07/05/2019

Biodiversity Crisis Is About To Put Humanity At Risk, UN Scientists To Warn

The Guardian - 

‘We are in trouble if we don’t act,’ say experts, with up to 1m species at risk of annihilation

Students protest in Adelaide. UN experts warned people alive today are at risk unless urgent action is taken. Photograph: Kelly Barnes/EPA 
The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken.
Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN’s leading research body on nature.
The 1,800-page study will show people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate.
The final wording of the summary for policymakers is being finalised in Paris by a gathering of experts and government representatives before the launch on Monday, but the overall message is already clear, according to Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
“There is no question we are losing biodiversity at a truly unsustainable rate that will affect human wellbeing both for current and future generations,” he said. “We are in trouble if we don’t act, but there are a range of actions that can be taken to protect nature and meet human goals for health and development.”
The authors hope the first global assessment of biodiversity in almost 15 years will push the nature crisis into the global spotlight in the same way climate breakdown has surged up the political agenda since the 1.5C report last year by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Like its predecessor, the report is a compilation of reams of academic studies, in this case on subjects ranging from ocean plankton and subterranean bacteria to honey bees and Amazonian botany. Following previous findings on the decimation of wildlife, the overview of the state of the world’s nature is expected to provide evidence that the world is facing a sixth wave of extinction. Unlike the past five, this one is human-driven.
Mike Barrett, WWF’s executive director of conservation and science, said: “All of our ecosystems are in trouble. This is the most comprehensive report on the state of the environment. It irrefutably confirms that nature is in steep decline.”
Barrett said this posed an environmental emergency for humanity, which is threatened by a triple challenge of climate, nature and food production. “There is no time to despair,” he said. “We should be hopeful that we have a window of opportunity to do something about it over these two years.”
The report will sketch out possible future scenarios that will vary depending on the decisions taken by governments, businesses and individuals. The next year and a half is likely to be crucial because world leaders will agree rescue plans for nature and the climate at two big conferences at the end of 2020.
That is when China will host the UN framework convention on biodiversity gathering in Kunming, which will establish new 20-year targets to replace those agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. Soon after, the UN framework convention on climate change will revise Paris agreement commitments at a meeting in either the UK, Italy, Belgium or Turkey.
Watson, a British professor who has headed both of the UN’s leading scientific panels, said the forthcoming report will delve more deeply than anything before into the causes of nature collapse, chief among which is the conversion of forests, wetlands and other wild landscapes into ploughed fields, dam reservoirs and concrete cities. Three-quarters of the world’s land surface has been severely altered, according to the leaked draft. Humanity is also decimating the living systems on which we depend by emitting carbon dioxide and spreading invasive species.
Watson said the authors have learned from attribution science, which has transformed the debate on the climate crisis by showing how much more likely hurricanes, droughts and floods have become as a result of global heating.
The goal is to persuade an audience beyond the usual green NGOs and government departments. “We need to appeal not just to environment ministers, but to those in charge of agriculture, transport and energy because they are the ones responsible for the drivers of biodiversity loss,” he said.
A focus will be to move away from protection of individual species and areas, and to look at systemic drivers of change, including consumption and trade.
The political environment is changing in some countries due to overwhelming scientific evidence and increasing public concern about the twin crises of nature and climate, which have prompted more than 1 million students to strike from school and led to street protests by Extinction Rebellion activists in more than a dozen countries.
The UK parliament declared a climate emergency this week and the government’s chief climate advisory body recommended an accelerated plan to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050. Until now, however, the nature crisis has been treated as far less of a priority. “Where are the headlines? Where are the emergency meetings?” asked the school strike founder, Greta Thunberg, in a recent tweet on the subject.
Extinction Rebellion activists said protests that blocked several London streets last month were as much aimed at the defence of nature as stabilising the climate. “They are two sides of the same destructive coin,” said Farhana Yamin, a coordinator of the movement who is also an environmental lawyer and formerly a lead author of the IPCC report.
“The work of IPBES is as crucial as the work done by the IPCC on the 1.5-degree report. That is why Extinction Rebellion is demanding an end [to] biodiversity loss and a net-zero phaseout by 2025. We can’t save humanity by only tackling climate change or only caring about biodiversity.”

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'Very Close': Cost Of Some Electric Cars To Match Petrol Ones By 2020

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The total cost of owning an electric vehicle will match some equivalent petrol or diesel-powered cars as soon as next year, according to analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The analysis, released on Tuesday, found electric cars "should start to achieve total cost of ownership parity with equivalent internal-combustion [cars] as early as 2020 in Australia for some segments of the market".
The cost of owning an electric car will match some petrol and diesel models by next year. Credit: Bloomberg
Ali Asghar, a Bloomberg NEF analyst, said average mid-sized battery electric ones would match the cost of a higher-end BMW-3 series vehicle by next year. For models such as Toyota's Camry or the Honda Accord, the parity point in ownership costs including purchase price was three to five years off.
"The crossover point is coming very close," Mr Asghar said, as tumbling battery costs allow manufacturers to drive prices lower.
The ownership costs were based on assumptions such as fuel costs of $1.30 per litre, rising 0.8 per cent annually after inflation, and an electricity price of 25 cents per kilowatt-hour. "If people generate electricity from their own solar panels, they can essentially cap the charging cost," he said.
EVs have been a point of difference between the Coalition and Labor during the election campaign after Opposition Leader Bill Shorten set a goal of half of new cars sales being electric by 2030 and proposing tougher average emissions standards for petrol and diesel models.
The Coalition labelled the plans a "carbon tax" for cars and Mr Morrison stated during Monday's debate in Perth that a new EV would cost $28,000 more "than a standard car".
Just 2176 plug-in electric cars were sold in Australia in 2018 - or about one in 500 new sales - in part because of the higher upfront costs and lack of models.
Bloomberg NEF, though, predicts 53 EV models will enter the Australian market by 2023 when sales will have climbed to 40,000, or about 3 per cent without any government policy to propel a take-up.
While politicians have focused on consumers, the spur for EV purchases may well come from the business sector, with fleet purchases accounting for about a fifth of all vehicle sales.
AGL Energy and Eclipx have set electric vehicle targets, and with a fleet cycle of two to four years, such purchases can increase demand, Mr Asghar said.
Hurdles for EVs, though, include the lack of recharging points, particularly in remote regions.
Home-based charging could also be challenging for the one in six households living in flats or semi-detached units that do not have access to dedicated charging points, Bloomberg NEF said.
The country's poor emissions standards are another barrier, with average carbon-dioxide emissions for passenger cars at 171.5 grams per kilometre in 2017, or 13 per cent higher than the 2016 average in the US.
"While emissions intensity of new Australian cars fell over the last decade, it is still higher than countries such as Saudi Arabia where historically low petrol prices provided little incentive to improve vehicle efficiencies," Bloomberg said.

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Our Carbon Budget Is All But Spent, But Who In Canberra Is Counting?

Fairfax - Penny Sackett* | Will Steffen*

According to the ABC’s Vote Compass, a majority of voters has put the environment ahead of the economy as the top election issue. Yet the budget we haven’t heard about in this so-called "climate election" is the carbon budget. That’s the budget set by the laws of physics and chemistry to hold global warming to the safer side of 2 degrees.
A polar bear climbs out of the water in the Franklin Strait in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The Arctic is suffering dramatic loss of sea ice. Credit: AP
Barring some speculative technology deployed in the next decade on massive, unprecedented scales that pulls down more carbon from the atmosphere than we are putting up, the emissions budget that humans must not exceed is 1000 billion tonnes of carbon – give or take. That’s the total carbon budget – from the beginning of the industrial revolution – to keep global warming strictly below 2 degrees with at least a 2/3 chance.
But the amount we have left to “spend” is much less, for three reasons. First, humans have already emitted 585 billion tonnes of carbon over the course of history until the end of last year. That must be subtracted to see what’s left.
Second, other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, also cause warming, so we need to account for their effects. That’s another 210 billion tonnes of carbon we can’t spend.
Finally, the budget must be reduced by 110 billion tonnes more, because warming increases the release of land carbon to the atmosphere, specifically through wildfires and the melting of permafrost, effects that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have not taken into account.
fter doing the sums, only 95 billion of the original 1000 billion tonnes is left to spend on carbon dioxide emissions. With 10 billion tonnes of carbon emitted every year, without immediate action, humanity will burn through the remaining budget in just 10 years. At that point, the chances of holding warming to 2 degrees will drop below 2/3, and we might as well flip a coin to know whether the climate will exceed boundaries maintained for more than a million years.
To put that in an Australian context, we can divide that remaining 95 billion-tonne budget evenly across the world’s population. With 0.33% of the world’s population, Australia’s “fair share” of the remaining budget is 310 million (million, not billion) tonnes of carbon to “spend” on carbon dioxide emissions, which come primarily from burning fossil fuels.
Sound like a goodly amount? Well, using recent numbers from the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, Australia would use up that “fair share” in just three years.
Three years. Now there’s something that fits into an electoral cycle. And that’s not even counting the carbon dioxide that results from exported Australian coal burnt overseas.
We are accelerating toward disaster. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to increase year after year. In fact, the rate at which it is increasing is itself increasing.
Renewable energy technologies, electric cars, improved land use, and managing waste are all important pieces of a transition to a healthy, prosperous Australia living within a carbon budget. But from a scientific point of view, the single most critical climate issue in this election is the elephant in the room.
You know the one, that rogue elephant that is trying desperately to remain invisible and not leave footprints on policy papers: the continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction in Australia.
Fossil fuel reserves already being exploited contain more than enough carbon to consume the remaining carbon budget for the 2 degrees Paris target. Simply put, it is senseless, dangerous and irresponsible to expand fossil fuel facilities in Australia (or anywhere else).
We are in the midst of a climate emergency that is disproportionately affecting the young, the poor, and the vulnerable. In emergencies, good leaders take considered, immediate and extraordinary action to combat the biggest source of threat. Australia needs leaders who acknowledge and commit to combating this climate elephant in the party room. Will they step forward before May 18?

*Penny Sackett, former Chief Scientist for Australia, is a physicist and honorary professor at the Climate Change Institute, Australian National University.
*Will Steffen is an emeritus professor at ANU and a councillor at the Climate Council. 

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06/05/2019

I'm Willing To Go To Jail To Stop Adani And Save Our Beloved Country. Will You Stand With Me?

The Guardian - 

In this anti-Adani rally speech, novelist Richard Flanagan says the fight against the Carmichael coalmine defines the fight against the climate crisis
 Protestors dressed as Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten at the anti-Adani rally outside Parliament House in Canberra on Sunday. ‘It matters very much who you vote for this election,’ writes Richard Flanagan. Photograph: Rohan Thomson/AAP
I grew up in a remote mining town. I know the hardship. I saw the tragedy. One of my earliest memories is a whole town stopped for a miner’s funeral, family after family lining the main street, one people joined in grief.
And when politicians talk of caring about miners I don’t believe a word they say.
If they cared wouldn’t they be advocating to end black lung disease, a 19th century industrial disease now returned, because of unsafe working conditions, to kill Australian coalminers in the 21st century?
If they cared wouldn’t they be speaking out about the increasing casualisation and pay stripping of coalminers, supported by the Morrison government?
And if they cared wouldn’t they question whether Adani is an appropriate business to employ Australian miners? Adani, such a friend of the working man that, when building its giant Shantigram luxury estate in India, it housed workers in conditions so appalling that there were 15 recorded outbreaks of cholera.
Put a hi-vis jacket on that corpse and say you’re still for the working miners of Queensland, Scott.
But then Adani’s long-term aim isn’t to employ miners under whatever pitiful conditions and awards its paid-up political mates might legislate.
As Adani Mining’s CEO said in 2016, “When we ramp up the mine, everything will be autonomous from mine to port. In our eyes, this is the mine of the future.” That’s right: Adani’s ambition is ultimately that its mine is all robots. Not a miner, not a driller, not a driver in sight.
So the promised 10,000 jobs that turned out to be 1,462 jobs will in turn vanish like the mist as Adani buys in ever more robots.
But that’s not all. Modelling by Wood Mackenzie shows that if coalmining in the Galilee Basin, led by Adani, goes ahead, coal production in older, less efficient Australian coalmines will drop significantly and many coalmining jobs will vanish. Adani’s new mine will simply steal the jobs off the old mines.
Jabbering jobs, jobs, jobs, in a hard hat doesn’t change these truths. It doesn’t make a politician fair dinkum. It makes him or her a lying clown who sells every coalminer down the drain for another backhander from the bosses of the fossil fuel industry.
The coalmining communities of Australia deserve better. They deserve the truth. They need a responsible transition plan, not lies and deceit.
Because Adani’s mine is not happening to help miners. It’s not happening to help Clermont or Mackay or far-north Queensland. It’s certainly not happening to help the poor of India.
It’s happening because of one thing: greed.
And that greed controls our politics. How can Scott Morrison claim to care about climate change when his political survival now hinges on a deal with Clive Palmer, a man whose own massive Galilee Basin coalmine is dependent on Adani getting up? What exactly did Scott Morrison promise Palmer? The Liberals’ platform is nothing more than a smoking coal heap.
Forty-one years ago, I had just kayaked through a beautiful gorge on the Franklin River called Irenabyss. The Franklin was to be dammed and though there was opposition to the damming, no one I knew believed it was possible to defeat the all-powerful state and federal governments that were at the time hell-bent on building it.
The gorge opened out into small basin. At its rainforested edge there was a beach. I kayaked over to it and a lanky man appeared out of the rainforest. And there, on the banks of that beautiful, doomed river, I met Bob Brown.
I asked Bob did he really think the river could be saved. His answer was revealing. I think, he said, that there is hope.
There is no power on this earth that can resist an idea whose time has come
And this is what I learned from Bob Brown. The battle for that river raged for another four years. Governments came and went. At every step it looked like we had lost, and yet, what we could not see was that at every stop we were growing stronger. Thousands of people went to prison in the biggest act of civil disobedience in Australian history.
In the end the government was spending countless millions to get heavy machinery into that remote rainforest to destroy as much a possible to make that dam inevitable. And at the very last moment, the high court ruled the dam could not go ahead.
I am here today to say that there is hope. That the Franklin flows free and Adani will be stopped. These things happen because at a certain point enough people say there are things that matter more than politics or money. There is no power on this earth that can resist an idea whose time has come.
Message of hope: former Greens leader Bob Brown addresses an anti-Adani rally on Sunday. Photograph: Rohan Thomson/AAP
I am not going to waste your time today repeating the many facts with which you are already familiar, suffice to say one thing: the IPCC last October said we had 12 years to contain climate change – that is, decarbonise our economy so that the temperature rises no more than another half a degree on what it is today. If large-scale action is not taken now the IPCC warned that we will face a global warming catastrophe.
More than half a year of that 12 years has already passed without any meaningful national or international action. Our emissions are still rising. And that is why this is a crisis unlike any we have ever faced. On present trends much of Australia will become, quite simply, uninhabitable. And what remains liveable will be small bands of our country.
We will not have the means to generate the food we need, the wealth we are accustomed to. The most recent science suggests that around the world up to one million species on which we depend for food and clean water face annihilation, that the planet’s very life support systems are entering a danger zone. This is not science fiction. This is not a Netflix series. It is what the world’s leading scientists tell us.
The moment for believing this is a matter that can be solved by flying less or not eating meat has long passed. The solution will not be about personal choices. It will be about – and can only be about – political change.
And that change will not come about because of a messianic leader. It will not come about because of this party or that party. It will only happen if we wish it to happen and if we make it happen. We have only ourselves to blame and we have only ourselves to turn to save ourselves.
It matters very much who you vote for this election. And after May 18 it matters even more to press whoever wins to recognise this crisis is not an issue. It is the issue.
The fight against Adani is a fight for the soul of our country
The drying out of Australia is the issue. The collapse of our fisheries is the issue. The likelihood of not having enough water to sustain our population is the issue. The threat greater and greater mega-fires pose is the issue. The decline of our agriculture is the issue. The inability of our infrastructure to cope with ever-larger floods and more frequent cyclones is the issue. Sea rises are the issue. The death of our rivers, the death of the Great Barrier Reef, the death of the Tasmanian rainforests is the issue. The drying wheatbelt is the issue. If our very fate as a species is not the issue, then what is?
And that is why Adani has become the symbol of why our country is broken. That is why the fight against Adani is a fight for the soul of our country.
I know many of you may feel that you have no power, or lack the skills or abilities needed. Faced with the crisis that is climate change it is too easy to feel powerless, to feel the problem is beyond your powers or perhaps anyone’s to influence.
Perhaps the greatest problem we face is not climate change, but the myth of our own powerlessness. We believe only the most powerful – the politicians, the corporations – can change our world. Accordingly, we feel a great despair about our future because we can see no hope in any politician or any corporation.
But it is not so.
Because the only thing that will save us is us. Half of the carbon in the atmosphere was put there by us in the last 30 years. And now we have 11 and a half years to reverse that disastrous act.
It is a time to act and it is for us to act. Because there is no one else and there is no other time.
And if our politicians continue to deceive themselves and deceive us, if after May 18 we end up with a government that will not act, and if we are only left with only our bodies to oppose this mine, if it takes putting our flesh between the past and the future, between the bulldozers and the earth, if it means a blockade of the Adani site, then I, for one, will be there. And if that means being arrested and going to jail then I will go to jail.
And my question to you today is this: will you?
Will you stand with me, will you go to jail with me, to stop this mine and save our future? Because if you will, I ask you to raise your hand.
I tell you this: we will win.
The Franklin was more than a river. Adani is more than a mine. This rally, you people, are part of the river of hope that flows through this country, our beloved country, and it is a river that cannot be bought, that cannot be dammed, that cannot be poisoned, that cannot be bought and sold. And every day that river grows larger and stronger.
And I am hopeful. Why? Because 41 years ago I met a man who refused to abandon hope and led a movement with such moral clarity that the river still flows. And 41 years later I stand here before you, with that same man, to say that hope is never lost.
Never. Never. Never.
Bob Brown speaks during Sunday’s protest against Adani’s Carmichael coalmine. Photograph: Rohan Thomson/AAP

 Note: This is an edited version of a speech delivered to the anti-Adani rally in Canberra on 5 May

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The Media Is Failing On Climate Change – Here's How They Can Do Better Ahead Of 2020

The Guardian - 

We spoke to climate change experts for advice on how news outlets can cover the environment in ways that make voters listen
Young protestors hold placards at the office of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell during a Green New Deal demonstration. Photograph: Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock 
America elected Donald Trump at the end of the hottest year ever recorded, without debate moderators asking him a single question about global warming.
But after three years of record temperatures, devastating wildfires and some of the most destructive hurricanes in US history, the media is facing new pressure – often from the candidates themselves – to give the subject more prominence during the 2020 election.
Yesterday, MSNBC devoted more than five minutes to Beto O’Rourke’s rollout of a $5tn climate plan, calling climate a “kitchen table issue” for 2020. Jay Inslee, the Washington governor who is seeking to make climate change the central thrust of his campaign, is calling on the Democratic National Committee to host a debate solely focused on climate. Bernie Sanders raised the issue during his town hall on Fox News earlier this month – and even drew cheers from the audience when he talked about new jobs in the renewable energy sector. Rising temperatures and the crisis they pose for humans were part of every Democratic candidate’s pitch during CNN’s marathon of hour-long town halls last week.
In the run-up to 2020, as newsroom leaders grapple with their mistakes in the 2016 election – from reliance on inaccurate polls to underestimating the impact of fake news – the failure to press candidates on climate change is emerging as an area of self-examination.
“In 2016 there were almost no questions asked , which is insane,” says Tony Bartelme, a senior reporter who covers climate change for the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. “It’s a good start that we’re starting to hear questions for 2020.”
The Guardian is joining forces with Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation to launch Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World, a project aimed at dramatically improving US media coverage of the climate crisis. The project kicks off today with an event at Columbia Journalism School featuring CJR’s editor-in-chief, Kyle Pope, the Nation’s environment correspondent, Mark Hertsgaard, and the Guardian climate columnist Bill McKibben.
The Green New Deal – progressives’ vision for slowing climate change without further burdening the poor – has also helped catapult the subject into the 2020 conversation. In March, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes took the highly unusual step of devoting an hour to the idea, in a show featuring the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But even as there are signs that airtime for climate is beginning to increase, questions remain about the depth and quality of the coverage. “I don’t see the media paying much attention to differentiating how serious each candidate is on the climate question,” said David Gelber, the creator and executive producer for the Showtime series on climate change, Years Of Living Dangerously.
More Americans than ever are worried about climate change. A poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa ranked climate change about on par with healthcare as the top issues they want candidates to talk about.
Research indicates that major national newspapers are beginning to pay more attention to climate – but local publications and TV news haven’t kept up. The major broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX – spent just 142 minutes on climate change last year, according to one calculation from the progressive group Media Matters. And about half of Americans hear about global warming in the media once a month or less, according to surveys by climate communications programs at Yale and George Mason universities.
Meanwhile, five major national US newspapers – the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times – have, in aggregate, roughly tripled their coverage of climate change since four years ago, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The New York Times now has a desk of about a dozen covering climate. Climate editor Hannah Fairfield said the team is collaborating with the politics desk to report on the 2020 candidates’ climate positions.
But climate coverage is not just a question of volume– it’s also a question of approach. We spoke to experts in the field for their advice on how news outlets should cover climate in ways that make voters listen during the 2020 race.

Quote conservatives
Adam Berinsky, who studies why some people believe political rumors – such as that climate change is a hoax – said people who buy into political rumors are driven by a “combination of conspiratorial dispositions and political motivations”. They are more likely to change their minds if they hear from sources they identify with, often fellow conservatives.
Aaron McCright, a sociology professor who studies public opinion at Michigan State University, said journalists should give the small but growing numbers of conservatives who care about climate change “more of a mouthpiece so that their message could start competing” with science denialism.
Republicans who want to limit climate pollution for the sake of national security or as part of a plan for energy independence need to compete better with climate deniers, said McCright. “Those could be effective messages if they’re promoted hour by hour, day by day, week by week, by dozens or hundreds of conservatives in everyday life, TV, papers, Congress.”

Bring up climate, even when the candidates don’t
Gelber says reporters should bring the campaign story back to climate change, even if the candidates aren’t discussing their proposed solutions. He said they should help audiences differentiate between the candidates, explaining to viewers and readers how specific they have gotten in their plans.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez greets audiences following a televised town hall event on the Green New Deal in New York City on 29 March 2019. Photograph: Jeenah Moon/Reuters
Cover climate as a local news story
Edward Maibach, a George Mason climate communications scientist, said “most people are saying they rarely hear climate change news because most people pay attention to local news. Most climate news in America is not local news”. Maibach’s program, Climate Matters, trains weathercasters and local reporters to explain the local consequences of a warming world.
Bartelme suggests trying to connect local catastrophes to the climate story and explain why the extreme weather is happening.
“What we can do is make those connections for people,” Fairfield said. Reporters can seek out “local stories that have climate fingerprints on them”.

Focus on solutions
Elizabeth Arnold, a longtime reporter and professor at the University of Alaska, argues that “doom and gloom” coverage alone may force the public to disengage.
“Repetition of a narrow narrative that focuses exclusively on the impacts of climate change leaves the public with an overall sense of powerlessness,” she said in an introduction to one paper.

Choose words carefully
Susan Hassol, director of the organization Climate Communication, said the phrase “heat-trapping pollution” is easier to understand than “greenhouse gas”, and “global warming” conveys more meaning than “climate change”.

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The Media Has Failed Spectacularly On Climate Change

Crikey - 

The media's coverage of climate change in the election campaign has reflected the Coalition's long-term strategy of denialism, rather than a desire for genuine scrutiny.
Image: Unsplash/Brad Helmink
In the last couple of weeks, there have been plenty of journalists complaining about the social media abuse to which they’ve been subjected in relation to election coverage.
The level of contumely directed at political journalists has indeed been noticeably worse, and much of it has been driven by the rage of left-wingers that the media isn’t acting as the eager trumpeteers of a Shorten victory. Instead, journalists dare to question Labor policies and push for details.
“This election is a contest, not a coronation,” Chris Uhlmann correctly noted, and there are many progressives on Twitter enraged at that, prepared to call bias at anyone not acting as a PR agent for Labor.
But on climate policy, the mainstream media — Nine, News Corp, the TV networks and the ABC — have indeed failed voters, and spectacularly so, in three crucial aspects.
First, climate change should be the central issue of the campaign. That’s not merely because climate change is the most serious threat to Australia’s economic future, and threatens major disruption to the global economy beyond the costs it is already imposing.
It’s also because climate change is the central issue of Australian politics. Twice in the last 10 years the Liberal Party has removed a leader over the issue. It played a key role in the demise of Julia Gillard. Scott Morrison is only prime minister because of the Liberal Party’s unwillingness to accept the existence of climate change and the need to address it.
Despite that, climate has been mostly at the margins of the campaign. Neither side has been particularly willing to talk about it, except where it is the pretext for new spending. Labor spent the entire first two weeks of the campaign talking about health, an area of policy success for Australia that needs little extra attention for all its totemic political importance. The media have taken their cue from the parties and mostly ignored climate.
Second, a gross imbalance exists in reportage of the two sides, given Labor is the only major party with a genuine climate policy. Scott Morrison is rarely questioned on the lack of any serious Coalition climate policy — journalists seem to take it as a given that the Coalition just doesn’t do climate, so it gets a pass from scrutiny.
That appears to be why the Coalition’s figleaf “direct action” policy, intended only to prevent the charge of wholesale denialism and pump more money to Coalition supporters, attracts no critique. The media know it’s a fake policy, so have never examined it closely in the 10 years since it was put together on the back of an envelope in the wake of Turnbull’s first removal.
Third, to the extent that the issue has featured in campaign coverage, it has been entirely around the issue of the economic cost of climate action policies. This is exactly the Coalition’s preferred framing of the issue, and one that it has used since the Howard years to obstruct action.
The framing involves using economic modelling to claim that climate action will impose massive economic costs, when even the modelling does not show that, but shows the difference between two fictional scenarios involving “business as usual” and an assumption-laden confection of the policies the Coalition wishes to discredit.
In fact, the Coalition has actually brought back the very man who was central to that technique, Brian Fisher, who is getting another run today with a new round of nonsense modelling claiming massive costs for climate action.
Remarkably, the mainstream media never mention Fisher’s central role in the Howard government’s climate denialism strategy (or that strategy itself). News Corp has even attempted to portray Fisher as “independent” and some sort of even-handed economist who served both sides during his time in government.
In fact, he comes to the debate with little credibility given his long history of peddling modelling designed to discredit climate action. Saliently, as he himself has admitted this time around, his modelling never addresses the costs of failing to address climate change.
And political history demonstrates how little real interest the media has in the issue of the economic impact of climate action. The Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme was estimated by Treasury to have a one-off impact on household CPI of 0.7%.
This was virtually never reported; instead, the Abbott opposition’s claims of spectacular price increases and warning it would be a “wrecking ball”, a “python squeeze”, a “cobra strike” etc were given strong prominence.
As it turned out, the carbon price may had had even less impact than Treasury predicted, as an array of economists noted in the aftermath. This, too, received little media attention. The focus on costings is thus not a mechanism to genuinely assess the impact of climate action but to deter action.
There are plenty of reasons for scrutiny of Labor’s climate policy — it’s a grab bag of measures, some of them adapted from the government, rather than a coherent policy like Gillard’s carbon-pricing scheme.
Very little of the economy is actually caught by its proposed safeguards scheme, some of the biggest polluting industries will be given exemptions to continue pumping out greenhouse emissions. But little of that is being reflected in the coverage.
Instead, the media is stuck in the same rut it’s been in since the Howard years.

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05/05/2019

The Rising Temperature Of Climate Change Politics

Canberra Times - Jack Waterford*

It is not yet clear to me whether Scott Morrison is slavishly following the urgers from News.com or it's the other way around. Perhaps given the way The Australian is barracking for the Abbott-Dutton tendency within the party, he should be very careful.
In any event, commentators from the Murdoch soviet have been unanimous in independently concluding that it is upon the costings of Bill Shorten's climate control policies that responsible people should vote. Liberal. From Monday's debate in Perth, Scott Morrison has followed the cues.
But it is hard to think it is going to do any great harm to the Labor campaign. It allows Labor to segue into the need for serious concerted action on climate change - something on which the majority of the electorate and the science community agree, and to hammer the argument that whatever passes for a Coalition climate change policy is not a fair dinkum policy at all.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack and Minister for Agriculture David Littleproud throw hay to feed cattle on Eumungerie Farm. Picture: AAP
That is because the Liberal and National parties are still full of climate change deniers, many of whom are prepared to split the party if there is anything more than a cosmetic policy.
Morrison can argue until he is blue in the face that the very limited measures he is taking represent just the right balance between maintaining a healthy economy and doing something. But this is a subject on which he is largely talking to himself.
His distraction tactics - of arguing either that the Shorten policy will bankrupt the economy, or has been so hopelessly costed that it shows Shorten, and Labor, to be too naive, reckless and silly to be trusted with the reins of government - only serve the purpose of reminding everyone that Labor has a policy and he does not.
Morrison claims the election is not a referendum on the need to do something about climate change. He says he agrees something should be done. The Coalition was taking action and would continue to do so. The question was whether the exciting, positive and good (and, no doubt, agile and flexible) measures the government was taking were appropriate, or whether we should have the reckless 45 per cent emission reduction target Labor was proposing, which would force Australians to choose between the economy and the environment. But it has been only belatedly that Morrison has seen any need to be on the side of history in the matter, and many voters, outside his own bubble, will remember him for the stunt promoting the use of coal.
Labor starts with the advantage that a majority of the population, along with the scientific community, national and international, and a good deal of industry, agree on the need to take effective action on world temperature increases and enormous local environmental damage.
Tony Abbott's political arguments against carbon pricing - and his argument that Australia should not get ahead of international action - may once have helped stall concerted action to put prices on activities contributing to emissions. But Coalition measures have not been based on the science, but on the determination of a significant rump in the party that nothing be done that inhibits coal extraction - from which substantial donations come to the party.
Putting out the projections of partisan economists, and effectively denying there will be serious costs to the Australian economy, and Australian governments, if Australia does nothing is not, of itself, enough to prove bigger targets for reducing emissions will ruin the economy. Indeed many sober people - not given to apocalyptic panic - fear disaster for our economy and our environment if Australia does nothing or so little that it has no impact on world emissions. The fear increases as effective action is delayed.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Mark Butler talk to Wilson Burns at the Southern Sustainable Electric solar farm in Whyalla, South Australia. Picture: AAP
Labor may have once, care of Kevin Rudd, proclaimed climate change as the moral issue of our time. For many voters, it remains that. But Labor is not promoting the issue as a moral imperative so much as the sensible and sound reaction to the scientific evidence of what is occurring, including evidence of more unpredictable weather. It's not panicky, or ideologically driven by advocates opposed to any form of mineral extraction or private enterprise. Rather it is in accord with the consensus of scientists, economists and industry and public policy experts all around the world, even if almost every continent has a significant denier standing in the way of sensible action.
Hysteria and refusal to believe in climate change, or to countenance any change are now rather more in the domain of the conservatives. Worst-case scenarios, even assuming the assumptions that have been fed into the models, are presented as the likely outcome. The misrepresentation does the Morrison government little credit, even in an election context. Morrison is perfectly entitled to seek to score points from some Shorten faltering on cost matters, but for most voters the debate belongs inside what Morrison would normally call "the Canberra bubble" - intricate detail for policy wonks, or, alternatively, matters that Morrison does not want to answer questions about.
But while Labor has shown some courage in making climate change one of the significant points of difference between itself and the Coalition, it can hardly be said, so far, that Labor has succeeded in making this the climate change election. It is merely one among five pillars of a Labor platform, and Labor has, as yet, to get out and positively sell it. It acts as if there is some doubt that it really is a plus for the party, even if it represents a consensus of all but a few reactionary unionists, focused only on short-term job security and sceptical about jobs for their members in an economy focused on emission reduction. Beyond being popular generally in the party, having a policy with some teeth is, or ought to be, a selling point in taking first preference votes from the Greens.
Labor policy is not as comprehensive as the Greens, but is perhaps better crafted for political reality. The Greens' history of letting their demand for perfection stand in the way of significant advances over the status quo has not been forgotten.
Labor has not shrunk from defending its policies, or the virtues of doing something, while it has been under attack over claims that it will act as a wrecking ball on the economy. But it should be doing more in mobilising support for itself around its policies, and in accepting and agreeing that the policies mean business. Opinion polls show that this is exactly what people want.
Labor policy is not as comprehensive as the Greens, but is perhaps better crafted for political reality.
As it happens, others are doing their best to keep the issue to the forefront. In most of the contests in which high profile independents are running against sitting Coalition members, climate change has been the chief issue used to differentiate the candidate from the incumbent. These have not been challenges the incumbents, such as Tony Abbott, have been keen to accept. He has himself moved significantly from his denialist positions, at the same time arguing that a vote for his opponent, Zali Steggall, is effectively a vote for Labor. The others - in Wentworth, Kerryn Phelps is campaigning to retain the seat won at a by-election when Malcolm Turnbull was a victim of the determined opposition within the Coalition to effective climate change action, and Helen Haines is running for Indi to replace the popular independent, Cathy McGowan.
Kerryn Phelps and Zali Steggall, the two indie candidates for Wentworth and Warringah. Picture: Edwina Pickles.
These are candidates who describe themselves as likely to support the Liberal Party particularly on economic issues. But they have made the need for action on climate change the central point of their platforms, and the prime point of differentiation from their Coalition opponents. It is the attention given to these contests that has the issue front and centre.
Also helping keep the issue to the fore, perhaps particularly in NSW, is the distress of many in the rural sector that the National Party, and the Coalition, seem more focused on supporting extractive industries, including coal and gas, than agriculture. In more closely settled areas, the argument has been about fracking, and the loss of valuable pastoral land by farmers. More widely, it has been about water mining, about abuses with irrigation water, particularly by big scale cotton farmers upstream of the Darling (or Barwon) river. Large scale fish kills and prolonged drought brought cries of cronyism, favouritism, a failure to enforce the law.
It's not, as usual, a picture much helped by reports of sales, under policies pioneered by Barnaby Joyce, in which tens of millions have been paid for non-existent water, the money in question disappearing to tax havens overseas. Only a month ago, National Party incumbents in the state election lost seats to the Shooters Fishers and Farmers Party, primarily over perceptions that the National Party was not serving the interests of rural people. Rural people do understand climate change; it has been a reality for years. Many are frustrated that so little is being done about it, primarily because of the active opposition of National members. While the threat to the very continuance of the National Party is obvious enough, and there is ample evidence of their being warned about the risks, it is far from clear that the party leadership (and alternative leadership, in the form of Barnaby Joyce) are addressing the problem.
For Labor, climate change should be a crusade, in both positive and negative terms.
To draw attention to Independents, or the bad example of the Nationals in the face of serious climate change is not to diminish Labor (or Green) activity on policies to combat climate change. But it is time that Shorten, and Labor, went positive and attacking on the issue, rather than defensive, seeming a little worried by the way Morrison has been focusing on it as a weakness. Shorten has been calm and unapologetic as he has been under assault. He is not usually at his best in dealing with forecasts, baited assumptions, and suggestions that he is withholding something from the community. Under immediate assault, it may be hard to change the subject. But if he is leading with the need for, and the value of the policy, he has a wider capacity to focus on the general case.
For Labor, climate change should be a crusade, in both positive and negative terms. It represents what citizens, as well as the research (and much of industry) community think is needed. But it also underlines the shambles of Coalition government, with three prime ministers over two terms because of prolonged brawls about whether there is to be any serious action taken. Action to deal with the effects of changes to the environment with the capacity to hurt Australia more than any of our neighbours.
The crusade cannot, or should not, be a series of actions by government remote from the effects that they have in different communities. In much the same manner that Paul Keating took the electorate along with economic reforms in the 1980s, concerted action should be part of a continuous dialogue with the wider community, in which the situation is repeatedly explained, new and emerging science is publicly seen to be brought to bear, and benefits and trade-offs, for example in relation to energy prices and the electricity market, to work to restore environments, are explained along with explanation for any adverse action.
It could also lead to some revised ways of organising climate change action. A propaganda point against action, for example, has been the suggestion that dour scientists, or pointy-headed intellectuals, will be seeking to take control of the lives of people working in productive industries. It would be a better sell, and easier on able and committed scientists, if what was described was a new sense of partnership, in which scientific skill and knowledge was added to the existing expertise of, say, farmers, who were acknowledged for work they had already done to improve the sustainability of their land and efficiencies with hydrocarbons, water consumption and tree control.
We know from the experience with the carbon tax that there are many in industry, and mining, who will adapt their behaviour, and significantly reduce emissions with clear price signals and transitional support. Many do it because they themselves see the problem and the imperative for action, rather than because they feel coerced. Many see the potential for economic benefits in the shifts to sustainable energy.
Labor is still the favourite to win this election, even as polls show some softening of support. This represents some success in efforts by Morrison to scare voters about risks to the economy if the dreaded socialists win. Labor has to give people reasons for voting for it, as much as it reminds people of the reasons why its opponents should be thrown it. It should own and embrace its policies, not dive for cover.

*Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times

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