels. The government has promoted the transition by effectively banning onshore wind farms, while overriding local decisions to impose fracking by central diktat. Now, to prevent people from taking back control, it intends to grant blanket planning permission for frackers to operate.
None of it makes sense, until you remember the intimate relationship between the fossil fuel industry, the City (where Perry made her fortune) and the Tory party, oiled by the political donations flowing from both sectors into the party’s coffers. These people are not serving the nation. They are serving each other.
In Germany, the government that claimed to be undergoing a great green energy transition instead pours public money into the coal industry, and deploys an army of police to evict protesters from an ancient forest to clear it for a lignite mine. On behalf of both polluting power companies and the car industry, it has sabotaged the EU’s attempt to improve its carbon emissions target. Before she was re-elected, I argued that Angela Merkel was the world’s leading eco-vandal. She might also be the world’s most effective spin doctor: she can mislead, cheat and destroy, and people still call her Mutti.
Other governments shamelessly flaunt their service to private interests, as they evade censure by owning their corruption. A US government report on fuel efficiency published in July concedes, unusually, that global temperatures are likely to rise by 4C this century. It then uses this forecast to argue that there is no point in producing cleaner cars, because the disaster will happen anyway. Elsewhere, all talk of climate breakdown within government is censored. Any agency seeking to avert it is captured and redirected.
In Australia, the new prime minister, Scott Morrison, has turned coal burning into a sacred doctrine. I would not be surprised if the only lump of coal he has ever handled is the one he flourished in the Australian parliament. But he dirties his hands every day on behalf of the industry. These men with black hearts and clean fingernails wear their loyalties with pride.
If Jair Bolsonaro takes office in Brazil, their annihilistic actions will seem mild by comparison. He claims climate breakdown is a fable invented by a “globalist conspiracy”, and seeks to withdraw from the Paris agreement, abolish the environment ministry, put the congressional beef caucus (representing the murderous and destructive ranching industry) in charge of agriculture, open the Amazon Basin for clearance and dismantle almost all environmental and indigenous protections.
With the exception of Costa Rica, no government has the policies required to prevent more than 2C of global warming, let alone 1.5C. Most, like the UK, Germany, the US and Australia, push us towards the brink on behalf of their friends. So what do we do, when our own representatives have abandoned public service for private service?
On 31 October, I will speak at the launch of Extinction Rebellion in Parliament Square. This is a movement devoted to disruptive, nonviolent disobedience in protest against ecological collapse. The three heroes jailed for trying to stop fracking last month, whose outrageous sentences have just been overturned, are likely to be the first of hundreds. The intention is to turn this national rising into an international one.
This preparedness for sacrifice, a long history of political and religious revolt suggests, is essential to motivate and mobilise people to join an existential struggle. It is among such people that you find the public and civic sense now lacking in government. That we have to take such drastic action to defend the common realm shows how badly we have been abandoned.

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