07/12/2018

France’s Protesters Are Part Of A Global Backlash Against Climate-Change Taxes

Washington Post - Steven Mufson | James McAuley


French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said Dec. 4 that fuel tax hikes would be suspended in response to nationwide anger that he said has “deep roots.” (Reuters)

The single most effective weapon in the fight against climate change is the tax code — imposing costs on those who emit greenhouse gases, economists say. But as French President Emmanuel Macron learned over the past three weeks, implementing such taxes can be politically explosive.
On Tuesday, France delayed for six months a plan to raise already steep taxes on diesel fuel by 24 cents a gallon and gasoline by about 12 cents a gallon. Macron argued that the taxes were needed to curb climate change by weaning motorists off petroleum products, but violent demonstrations in the streets of Paris and other French cities forced him to backtrack — at least for now.
“No tax is worth putting in danger the unity of the nation,” said Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who was trotted out to announce the concession.
It was a setback for the French president, who has been trying to carry the torch of climate action in the wake of the Paris accords of December 2015. “When we talk about the actions of the nation in response to the challenges of climate change, we have to say that we have done little,” he said last week.
Macron is hardly alone in his frustration. Leaders in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere have found their carbon pricing efforts running into fierce opposition. But the French reversal was particularly disheartening for climate-policy experts, because it came just as delegates from around the world were gathering in Katowice, Poland, for a major conference designed to advance climate measures.
“Like everywhere else, the question in France is how to find a way of combining ecology and equality,” said Bruno Cautrès, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. “Citizens mostly see punitive public policies when it comes to the environment: taxes, more taxes and more taxes after that. No one has the solution, and we can only see the disaster that’s just occurred in France on this question.”
Yellow-vested demonstrators block a fuel depot Tuesday in Le Mans, France. (David Vincent/AP)
“Higher taxes on energy have always been a hard sell, politically,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University and advocate of carbon taxes. “The members of the American Economic Association are convinced of their virtue. But the median citizen is not.”
In the United States — where energy-related taxes are among the lowest in the developed world — politicians, their constituents and their donors have repeatedly made that clear.
President Bill Clinton proposed a tax on the heat content of fuels as part of his first budget in 1993. Known as the BTU tax, for British thermal unit, it would have raised $70 billion over five years while increasing gasoline prices no more than 7.5 cents a gallon.
But Clinton was forced to retreat in the face of a rebellion in his own party. “I’m not going to vote for a BTU tax in committee or on the floor, ever, anywhere. Period. Exclamation point,” said then-Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.).
The state of Washington has also tried — and failed twice — to win support for a carbon tax or carbon “fee.” In 2016, the state’s voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have balanced a carbon tax with other tax cuts. In 2018, a wider coalition sought backing for an initiative that would have poured fee revenue into clean energy projects, job retraining and early retirement plans for affected workers. The fee would have started at $15 a ton and gone up $2 a ton for 10 years. It, too, failed.
A worker removes graffiti reading "Macron resignation" from the Arc de Triomphe following protests in Paris. (Thibault Camus/AP)
To be sure, some climate-conscious countries have adopted carbon taxes, including Chile, Spain, Ukraine, Ireland and nations in Scandinavia. Others have adopted cap-and-trade programs that effectively put prices on carbon emissions.
Only around 12 percent of global emissions are covered by pricing programs such as taxes on the carbon content of fossil fuels or permit trading programs that put a price on emissions, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Policy experts say that to some extent the prospects of carbon taxes may depend on what happens to the money raised.
Using the revenue for deficit reduction, as was planned in France, is a no-no.
“Even in the best of times, carbon taxes must be carefully crafted to avoid political pitfalls,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Senate Finance Committee staffer and Clinton White House climate adviser. “In particular, much of the revenue raised must be recycled back to middle-income workers. Macron’s approach put the money toward deficit reduction, stoking already simmering class grievances.”
Last year, a group of economists and policy experts — including former treasury secretaries James A. Baker III and Lawrence H. Summers and former secretary of state George P. Shultz — advocated a tax-and-dividend approach. It would feature a carbon tax of $40 a ton, affecting coal, oil and natural gas. The revenue would be used to pay dividends to households. Progressive tax rates would mean more money for lower- and middle-income earners.
“Because the revenue is rebated equally to everyone, most people will get more back than they pay in carbon taxes,” said Mankiw, who is part of the group. “So if people understood the plan, and believed it would be carried out as written, it should be politically popular.”
So far the group, called the Climate Leadership Council, has not been able to generate much support from members of Congress.
But Canada is about to offer a test case.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has unveiled a “backstop” carbon tax of $20 a ton, to take effect in January, for the four Canadian provinces that do not already have one.
Trudeau was elected partly on a promise of this sort of measure, but it’s costing him more political capital than expected. Conservative premiers oppose the plan, which looks set to become an election issue.
Trudeau’s policy, however, is designed to withstand criticism. About 90 percent of the revenue from the backstop tax will be paid back to Canadians in the form of annual “climate action incentive” payments. Because of the progressive tax rates, about 70 percent of Canadians will get back more than they paid. If they choose to be more energy efficient, they could save even more money.
The first checks will arrive shortly before Canadian elections.
Climate policy doesn’t only suffer from lack of enthusiasm. It also arouses the ire of right-wing populist movements.
Many of the people most angry at Macron’s tax come from right-wing rural areas. The German right-wing opposition party Alternative for Germany has called climate change a hoax. And in Brazil, a new populist president had indicated he will develop, not preserve, the Amazon forests that pull CO2 out of the air and pump out oxygen.
President Trump, who has said he does not believe climate science, also took to Twitter to say Macron’s setback showed Trump was right to spurn the Paris climate agreement.
“I am glad that my friend @EmmanuelMacron and the protestors in Paris have agreed with the conclusion I reached two years ago. The Paris Agreement is fatally flawed because it raises the price of energy for responsible countries while whitewashing some of the worst polluters in the world,” he wrote. “American taxpayers — and American workers — shouldn’t pay to clean up others countries’ pollution.”
Fuel taxes, however, generate revenue that stays inside home countries without going to pay for others’ pollution. And the Paris agreement placed much greater responsibilities on developing countries than ever before.
A member of Trump’s beachhead transition team at the Energy Department also took to Twitter to celebrate the collapse of Macron’s fuel tax plan.
“It’s easy for politicians like #Macron to lecture us about #ClimateChange because the elites don’t notice the economic hit. Working class people do. Working class French people are ANGRY about unnecessarily higher fuel taxes that are only a #virtuesignal,” wrote Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research — a group funded in the past by Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute and Exxon Mobil.
Jason Bordoff, director of the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, said the celebration “would be reading too much into what’s happening in France.” That’s because Macron was already seen as favoring the rich over the working class, he said.
Nicolas Hulot, a popular climate change activist and Macron’s former environment minister, made national headlines in August when he resigned from Macron’s cabinet during a live radio broadcast. His reason: that the French government was more word than deed when it came to fighting climate change.
On the heels of the French government’s abrupt reversal on fuel taxes Tuesday, Hulot praised what he couched as a necessary political maneuver, albeit one that was not good for the environment.
“I welcome a necessary, inescapable, courageous and common sense decision in the current context, which saddens everyone,” he said, speaking on France’s RTL radio. But, he added, there would probably be consequences from the popular uprisings against the diesel taxes, which the government has now suspended for six months.
“All that is not good news for the climate,” he said.
The key, said Hulot, is not to impose action on climate change in a technocratic way, in a way that ordinary people do not understand. “The ecological challenge shouldn’t be against the French,” he said. “We need every Frenchwoman and Frenchman. On that, there is obviously a huge amount of misperceptions and misunderstandings.”
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The Guardian View On Climate Change: Too Much, Too Soon

The Guardian - Editorial

We are losing the war against climate change; the use of fossil fuels is driving higher carbon emissions when they need to be coming down
Steam and smoke rise from the coal-fired Belchatow power station in Poland.
Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Outside of the desperate and the deluded, everyone knows that the world is in the early stages of a truly catastrophic climate change. As Sir David Attenborough told the UN climate change conference in Poland, “the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”. We have even worked out, with scrupulous care, what we must do to avoid this or to mitigate the effects of climate change. We know what to do. We can see how to do it. There’s only one problem: we do almost nothing.
Figures released today by the University of East Anglia for the conference in Katowice show that global carbon emissions will be higher than ever before this year. In fact they will rise by nearly 3%, an astonishing and terrifying annual figure at a time when the need to diminish them has never been more urgent. The main driver of this growth has been the increased use of coal, which is rapidly approaching its previous peak level, from 2013. There is a particular irony in that this conference is being held in Poland, a country that still derives 80% of its electricity from coal, even if this is less grossly polluting than it was in the Communist era. In fact emissions there are down 30% from their peak in 1988. But far more must be done. To limit global warming to the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, CO2 emissions would need to decline by 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by around 2050.
All this destructive activity far outweighs the progress that has been made on the use of renewable resources. That is considerable, but so long as renewables are understood only as a pastime for the rich, they will be wholly insufficient to meet the problems before us. The Paris goal often looks like a drunkard’s resolution that everything will be different as soon as tomorrow comes. Everything has stayed much the same, and the balance of expert opinion is that three degrees is now more likely than the target figure of half that.
It’s not just coal. China is now the biggest emitter of carbon, followed by the US and the EU as a whole, then India, Russia, and Japan. Oil use continues to grow. The worldwide demand for energy is outpacing efforts to deal its climate-altering side effects. In a characteristically greedy and destructive way, the Trump administration proposes to destroy one of the last great Arctic wildlife reserves in order to drill for oil there. The great oil-producing nations of Saudi Arabia and Iran both figure among the top 10 carbon-emitting countries despite having hardly any other components to their economies. Add to this the effects of deforestation in the Amazon, which will accelerate under the Bolsonaro government, and the future looks unimaginably grim. Climate change will exacerbate, as it already does, the world’s existing political and economic divisions.
The most worrying feature of the latest UN report is the suggestion that the relatively good performance of the years 2014-16 in reducing carbon emissions was the result of an economic slowdown. The political consequences of the resulting discontent are with us still. They produced Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro and gravely weakened the EU. All those factors make a sane policy on climate change less likely. The purely physical feedback loops that drive climate change, such as the reduction of reflective ice surface, are now well enough understood. But it may be that the long-term message of the years since the Paris summit is that this understanding is not enough. We must also learn somehow to disrupt the political and economic feedback loops which are driving our civilisation to the brink of catastrophe.

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Save Millions Of Lives By Tackling Climate Change, Says WHO

The Guardian - 

Global warming and fossil fuel pollution already killing many, UN climate summit told
Hanhan, three, receives nebuliser therapy after a Beijing red alert for air pollution in 2015.

Photograph: Jason Lee/Reuters
Tackling climate change would save at least a million lives a year, the World Health Organization has told the UN climate summit in Poland, making it a moral imperative.
Cutting fossil fuel burning not only slows global warming but slashes air pollution, which causes millions of early deaths a year, the WHO says. In a report requested by UN climate summit leaders, the WHO says the economic benefits of improved health are more than double the costs of cutting emissions, and even higher in India and China, which are plagued by toxic air.
“The global public health community is getting very impatient,” said María Neira, WHO director of public and environmental health. “If you don’t think you need to take action for the sake of climate change, make sure when you think about the planet you incorporate a couple of lungs, a brain and a heart. It is not just about saving the planet in the future, it is about protecting the health of the people right now.”
The damage caused by coal, oil and gas pollution is “outrageous”, she said. “There are words not included in the documents at [the climate summit]: asthma, lung cancer, stroke, heart disease – they need to be incorporated in all the decision-making processes.”
“Morally, delaying the [clean energy] transition is being responsible for millions of deaths every year,” Neira said. “[Leaders] need to ask themselves how many deaths are [they] willing to accept. When health is taken into account, climate action is an opportunity, not a cost.”
Air pollution is the best known impact of fossil fuel use, and climate change damages health through heatwaves, storms, floods and droughts, increased spread of infectious disease and the destruction of health facilities. Global warming is also damaging crops and reducing their nutritional value, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization now reporting a rise in the number of hungry people going up after decades of decline.
“We now have scientific evidence that people are suffering and dying from climate change,” said Prof Kristie Ebi, at the University of Washington and lead author on the recent intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) report, that warned that the global temperature rise must be kept to 1.5C to protect hundreds of millions of people from harm. Another major recent report concluded that climate change is already a health emergency.
Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, at the World Health Organization and also an IPCC report author, said doctors needed to press hard for climate action: “The health profession is the single most trusted profession in the world.” Just 0.5% of multilateral climate finance is currently going to healthcare, he said. Organizations representing more than five million doctors, nurses and public health professionals from 120 countries have issued a call to action to the climate summit in Poland.
Tirig and her sister Saua in Somalia. Their family was forced to leave their home in search of water and food.
Photograph: Kate Holt/UNICEF
“We should no longer be talking about the cost of [cutting emissions], we should talk about the benefits to people’s health of investing in what needs to be done,” Campbell-Lendrum said.
“At the moment we pretend that polluting [fossil] fuels are cheap fuels, only because we don’t include the cost of them to our health and economy.” The IMF estimates these subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to be $5tn a year, more than all governments currently spend on healthcare.
Almost 200 nations are meeting in Katowice, Poland, for two weeks, aiming to turn the carbon-cutting vision set in Paris in 2015 into a reality, as well as increasing the ambition and speed of action and the funding needed. Current pledges leaving the world on track for a disastrous 3C of warming.

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06/12/2018

Climate Denial Was The Crucible For Trumpism

New York Times - Paul Krugman

It’s where the conspiracy theorizing and menacing of critics began.

Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump during a briefing about Hurricane Florence in the Oval Office on Sept. 11, 2018. Credit Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Many observers seem baffled by Republican fealty to Donald Trump — the party’s willingness to back him on all fronts, even after severe defeats in the midterm elections. What kind of party would show such support for a leader who is not only evidently corrupt and seemingly in the pocket of foreign dictators, but also routinely denies facts and tries to criminalize anyone who points them out?
The answer is, the kind of the party that, long before Trump came on the scene, committed itself to denying the facts on climate change and criminalizing the scientists reporting those facts.
The G.O.P. wasn’t always an anti-environment, anti-science party. George H.W. Bush introduced the cap-and-trade program that largely controlled the problem of acid rain. As late as 2008, John McCain called for a similar program to limit emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.
Trump fits right in with this mind-set. In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.
Take Trump’s dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling the evidence for global warming — evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists — a “gigantic hoax” 15 years ago.
What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails. The credulousness of all too many journalists about the supposed misconduct revealed by “Climategate,” a pseudo-scandal that relied on selective, out-of-context quotes from emails at a British university, prefigured the disastrous media handling of hacked Democratic emails in 2016. (All we learned from those emails was that scientists are people — occasionally snappish, and given to talking in professional shorthand that hostile outsiders can willfully misinterpret.)
Oh, and what is supposed to be motivating the thousands of scientists perpetrating this hoax? We’ve become accustomed to the spectacle of Donald Trump, the most corrupt president in history leading the most corrupt administration of modern times, routinely calling his opponents and critics “crooked.” Much the same thing happens in climate debate.
The truth is that most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-fuel companies. But after the release of the recent National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.” Projection much?
Finally, Trump has brought a new level of menace to American politics, inciting his followers to violence against critics and trying to order the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey.
But climate scientists have faced harassment and threats, up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work. Most famously, Michael E. Mann, creator of the famous “hockey stick” graph, was for years the target of an anti-climate science jihad by Ken Cuccinelli, at the time Virginia’s attorney general.
And on it goes. Recently a judge in Arizona, responding to a suit from a group linked to the Koch brothers (and obviously not understanding how research works), ordered the release of all emails from climate scientists at the University of Arizona. To forestall the inevitable selective misrepresentation, Mann has released all the emails he exchanged with his Arizona colleagues, with explanatory context.
There are three important morals to this story.
First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.
Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party, which has burrowed ever deeper into climate denial even as the damage from a warming planet becomes more and more obvious.
Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics. And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.

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The Energy 202: Trump Officials Mount Full-Court Press Against Their Own Climate Report

Washington Post - Dino Grandoni

President Trump speaks during an interview with Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey in the Oval Office on Tuesday. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The White House press secretary said it was "not based on facts."
The secretary of the interior said it focused only on the "worst scenarios."
And President Trump said that when it comes to the devastating effects of climate change described in it, "a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we're not necessarily such believers."
The publication Friday of a major climate report written by 13 federal agencies has prompted a series of high-level Trump administration officials, including the president himself, to mount a full-court press questioning its findings.
The fourth National Climate Assessment says the effects of rising temperatures, including more heat waves, coastal floods and forest fires, could collectively strip the United States of one-tenth of its gross domestic product by the end of the century.  Already, the authors argue global warming “is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us.”
The conclusions of the congressionally mandated report run counter to much of the rhetoric that has come from Trump's political appointees, who have tried to ramp up extraction of fossil fuels nationwide while often downplaying, or sometimes outright dismissing, their contributions to global warming.
Trump officials chose to publish the climate assessment on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when many Americans are busy shopping or spending time with family instead of reading the news.
But instead of being buried on Black Friday, the report has stayed in the headlines into the middle of this week. That's partially because its findings were particularly dire. But it's also because Trump officials chose to play them down.
Trump officials claimed the climate report focused on only worst-case scenarios, even as scientists who wrote the document said that is not true.
Appearing on an NBC affiliate in Sacramento while touring fire damage in California, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke did acknowledge "the temperatures have risen" and the fire season "has gotten longer."
But he added: “It appears they took the worst scenarios and they built predictions on that. It should be more probability, but we’re looking at it.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the chief spokeswoman for the White House, expanded on that point during a press conference Tuesday.
"You have to look at the fact that this report is based on the most extreme model scenario, which contradicts long-established trends," she said. "Modeling the climate is extremely complicated science that is never exact."
Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Texas Tech University Climate Science Center and one of the more than 300 co-authors of the climate assessment, responded to Sanders on Twitter by saying "we considered many scenarios." The report indeed considered several scenarios, including the worst-case ones.


White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attacked the Trump administration's own climate report, calling it "extreme" and "not based on facts." (Reuters)

And the most robust dismissal of his own government's report came from the president himself.
During an interview Tuesday with The Post's Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey, Trump said he does not count himself among the “believers” who see the problem of climate change as dire and caused by humans.
“As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it,” he said.
Instead of addressing the root cause of recent rising temperatures — the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activity — Trump riffed on a number of other environmental problems, including the accumulation of trash in the oceans and smog-forming pollution in the air around the world.
“You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia , including many other places, the air is incredibly dirty, and when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small,” Trump said. “And it blows over and it sails over. I mean we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific. It flows and we say, ‘Where does this come from?’ And it takes many people, to start off with.”
Trump's response left some climate scientists baffled. “How can one possibly respond to this?" Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told The Post.
The response to the report from Republicans outside of the executive branch was not universally dismissive. On Twitter, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called the climate report "a glaring reminder of the long-term risks of climate change" while Sen. Susan Collins of Maine urged the Trump administration "to take a harder look at the consequences of inaction." Both senators are up for reelection in swing states in 2020.

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As A Warming World Wreaks Havoc, Trump Wages War On Climate Science

The Guardian - 

The US administration’s politicization of science has led to big budget cuts for data and analysis. Others must fill the gap
This global heat map from July 2018 shows how temperatures are soaring across the planet. Photograph: Climate Reanalyzer/Climate Change Institute/University of Maine
The evidence of climate change is all around us, from melting Alaskan permafrost to wildfires in Sweden, from the brutal European heatwave to the devastating 2017 and 2018 hurricane seasons, which have claimed thousands of lives and caused billions of dollars in damage in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and North Carolina. In recent weeks, the worst wildfires in California history have wiped entire towns off the map and killed scores of people. The recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning of mass wildfires, superstorms, food shortages and dying coral reefs by 2040 was a cry for immediate action.
But as climate change is happening in real time, the practice of climate science –collecting data, observing and analyzing the Earth’s systems and communicating those findings to decision-makers and the public – has never been at greater risk. That’s why I am in Brussels this week speaking to European Union parliamentarians on the unprecedented threats facing the global understanding of climate change as a result of the Trump administration’s hostility to climate science, and discussing what European countries can and should do in response.
Even though the need for high-quality reliable scientific data on the causes and effects of climate change has never been higher, the politicization of climate science in the United States has reached regrettable new lows. The Trump administration has twice now issued budget proposals that sought to dramatically reduce funding for or outright eliminate the collection and analysis of data about Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and geological, biological and energy systems. All told, across all 13 US federal agencies that play a role in federal climate and energy data and science programs, the Trump administration’s budgets would have yielded cuts of 13.2 to 16.8%, according to an analysis released in June by the Center for American Progress.
The Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts – and their other efforts to interfere with the practice of science – matter because the United States has long been the world’s pre-eminent source for climate and energy data and analysis. The US government’s role in making this data publicly available at no cost further enables users around the globe to advance their own understanding of climate change, which is critical to reducing risk and saving lives. In every aspect of research and analysis of the Earth and its climate, immense, detailed data sets undergird the decisions of leaders in government, the military and business, and the actions of farmers, ranchers, engineers and planners around the world.
So far, Congress has responded to the Trump administration’s provocative budget requests by acting on a bipartisan basis to restore and even increase funding for many vital climate science programs. But the care that appropriators have shown for science, and particularly for climate and energy data and research, can only go so far. Political appointees in the Trump administration retain a great degree of discretion which they can exercise over how these appropriated funds are actually spent.
For example, Nasa’s Carbon Monitoring System, which enabled observation and analysis of global carbon sinks and sources, saw its $10m budget eliminated because a single line item fell through the cracks in the appropriations process and administration officials seized the opportunity to cut the program.
Outside advisory boards of experts who helped translate federal climate science into usable information for state and local policymakers and businesses have seen those longstanding councils disbanded with little notice.
It's little wonder that the US government’s leading career atmospheric and oceanic scientists are leaving in frustration
Of highest consequence to the international scientific community, the Trump administration has dramatically cut or altogether ceased funding to the IPCC, the World Meteorological Organization’s Global Climate Observation System (GCOS), and other United Nations climate research bodies.
These and other budget cuts and policy changes are taking place against a backdrop of troubling stories of scientists being sidelined within their agencies, prohibited from traveling or presenting their findings, or seeing the public-facing resources they helped write erased from government websites. It’s little wonder that the US government’s leading career atmospheric and oceanic scientists, with decades of experience, are leaving in frustration with an administration that ignores their work.
Scientists and policymakers in Europe and the United States alike need to stay alert to signs of political interference in climate and energy data collection that will limit our capacity to understand and respond to the warming planet, whether that interference occurs in the United States or elsewhere. If the Trump administration fails to fund the satellites, climate models, Arctic flights and other scientific investments needed to produce and interpret vital climate and energy data, other champions, including European agencies and governments, will need to step up to fill in any data, monitoring and research gaps that could set back our understanding of climate change and its impacts.

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05/12/2018

Big Coal And Friends On Track To Shut Down Your Climate Activism

New Matilda - 

A major case in a Queensland court could have profound implications for climate activists around the country. Julie Macken explains.
IMAGE: Hugh Llewelyn, Flickr
The term, “climate crisis” is now the most commonly used descriptor when discussing global warming. Extreme weather events, firestorms, heat waves, flooding rain, loss of ice, snow and species are rightly seen within the frame of an emergent climate crisis. But if we are really witnessing a climate crisis – one with the potential to destroy our way of life and end our lives – how should we respond as a community?
This is a question being tested in Australia’s classrooms and Parliament right now and later today, in fact. The Queensland Supreme Court will be asked to decide whether, despite this crisis, it is reasonable for a large corporation to dictate how the community should be allowed to use social media to try and prevent this crisis.
The background to the case is this. Aurizon, the rail freight company formerly owned by the Government of Queensland, has been targeted by a number of individuals and communities because it plays a key role in the coal industry managing the 2,670 km Central Queensland coal network. It is also critical to Indian mining company Adani’s plans to ship coal from the proposed Carmichael mine to Abbott Point, as Adani plans to build a 200km line that will connect to Aurizon’s existing Goonyella and Newlands rail network.
Without Aurizon there is no Adani mine.
One of those groups protesting the proposed Adani mine, and Aurizon’s involvement in the expansion of the coal industry, is a small community group called FLAC – Front Line Action on Coal. Unlike the large environmental NGO’s, FLAC is still committed to supporting people who take direct action to prevent the expansion of the coal industry and they have had some serious successes of late.
So much so that Aurizon has taken the extraordinary action of getting interim orders against FLAC. Those orders include prohibiting FLAC from inciting anyone by Facebook, website, and Twitter to enter rail corridors across Aurizon’s network or interfering with any of the company’s coal trains.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk shakes hands with Gautam Adani, Port of Townsville, 6 December 2016. IMAGE: AAP
On Tuesday the Supreme Court will be asked to make these interim orders permanent thus preventing FLAC from using social media to inform people and to be prohibited from going within 20 meters of the entire Queensland rail corridor. That’s a lot of rail corridor.
But there are concerns Aurizon will want more than just clear corridors. For many in the climate movement FLAC has become a touchstone as a moral force and an inclusive community that takes seriously the discipline and commitment to non-violent, safe, direct action. And this is what Aurizon is keen to shut down.
The company wants to prevent this small community group from encouraging, supporting or training anyone to take non-violent action to prevent this crisis. The less there are of these kinds of communities the better things are for large corporations like Aurizon.
These are extraordinary days climatically and politically. On Friday there was the sight of thousands of Australian school kids leaving their classrooms to demand governments – State and Federal – take the action necessary to secure their future. It was an action that happened with blessing of the Australian Senate.
Frontline Action on Coal protestors have been blocking coal trains in Queensland using tripods.
Globally the divestment campaign has seen billions divested from companies involved in the fossil fuel business. While banks with a high exposure to fossil fuel companies have been forced to either rule out further investment or explain their plan to manage the escalating risk posed by stranded assets.
Then there’s the science. According to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report the world is confronting the real risk of mass wildfires, food and water shortages, super storms and dying coral reefs by as soon as 2040. The last week alone in Australia has seen Sydney experience a one in 100-year rain event, while Queensland continued to burn.
These are extraordinary times and the science tells us they will get even more extreme as the global political leadership fails to materialise to prevent it. It is in this context that Aurizon’s request to the Supreme Court to gag FLAC must be viewed.
The Supreme Court must decide if Aurizon, an enormously powerful and well connected corporation, should have the power to deny a small community group the right to inform Australians how to help to prevent this climate crisis.
Obviously the people who make up FLAC have a direct interest in the outcome, but should this corporation succeed in gagging free speech to this degree, we will all be the worse for it.
Finally, Aurizon’s action is based on the assumption that if FLAC stops training concerned citizens on how to take non-violent, safe, direct action, people will stop taking action. Unfortunately what may well happen is that people continue to act to prevent a climate catastrophe, but do so without the training, discipline or principles of non-violence.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative