NSW Set To Fall Short Of Climate Targets But Victoria On Track

Sydney Morning Herald - Nicole Hasham

NSW and Queensland appear set to fall short of their self-imposed targets for cutting greenhouse gas pollution and phasing out fossil fuels, as responsibility for climate action in the electricity sector increasingly falls to the states.
But analysis by research and advisory group Green Energy Markets found Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania are on track to hit their climate goals.

NSW and Queensland must make up ground to meet their climate targets in the electricity sector, analysis has found. Credit: Michele Mossop

Electricity is considered the most cost-effective sector of the economy in which to slash greenhouse gas pollution, largely because zero-emission wind and solar technology already exists.
However, Australia's renewable energy target peaks in 2020 and since the collapse of the National Energy Guarantee last year, the Morrison government has not had a major policy to cut emissions in the sector. This leaves state policies as the key driver of investment in renewable energy generation.
Green Energy Markets examined progress on climate targets by the five eastern-most states that make up the national electricity market.
It found the most populous state, NSW, was not on pace to meet its target of net-zero emissions from the electricity sector by 2050.
On current trends, renewables would comprise 28 per cent of NSW's total electricity use by 2030, based on expected rooftop solar uptake and new wind and solar projects. This was well below the 46 per cent renewables share needed by 2030 if NSW was to meet its 2050 target, the report said.
NSW needs almost 5000 megawatts of new renewable energy projects over the next decade to bridge the gap.
Green Energy Markets director Tristan Edis said there had been commitments to construct 2800 megawatts of renewables projects in NSW over the past three years, so the state's catch-up task was "readily achievable" by 2030.
The Queensland Labor government wants renewables to make up 50 per cent of the electricity mix by 2030. However, the state is currently tracking towards a 29 per cent renewables share, based on existing wind and solar commitments and expected rooftop solar growth.

Hydro Tasmania's Devils Gate Dam spill. The state is tracking well to meet its target for 100 per cent renewable energy, including hydro power, by 2022.

If all states achieved their targets, enough construction jobs would be created to employ 32,000 people for a year, the analysis showed.
Victoria was already close to achieving its goal of 40 per cent electricity generation from renewable sources by 2025, the report found. It required just 2000 megawatts of new projects to reach its target of 50 per cent renewables by 2030.
South Australia was on track to meet its goal that renewables comprise 73.5 per cent of electricity consumption by 2030, and Tasmania did not need any new projects to reach its 100 per cent renewables goal by 2022.
A spokeswoman for the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment said the state was “reducing emissions at one of the fastest rates in Australia”.
“The government is supporting record investment in solar and wind and, in the last five years, energy generation from these sources has tripled in NSW,” she said.
Between 2018 and 2022 the NSW government will spend $1.4 billion to drive investment in renewable energy, emerging technology and climate action.
Queensland Energy Minister Anthony Lynham said the Palaszczuk government was on track to meet its 50 per cent renewable target by 2030, citing a recent report by the Clean Energy Council that described the state as "the renewable energy construction capital of Australia".
"Despite the lack of any coherent or consistent energy policy from the commonwealth government, Queensland continues to embrace a renewable future," Dr Lynham said, adding that the states "have been left alone to do the heavy lifting on tackling climate change".

Links

• Green Energy Markets
• Renewable Energy Index
• Australia Is Counting On Cooking The Books To Meet Its Climate Targets
• Australia’s Carbon Emissions Highest On Record, Data Shows
• Australia Not On Track To Hit Paris Emissions Goals, As UN Warns Global Efforts Must Increase
• Australia To Miss 2030 Emissions Target By Massive Margin
• Scientists Slap Down Australia Government Over Fake Climate Claims
• Australia Quizzed By EU And China On Whether It Can Meet 2030 Paris Climate Target
• Scott Morrison's Pea-And-Thimble Trick
• 'Problem in waiting': why natural gas will wipe out Australia's emissions gains
• Australia's emissions still rising, says report withheld in defiance of Senate order

Action Now’: The Farmers Standing Up Against ‘Wilful Ignorance’ On Climate

The Guardian - Gabrielle Chan

The challenge for farmers is how to discuss global warming without scaring people out of food production

Farmers across Australia are trying to deal with increased risk by finding new income streams, and changing their cropping and stock management plans. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian 

The last election may have left the impression with voters that farmers and rural people in general do not accept climate science because there was no seismic shift of seats.
Yet this week the agricultural thinktank, the Australian Farm Institute, gathered farmers and their advocacy groups to talk about the impacts of global warming on the already risky business of farming.
Speaker after speaker described how their businesses were trying to deal with increased risk by finding new income streams, changing their cropping and stock management plans and still sometimes being blindsided.
Australia’s largest and oldest continuing pastoral company, AACo, owns 7m hectares of land or roughly 1% of Australia’s land mass.
After the loss of 43,000 head of cattle in record flooding in the Gulf of Carpentaria, AACo boss Hugh Killen’s message to the audience was clear.
“The direct effects of climate are real for us – we come to this discussion with first hand experience and a commitment to find a way forward comes from the heart,” Killen said.
“Slight changes to fire, flood and drought patterns can shift a very delicate balance. Increased flood, drought and fire can disrupt everything we do in their own right, as with risks we have seen in the gulf.
“Changing patterns can also tip the balance in favour of harmful flora and fauna and it can tip the balance away from replenishment of nutrients in the soil.”
He decried the tribal nature of politics and then he urged the room to act and engage on the subject, in spite of the noisy political debate.
“Those who call themselves believers demand action now,” Killen said. “We need to show them we share their conviction about the dangers that we all face.
“They need to know that we care, we take the science seriously and that we are taking action where we can to manage climate risks daily.”
It was an unusual conference because since Tony Abbott dismantled the carbon price in 2013, the largely conservative industry has tiptoed around the issue – a point recognised by the National Farmers’ Federation president, Fiona Simson, last year when she declared climate change was making drought worse.
Long-time climate campaigner and Boggabilla farmer Pete Mailler said there was a “widespread wilful ignorance” about climate change and that was creating the impasse on public policy responses.

Pete Mailler says ‘I can’t stand by and let people glibly talk up agriculture if they are not prepared to start tackling the hard issues now’.

“There’s this big issue that says we can’t really admit to climate change because that means we have to change all these other things and that’s really hard, we don’t really want to shut down coal-fired power stations,” Mailler said.
“The reality is I can’t stand by and let people glibly talk up agriculture if they are not prepared to start tackling the hard issues now. Because if we set the next generation up to walk off into the sunset and say ‘here you go’, it’s a great opportunity and if we don’t start to tackle these problems now we are setting them up to fail.”
Yet the challenge for farmers and their representative bodies is always how to discuss global warming without scaring people out of food production.
Verity Morgan-Schmidt, of Farmers for Climate Action, said no farmer wanted to be intentionally negative but there was a need to stare the challenges “in the face”.
“It’s a huge step forward for the industry to have such a trusted respected research organisation actively engage on the issue and raise the challenges,” she said. “We all want the industry to have vibrant future but we don’t want to sell people up the river.”
The National Farmers’ Federation chief executive, Tony Mahar, said climate change was increasing risk to the sector through more intense and severe droughts, high water prices, increased volatility of farm income, loss of productive land and relocation of industries.
The NFF declared its “priority ask” was a $1bn eco-systems services fund, following on from a $30m biodiversity stewardship fund announced in the federal election that would develop a framework to pay farmers to improve landscape and capture carbon.

National Farmers’ Federation CEO Tony Mahar, centre, says climate change is increasing risk to the sector through more intense and severe droughts, high water prices, increased volatility of farm income, loss of productive land and relocation of industries. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

Mahar echoed the Craik report, which also recommended the government introduce “market-based” National Biodiversity Conservation Trust fund for eco-services.
“We are talking about this as the new Landcare and being a system that will recognise, reward, and put a value on some of the systems and services and land management processes that farmers undertake every day, every year, and have done for decades but haven’t been able to get an income stream from that.”
The World Wildlife Fund has backed has backed the principle of paying farmers for good environment practices.
The WWF’s Ian McConnel said farmer payments for eco-system work would be an important driver for positive change.
“We need to reward people when they are adopting practices, especially when those practices don’t come as a win-win to production,” McConnel. “We need to prove there’s a biodiversity measurement. There’s a whole range of challenges around that, but we need to have very good models based on data that says if you do this practice, we see this improvement.”
McConnel said the WWF had already designed farm practices applicable to Germany where farmers could choose from a range of works from restoring wetlands to vegetation connectivity and get paid a premium.
McConnel said while planting and retaining trees was certainly “the easier way” to improve environmental outcomes, capturing soil carbon was potentially a longer term solution for farmers.
The NFF’s $1bn target was “absolutely” achievable, he said, and could come from a mix of government funding and private investors.
“The world needs pretty large-scale investment if we are going to turn the head on biodiversity loss and carbon so we are going to have to see some pretty big investment in that space and I think the willingness is there from both the public and private to invest,” McConnel said.

Links

• Act Now On Emissions Says Farmers For Climate Action 
• 'He Will Fail Farmers': Morrison Pressured To Tackle Climate Change As Part Of Drought Pledge 
• The Future Of Farming In The Era Of Climate Change 
• Farmers Asked To Share Their Climate Change Experience 
• Farmers Challenge Nationals' Claim Drought Unrelated To Climate Change 
• Drought-Stricken Farmers Challenge Coalition's Climate Change Stance In TV Ad 
• Farmers For Climate Action Say A Unified Parliament Needed To Address Looming Crisis 

Australia Won't Reach Paris Target Without Action On Transport, LNG And Coal, Expert Says

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Morrison government urged to address where greenhouse gas emissions are rising substantially

Emissions released during LNG processing and coalmining have jumped 55%, which will impact Australia’s Paris target, an Australia Institute report says.

The challenge the Morrison government faces in meeting future climate targets without new policies is underlined by an analysis that breaks down how significantly greenhouse gas emissions are increasing from transport, natural gas and coalmining.
Since 2005, the year against which the government has chosen to benchmark its Paris target, Australia’s emissions from transport are up 23%.
Pollution from burning fossil fuels – mainly natural gas, but also coal – in manufacturing, construction and domestic heating has risen 30%. “Fugitive” emissions released during liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing and coalmining have jumped 55%.



Other parts of the economy are getting cleaner – emissions from electricity generation, which is still the biggest chunk of national emissions at about a third, are down 10%. There have been smaller cuts from agriculture, waste and industrial processes.
But the analysis of government data by Hugh Saddler, an energy consultant and ANU honorary associate professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, suggests Australia cannot meet the target it set at the Paris climate summit without policies to address where emissions are rising substantially.
He said at the moment the government does not have any.
“They absolutely don’t have any policy to stop emissions rising from transport and in the other areas such as LNG and coal exports the policy is to actually encourage them to grow – the government would like to think they would keep going up and up,” Saddler said.
The data is contained in Saddler’s latest national emissions audit, which is published by progressive research and lobby group the Australia Institute.
Australia’s total emissions are now estimated to be 12.7% less than they were in 2005. They have increased each year since 2015, when they were 14.5% below the benchmark year. The Coalition’s target is a 26-28% cut by 2030.
Saddler said it showed why the Morrison government was pushing hard to use what are known as carryover credits to meet its Paris target. The credits represent the amount Australia expects to finish ahead of its 2020 target under the previous climate deal, the Kyoto Protocol.
Several countries – notably members of the Association of Small Island States such as Tuvalu – challenged Australia at United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany last week over its plan to use carryover credits. The European Union and New Zealand are among others opposed to their use.
Opponents say using carryover credits would effectively reduce Australia’s 2030 target to a 16% cut.
They say carryover credits are merely a reflection that Australia set easy-to-meet targets under the Kyoto Protocol – a pollution increase between 1990 and 2010, then a 5% cut between 2000 and 2020 – and that all countries will need to drop accounting tricks and make much deeper cuts if the world is to limit global heating to as close to 1.5C as possible.
Richie Merzian, the Australia Institute’s climate and energy program director, said using carryover credits was the most egregious example of the Coalition government’s contempt for the international climate system. “Australia is isolated as the only OECD country pushing to exploit this loophole,” he said.
A recent policy brief by the Investor Group on Climate Change says carryover credits were included in the initial Kyoto deal as an incentive for ambitious countries to go beyond their formal targets. In reality, it has just rewarded countries that set weak targets, such as Australia and Russia.
It is still unclear how carryover credits will be treated under the Paris deal. Countries are expected to explain how they will meet their targets and – unless there is a unanimous agreement to ban carryover credits – they could technically just include them. But they would be likely to face increasing criticism.
The Paris agreement also says countries will become more ambitious over time and that their commitments will reflect their “highest possible ambition”. Opponents say carryover credits do not fit this definition as they transparently weaken a target.
When asked about carryover credits, the government says Australia has made “responsible, achievable and balanced commitments” to reduce emissions and has a strong track record in meeting and beating its targets.
The minister for emissions reduction, Angus Taylor, has also argued that the growth in emissions from Australia’s rapidly expanding LNG industry should be seen as a positive as the gas would be reducing the amount of coal burned in Asia. The Saddler report suggests this makes little sense given the government is also supporting a significant expansion of coalmining in Queensland.
Saddler said there was a possibility that emissions could be reduced where they are currently growing through state government and city-based policies and changes in technology and on international markets. He gives the example of electric vehicles, which are expected to be cost competitive with petrol cars by 2025.
“One of the things we can hope for is that technological change comes along in the absence of any government policy,” he said.
A government policy document released before the election estimated by 2030 about 100m tonnes of emissions reduction would come from unspecified “technology improvements and other sources of abatement”.
Other trends in the report include:

• Queensland has the highest emissions in the country. Emissions grew in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory between 2014 and 2017 while falling everywhere else.
• National emissions would have been expected to increase even more this year were it not for the devastating drought and floods in eastern Australia that killed huge numbers of sheep and cattle.
• Diesel fuel emissions surged 50% between 2011 and 2018, increasing significantly both on the road and in power generation at mining sites.
• But diesel use has fallen each month since December despite no obvious change in policy. If that continues for the rest of the year, it will be the first time it has happened since 1990-91 – the low point of Australia’s last economic recession.

Links

• Australia Is Counting On Cooking The Books To Meet Its Climate Targets
• Australia’s Carbon Emissions Highest On Record, Data Shows
• Australia Not On Track To Hit Paris Emissions Goals, As UN Warns Global Efforts Must Increase
• Australia To Miss 2030 Emissions Target By Massive Margin
• Scientists Slap Down Australia Government Over Fake Climate Claims
• Australia Quizzed By EU And China On Whether It Can Meet 2030 Paris Climate Target
• Scott Morrison's Pea-And-Thimble Trick
• 'Problem in waiting': why natural gas will wipe out Australia's emissions gains
• Australia's emissions still rising, says report withheld in defiance of Senate order

Fears Northern Australian Mangrove Forests Could 'Drown' Due To Rising Seas

ABC News - Nick Hose

Northern Australia's mangroves could be under threat by rising sea levels. (ABC News: Nick Hose)

Key Points: Mangroves could be wiped out by the end of the century, researchers say Research is being done to work out how the ecosystem will cope with rising seas Sea level rise is happening at a faster rate in northern Australia than in the south

It's low tide on a sunny, dry season afternoon in the mangrove forest at East Arm in Darwin Harbour.
As the tide laps at the dense tangle of roots that run for thousands of hectares along northern Australia's pristine coastline, it's hard to comprehend these forests could be wiped out by the end of the century.
"They're definitely vulnerable," said Madeline Goddard, a PhD candidate at Charles Darwin University.
Ms Goddard is studying mangroves to see how they will adapt to rising sea levels.

Mangroves could drown
"Across the world the sea level is rising, increasing the amount of time mangroves spend underwater, potentially flooding and killing these valuable forests," Ms Goddard said.
The Bureau of Meteorology has been monitoring sea level rise and found it is happening at a faster rate in northern Australia than in the south.
"We've seen for the last 7,000 years the water level has slowly risen and that mangroves have persisted, they are really resilient," Ms Goddard said.

"But they can't keep up with our really dramatic projected rise."

Charles Darwin University PhD candidate Madeline Goddard (right) studies mangroves in northern Australia (ABC News: Nick Hose)

 
It is a fear shared by the Australian Marine Conservation Society.
Northern Territory manager Jason Fowler said the mangroves could drown because sediment was accumulating slower than the rate that the sea level was rising.

"So the mangroves will literally run out of mud, slowly get flooded, and drown out," he said.

"We've already seen that mangroves are vulnerable to climate change after one of the worst instances of mangrove forest dieback struck Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria in the summer of 2016."

Carbon-storing superpowers
Ms Goddard said there was a huge amount of carbon that mangroves store in the mud.
"But also in the forest themselves," she said.
It's a superpower that could prove crucial in the fight against climate change.
"Mangroves store a lot of carbon — upwards of 50 times more than identical areas of rainforest," Ms Goddard said.

Mangroves in northern Australia are under threat. (ABC News: Nick Hose)

 
Best hope of survival could lie in careful planning
Ms Goddard said mangroves might be able to adapt to sea level rise if they have space to grow.

"What's really critical is they can also move landward," Ms Goddard said.

She said many coastlines in northern Australia were not developed, which would leave new habitat for mangroves to move into.
"As you get elevated sea level rise you get increased flooding times, and so the area behind the mangroves has potential for them to move into," she said.

Links

• Extreme weather explains 'unprecedented' mangrove deaths: study
• 'Shocking images' reveal death of 10,000 hectares of mangroves
• 'They Died Of Thirst': Extreme Conditions Wipe Out Forest Over 1000 Kilometres
• 'Shocking images' reveal death of 10,000 hectares of mangroves across Northern Australia
• Mexican desert mangroves – small but valuable in dealing with climate change
• Extreme weather likely behind worst recorded mangrove dieback in northern Australia
• Rising seas threaten to drown important mangrove forests, unless we intervene

Kids Suing Governments About Climate: It's A Global Trend

National Geographic - Laura Parker

From Colombia to Pakistan to the Netherlands, kids are claiming a right to a clean environment—and sometimes winning.

People demonstrate in support of the plaintiffs in the climate change lawsuit Juliana v. U.S. in front of the Wayne L. Morse Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon. Photograph by Terray Sylvester, VWPics via AP

When young people in the Netherlands sued their government for inaction on climate change, they unexpectedly won. In a decision noted for its bluntness, the court ordered the government to curb carbon emissions 25 percent by next year.
Another ground-breaking success emerged last year in Colombia, where 25 young people won their lawsuit against the government for failing to protect the Colombian Amazon rainforest. The court concluded that deforestation violated the rights of both the youths and the rainforest and ordered the government to reduce it to net zero by 2020.
And a seven-year-old girl in Pakistan gained the right to proceed with her climate change lawsuit on its merits—establishing, in a first for Pakistan, the rights of a minor to sue in court.
This trio of courtroom victories on three continents has become the foundation of a global legal movement to compel governments to step up and save the planet before it’s too late. Citizens are raising constitutional claims to gain recognition of the fundamental right to live in a healthy environment. Court decisions defending that right have been made in more than 50 nations, where governments have been faulted for a host of environmental sins that range from climate-risky pension fund investments to simply failing to live up to commitments made in the Paris climate agreement.
Legal experts anticipate that the number of new lawsuits will only grow as the scientific prognosis for the impacts of climate change becomes increasingly dire.
“This is a direct response to the fact that we are waking up to the magnitude of the global crisis,” says David Boyd, a law professor at the University of British Columbia and a United Nations special rapporteur on human rights.
Boyd, who specializes in environmental rights, catalogued legal actions among UN member states and concluded that no other social or economic right has spread as quickly through the world.

---

                            A People’s Right to a Healthy Environment

There are three mechanisms by which a country can recognize its citizens’ right to a clean environment:
       1. constitutional guarantees;
       2. national legislation; and
       3. adherence to international conventions.
On this map we show how many of these mechanisms are available in each country. Countries with none are shown in white and include some of the largest democracies. But a total of 112 countries recognize environmental rights in their constitutions—the strongest guarantee.

                           Legal recognitions of environmental rights: 

NG Staff Source: David R.Boyd University Of British Columbia

Institute For Resources, Environment, And Sustainability

---

Once dismissed as a “novel perspective,” the right to a healthy environment is now considered legally established around the world, he says. It is enshrined in the constitutions of more than 100 nations and has been incorporated in legislation, treaties or in other documents of at least 155 nations. Of the court cases based on a constitutional right to a healthy environment, the majority are winning. And, in the cases brought by young people, courts are receptive to recognizing that right for future generations.
“What you see in this rising tide, led by children—who have the greatest stake—of people saying to their governments: ‘You have failed. We have rights and you need to abide by and protect those rights,’” says Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, based in Washington and Geneva.

Influential cases
The seven-year-old’s case in Pakistan builds on the successful outcome of an earlier lawsuit filed by a farmer who claimed Pakistan’s failure to carry out its climate commitments cost him his livelihood. The court found that “the delay and lethargy of the State in implementing [climate policy] offend the fundamental rights of citizens.” The court also ordered the creation of a Climate Change Commission to monitor the government’s progress.
The Netherlands case eventually involved almost 900 Dutch citizen plaintiffs from multiple generations. In 2015 the judges swiftly and overwhelmingly rejected the government’s claim that near-term climate action would be too expensive. The court-ordered remedy requires the government, within a year, to make nearly twice the carbon emission cuts made since 1990. To meet that target, the government has said it would shut down a coal-fired power plant in Amsterdam, slated for closure at the end of 2024, by the end of this year. Meanwhile it has appealed the decision to the Dutch supreme court.
The Dutch case has became the model for similarly fashioned lawsuits in Belgium, Ireland, and Canada, and it has inspired other climate cases in countries as far flung as Uganda, New Zealand, Australia, and Norway. The Colombia case has had a similar impact. When the youths there won their case, Boyd says, “Let me tell you, there were lawyers in 100 other countries saying: how can we emulate that decision? We’ve never had such a globally connected system.”
The exception may be the case in the United States, where judges are traditionally immune from influence from international cases. Juliana v. United States, named for lead plaintiff Kelsey Juliana, now a 23-year-old University of Oregon student, was filed against the Obama administration in 2015, around the same time the Netherlands case was decided. It’s being closely watched for the possibility that it may write new precedents if it survives.

Litigation not always successful
If some see climate litigation as the last chance to slow global warming, critics argue that turning policy and lawmaking over to judges is misguided and will accomplish little more than to spawn the very flood of litigation that advocates predict.
Michael Burger, executive director and CEO of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University Law School in New York, says the swelling wave of lawsuits should surprise no one, given the lumbering pace of government action. At the moment, the center is tracking 1,039 cases ongoing in the United States and 283 in other countries. The majority of them, unlike the youth cases, involve enforcing existing environmental regulations and law.
“People are taking to the courts because governments are falling short and when you have nowhere else to go, you go to court,” he says.
There are other drawbacks to litigation. Lawsuits move slowly too. The Belgian case stalled for three years over arguments about whether to proceed in Dutch or French; the parties finally agreed on French. Court-ordered solutions can be ineffective or unenforceable.
The decision last year in Colombia, for example, is considered one of the most progressive and powerful in the region. But the court-ordered plan to curb deforestation has so far generated more publicity than government action, says Cesar Rodrigues-Garavito, the plaintiffs' lawyer and founder of Dejusticia, a Colombian human rights group. He has called for his clients to mobilize to prod the government to move ahead.
Most of the countries with constitutional protections of environmental rights are developing nations with newer constitutions, Boyd says. Many are still emerging from the legacies of colonialism or military dictatorship and struggling to deliver basic services to their citizens. Those factors increase the odds against a court ordering a climate remedy, say, that is actually enforced.
Even in Norway, where the constitution, which dates to 1814, is the world’s second-oldest after that of the United States, protected rights don’t always win the day. Norway’s constitution clearly details the right to a healthy environment and that it be “safeguarded for future generations.”
Yet a Norway court dismissed efforts by Nordic youth and two non-governmental organizations to prevent the government from granting licenses for oil and gas exploration in the Barents Sea. The plaintiffs had argued that the licenses would violate Norway’s commitment under the Paris climate agreement as well as the Norwegian constitution. Although the court agreed that the right to a healthy environment is a claimable right, it concluded that the licenses would not violate it.
“Sometimes judges make bad decisions. They said this can’t be a violation of Norway’s right to a healthy environment because the oil will be exported,” Boyd says. “This case has a chance on appeal, which will be heard this fall.”

New legal ground
The constitutional question is at the center of the U.S. case. Government lawyers for both the Obama and Trump administrations have argued from the start that no such constitutional right exists, and the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to have the case thrown out of court.
The United States is one of 38 UN member states lacking expressly stated constitutional protections to a healthy environment. The youths say such language is not necessary for courts to find in their favor. They claim the federal government’s promotion of the production of fossil fuels and indifference to the risks posed by greenhouse gas emissions have created a “dangerous destabilizing climate system” that threatens their rights to life, liberty and property, which are contained in the Constitution. U.S. District Court Judge Anne Aiken agreed with their claim and ordered the case to be tried.
Recognizing environmental rights in that context would elevate the case into the realm of historic cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that declared segregation of public schools unconstitutional, and Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that recognized a constitutional right to access to abortion.
In arguments before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier in June, Jeffrey Clark, a U.S. assistant attorney general, called the lawsuit a “dagger at the separation of powers.”
He added: “This is a suit that is designed to circumvent a whole bunch of statutes.”
In an animated, hour-long hearing, the three-judge panel conveyed their skepticism to both Clark and Julia Olson, the youths’ lead attorney.
“Look, you’re arguing for us to break new ground,” Judge Andrew Hurwitz told Olson. “I’m sympathetic to the problems you point out. But you shouldn’t say this is an ordinary suit… You’re asking us to do a lot of new stuff.”

Links

• Young People Are Suing Governments Over Climate Change 
• 'Biggest Case On The Planet' Pits Kids Vs. Climate Change
• Children Sue Over Climate Change
• These 21 Kids Taking On Trump Could Be Our Best Hope For Climate Action
• The Forsaken Children Strike Back: 21 Young People Sue To Save Planet
• Landmark Children’s Climate Lawsuit Hits New Roadblock

Tiny Nations Challenge Australia's Carbon 'Carryover Credits'

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Nations from Senegal to Tuvalu have used a United Nations climate conference to challenge the Morrison government's use of carbon "carryover credits" to virtually halve Australia's abatement ambition out to 2030.
The conference that wrapped up at the end of last week in Bonn, Germany, debated among other things, the rules of the Paris Agreement.

Climate issues, including how Australia counts its emissions, aren't going away. Credit: John Veage

The discussions included whether nations including Australia should be allowed to count the surplus it expects to generate during the Kyoto Protocol period that runs to 2020.
On the government's projections, 328 million tonnes of Australia's pledged cut of about 695 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent could be met by counting the Kyoto surplus for the Paris pledge over the decade from 2021-2030.
Among the nations that opposed the use of "carryover credits" at the Bonn conference included the Association of Small Island states, including Tuvalu.
South Korea, the European Union and New Zealand were also against using Kyoto surplus, according to Kate Dooley, a researcher with the the Climate and Energy College at the University of Melbourne, who was an observer at the Bonn conference.
"Discussions here in Bonn have made it clear that most countries do not accept the carry-over of Kyoto units into the Paris Agreement," Dr Dooley said.
"The world’s most vulnerable countries have spoken out to say that accounting tricks, such as those the Australian government intends to use, are not consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees."
Angus Taylor, the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, though, defended Australia's stance.
"We have made responsible, achievable and balanced commitments to reduce our emissions and we have a strong track record in meeting and beating our targets," Mr Taylor said.
"We will meet our Paris commitment to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and we will do this while growing the economy, creating jobs, protecting our environment and keeping power prices down."

The 367 million tonne Kyoto credit more than halves Australia's total carbon abatement effort for the 2021-30 decade - that will be costly to make up if the surplus plan falls through. Credit: The Australia Institute, using projections by Tim Baxter, University of Melbourne.

"We have already over-achieved on our commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, exceeding our 2012 targets and expecting to exceed our 2020 targets by 328 million tonnes - something few countries have done," Mr Taylor said.
The Bonn talks were largely focused on preparing the rules for Article 6 of the Paris Agreement ahead of a Conference of the Parties (COP25) summit in Santiago, Chile later this year. The article is one of the main unresolved issues from the pact signed in Paris in 2015.
The Carbon Pulse newswire said while the new text agreed at Bonn had the potential to scupper Australia's plans to use Kyoto credits without a specific prohibition in place they would still be able to be banked.
Still, the newswire quoted Gilles Dufrasne of Carbon Market Watch as raising the issue of how such credits had undermined nations' abatement efforts.
"We have seen how damaging this has been under the Kyoto Protocol and we cannot afford to repeat the experience under the Paris Agreement," Mr Dufrasne said. "It is very important that [Kyoto Protocol] units are not allowed for use towards [national targets}."

Links

• Australia refuses to forfeit carryover credits in emissions accounting
• Australia likely to use controversial Kyoto loophole to meet Paris agreement
• Explained: why Kyoto carryover credits are so important
• Australia bending carbon credit
• Farmers accelerated land clearing after new laws, first figures reveal
• Audit Office blasts land-clearing rules as 'weak', enforcement 'rare'
• City of Sydney officially declares 'climate emergency'
• The push for genetically modified crops to combat climate change food shortages

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope Is Contagious'

The Guardian - Emma Brockes

One is America’s youngest-ever congresswoman, the other a Swedish schoolgirl. Two of the most powerful voices on the climate speak for the first time

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg. Photograph: Stephen Voss, Anna Schori/The Guardian 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez enters a boardroom at her constituency office in Queens, New York, after a short delay which, a political aide hopes, hasn’t been caused by a constituent waylaying her in the corridor. (“They can get really excited to meet her.”) Greta Thunberg is in her home in Sweden, her father testing the technology for the video link while the teenager waits in the background. The activists have never met nor spoken but, as two of the most visible climate campaigners in the world, they are keenly aware of each other.
Thunberg, now 16, catapulted to fame last year for skipping school every Friday to stand outside the Swedish parliament, protesting against political inaction over the climate crisis and sparking an international movement, the school strike for climate, in which millions of other children followed suit. Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district is, at 29, the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress, whose election over a well-funded incumbent in 2018 was a huge upset to politics-as-usual. She has been in office for less than a year, which seems extraordinary given the amount of coverage she has generated. In February, Ocasio-Cortez submitted the Green New Deal to the US House of Representatives, calling for, among other things, the achievement of “net-zero” greenhouse gases within a decade and “a full transition off fossil fuels”, as well as retrofitting all buildings in the US to meet new energy efficient standards.
The Green New Deal, while garnering support from Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, was mocked by speaker Nancy Pelosi (“the green dream or whatever they call it”), and defeated in the Senate by Republicans. Like Thunberg, however, Ocasio-Cortez gives every appearance of being galvanised by opposition, and has the kind of energy that has won her 4.41 million Twitter followers and makes establishment politicians in her path very nervous.
In the course of their conversation, Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg discuss what it is like to be dismissed for their age, how depressed we should be about the future, and what tactics, as an activist, really work. Ocasio-Cortez speaks with her customary snap and brilliance that, held up against the general waffle of political discourse, seems startlingly direct. Thunberg, meanwhile, is phenomenally articulate, well-informed and self-assured, holding her own in conversation with an elected official nearly twice her age and speaking in deliberate, thoughtful English. They are, in some ways, as different as two campaigners can get – the politician working the system with Washington polish, and the teenager in her socks and leggings, working from her bedroom to reach the rest of the world. There is something very moving about the conversation between these young women, a sense of generational rise that, as we know from every precedent from the Renaissance onwards, has the power to ignite movements and change history.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez It’s such an honour to meet you!

Greta Thunberg You, too!

AOC Thank you. I’m so excited to be having this conversation. I remember first hearing your speech a few months ago – I was hanging out with a friend in Harlem, who said, “Have you listened to this young woman?” And I heard your speech and was thrilled, because here in the United States, even when I was running, people were saying there’s no need to convey this kind of urgency [about the climate], and it’s radical, and it’s unnecessary. To hear you articulate the belief that I’ve had as well is so exciting and validating. So I wanted to thank you for your work and your advocacy.

GT Thank you so much for standing up and offering hope to so many people, even here in Sweden.

People say, 'Don’t politicise young people.' It’s almost a taboo. I find it very condescending

AOC One of the things I’m interested in hearing from you is that often people say, “Don’t politicise young people.” It’s almost a taboo. That to have someone as young as you coming out in favour of political positions is manipulative or wrong. I find it very condescending, as though, especially in this day and age with the access to information we have, you can’t form your own opinions and advocate for yourself. I’m interested in how you approach that – if anyone brings that up with you?

GT That happens all the time. That’s basically all I hear. The most common criticism I get is that I’m being manipulated and you shouldn’t use children in political ways, because that is abuse, and I can’t think for myself and so on. And I think that is so annoying! I’m also allowed to have a say – why shouldn’t I be able to form my own opinion and try to change people’s minds?
But I’m sure you hear that a lot, too; that you’re too young and too inexperienced. When I see all the hate you receive for that, I honestly can’t believe how you manage to stay so strong.

AOC I think the thing that people sometimes don’t realise is that here in the United States, because of the gap between the rich and the poor, people really identify Wall Street as a very potent political force. With our rules, politicians are allowed to accept campaign contributions on a level that is probably beyond what happens in other parts of the world.
But what people don’t recognise is how strong the fossil fuel lobby is. The Koch brothers in the US have essentially purchased the entire Republican party, but people forget they made their money off oil and gas. That is where their fortune comes from. And I think that’s what we’re up against. So the severity of the pushback indicates the power that we are challenging. You can look at that with despair, or you can look at it with hope. That’s how strong we are: we’re so strong that we’re able to take this on credibly and actually build a movement against it.

‘Why should we argue about who or what needs to change first? Why not take the leading role?’ Photograph: Stephen Voss, Anna Schori/The Guardian 

GT Yes, I mean, the oil lobby is huge in the US, and we also have that kind of lobby in Sweden. Not as much, but...

AOC What is the most effective tactic in gaining attention for the environmental movement? What have you done, or what have been the practices that have been most galvanising?

GT I think this whole movement in which I just sat down in front of the parliament, alone – I think that had a huge impact, because people saw it and were moved, and became emotional. Millions of children around the world, striking and saying, “Why should we study for a future that may not exist any more?” This is not only me, but everyone in the movement.

AOC Another question I have for you is that a lot of people talk about Sweden and other Nordic countries as an inspiration. People say that [advanced thinking around the climate crisis] could never happen in the US, because we’re a multiracial democracy – the fact that Sweden and other places are more homogenous means they’re able to get along better. That because of the racial diversity here, and issues with immigration and so on, there’s no way we can come together in order to combat this. I’m interested in what you say in response to that.

GT Many people, especially in the US, see countries like Sweden or Norway or Finland as role models – we have such a clean energy sector, and so on. That may be true, but we are not role models. Sweden is one of the top 10 countries in the world when it comes to the highest ecological footprints, according to the WWF – if you count the consumer index, then we are among the worst per capita.
In Sweden, the most common argument that we shouldn’t act is that we are such a small country with only 10 million inhabitants – we should focus more on helping other countries. That is so incredibly frustrating, because why should we argue about who or what needs to change first? Why not take the leading role?

AOC We hear the same exact argument here. And this is the United States of America! People say, “Well, we should wait for China to do something.” There’s this political culture of people trying to say America First – that the US is the best nation in the world, yet at the same time they’re saying, “Well, China’s not doing it, why should we?”
And I think it’s the same argument: are we going to choose to lead, or are we going to sit on our hands? It seems as if they take pride in leading on fracking, on being the number one in oil, in consumption, in single-use plastics. But they don’t seem to want to take pride in leading on the environment and leading for our children.

GT Yes. I mean, countries like Sweden or the US, since we are rich countries, need to go first. Because people in poor countries need to be able to raise their standard of living. We have a duty to lead when we already have, basically, everything.

People think of leadership as this glamorous, powerful thing. But leadership is a responsibility. Leadership is not fun

AOC Yes. People think of leadership as this glamorous, powerful thing. To be a leader is to come first, to set the agenda. But what people don’t realise is that leadership is also enormously difficult. Leadership is a responsibility. Leadership is not fun. Leadership is about doing things before anybody else does them. Leadership is about taking risks. Leadership is about taking decisions when you don’t know 100% what the outcome is going to be.
It’s enormously easy to follow – it’s the easiest thing in the world. And there are detriments to following. You are too late. You do not control your destiny. You are not in control, period. You are often under the thumb of someone else. But it is enormously easy because you don’t have to determine the future. It seems as if, really, it’s a decision on whether we’re going to lead or not.
I wonder what, to you, is encouraging, and what keeps you going? There’s a school of thought – I personally disagree with it – that says if you educate people too much [about the climate] they’re going to think it’s too late and they’re going to wallow in despair and not act at all. So I’m curious, given how daunting the issue is, why aren’t you so filled with despair that you’re staying on your couch every day, and just waiting for the apocalypse? [Laughs]

GT Before I started school striking, I was like that. I was so depressed and I didn’t want to do anything, basically. But what I find encouraging is having all these people who are fighting on different sides in different ways, to create a better future and to make us avoid catastrophic climate breakdown.
The school-striking children, when I see them – that is very hopeful. And also the fact that people are very unaware of the climate crisis. I mean, people aren’t continuing like this and not doing anything because they are evil, or because they don’t want to. We aren’t destroying the biosphere because we are selfish. We are doing it simply because we are unaware. I think that is very hopeful, because once we know, once we realise, then we change, then we act.

AOC I had a similar tipping point, although it had more to do with income inequality. Many people know that several years ago I was working in a restaurant, and I had gone to college, and I had worked on so many things, but my family had fallen in to a lot of misfortune – my father had gotten sick and so on. And I was working in this restaurant and I would go, day in and day out, and I was so depressed. I felt so powerless, and as though there was nothing I could do that could effectively counter the enormous number of societal structures that are designed in the US to keep the working class poor, and to keep the rich, richer.

‘Hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions.’ Photograph: Stephen Voss, Anna Schori/The Guardian 

I was really wallowing in despair for a while: what do I do? Is this my life? Just showing up, working, knowing that things are so difficult, then going home and doing it again. And I think what was profoundly liberating was engaging in my first action – when I went to Standing Rock, in the Dakotas, to fight against a fracking pipeline. It seemed impossible at the time. It was just normal people, showing up, just standing on the land to prevent this pipeline from going through. And it made me feel extremely powerful, even though we had nothing, materially – just the act of standing up to some of the most powerful corporations in the world.
From there I learned that hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope.

I remember the first day I was school-striking outside the Swedish parliament, I felt so alone. But I was hopeful

GT Yeah. I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, “What should I do?” And I say: “Act. Do something.” Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression. I remember the first day I was school-striking outside the Swedish parliament, I felt so alone, because everyone went straight past, no one even looked at me. But at the same time I was hopeful.

AOC It’s true that people don’t know when those small actions can manifest into something. I’ve seen it even in office. There’s so much cynicism about, how powerful can this be? Just me showing up?
I think sometimes we’re so obsessed with measurement. What does me standing outside of parliament with a sign do? It doesn’t lower any carbon emissions immediately. It doesn’t change any laws directly. But what it does is make powerful people feel something, and people underestimate the power of that. It is becoming harder and harder for elected officials to look people in the eye.
Just this morning I was sent a picture of an older gentleman from the midwest, which has just seen some catastrophic flooding – we’re starting to see flooding in the US where there was never flooding before. In the midwest there’s a disaster package that’s not getting passed, and he was just there with a sign saying, “Do you care about me?” He stood outside the congressional building, knowing that members are going to have to pass him by, and it’s very much inspired, I would say, by the actions that you’ve taken.
The biggest weapon people have is to try to make you think that you don’t matter. It is to say, “This doesn’t change anything.” Because if you can convince people that it doesn’t matter, then they won’t do it and people can go on as though it’s business as usual. We are no longer at the point of preventing [climate disaster] from happening entirely – we are now at the point of minimising the damage. And as these floods and storms are here, I think more and more people are going to be willing to stand up for themselves.

GT I have a question. I have heard about how bad the situation is in the US with climate denialism, but I find it very hard to believe. It’s bad here in Sweden – but I have seen reports of how little the US media mentions the climate crisis and how it is treated. How bad is it really?

AOC I would say that it has historically been very, very bad. But it’s actually getting much better.
In the 1970s, ExxonMobil had internal science that not only definitively proved that climate change was real, but they themselves, the oil company, invested in modelling to see how bad it was going to be. Some of their models were so sophisticated that, back in the 70s, they were predicting our weather patterns as far out as 2012 – and many of them were accurate. They knew exactly what was happening.
So what they did, starting the year I was born, around 1989, was to start funding a lot of media and lobbying campaigns. They knew they couldn’t fund campaigns outright saying climate change is not real. But they could fund campaigns sowing confusion. So they would run campaigns saying we need to see more science, to sow doubt around the consensus. For a very long time it worked, and it got very bad. We came very close to acting on the climate in 1989, but the lobbying was so powerful that they effectively prevented action – we had almost 40% of Republican voters not believing that climate change was settled fact.
But I think because of our advocacy and our movement, those numbers have been dropping precipitously in just the last few years. And in the last year especially, with our push for a Green New Deal, connecting everything that is happening to climate change. People who cover increasingly worse hurricanes as though they are accidents, or just things that happen – now, every time a storm comes, we talk about climate change. The other piece of it is not just acknowledging that it’s real, but prioritising it as a top issue. We just received some very encouraging numbers yesterday – a year or two years ago, only 20% of Democratic voters, the more liberal voters in the country, saw climate change as a top issue. With our action, and the youth organising that’s going on now, it has surged. We’ve seen in very early voting states, something like 70% of Democratic voters think that a Green New Deal should be a top issue, and that they would support candidates who support it, and not supporting it is a red flag for many voters. I think we’re moving, but it takes this radical action to move it.
We have historically had an issue with media coverage of the climate crisis – I think they don’t realise that not covering it is just as bad as denying it. We have issues because much of our media is profit-driven, and if it doesn’t drive ratings they will not cover it as much. But we simply don’t have a choice. We have to do this.

GT I saw very recent numbers, I think it was yesterday, that suggested about 2% of Sweden’s population don’t believe in the climate crisis. Here it’s not as acceptable to not believe in it. Everyone accepts that it’s a fact. But still we aren’t talking about it, and it’s not a priority. We are just treating it like any other issue.

AOC Why do you think young people have been more powerful and persuasive on this issue, in particular?

GT Many reasons, but I think the main one is that it is our future that is at risk. Most of us know that this is going to affect us in our lifetimes – it’s not just something that might happen in the future. It’s already here and it’s going to get worse, and many of us understand that this is going to make our lives much worse. And also that as young people, we aren’t as used to the system. We don’t say, “It’s always been like this, we can’t change anything.”

AOC I’ve always said to people that youth is a mindset. And young people, we tend to come in and almost take that mindset for granted because as you said, we haven’t seen the world before, this is our first path, and so we have a tendency to question all of the nonsensical things that have just gone on for reasons of outdated logic. I have three- and four-year-old nieces and nephews, and they’re always asking, “Why, why, why, why?” For a lot of people it can be somewhat irritating. But I think sometimes it’s irritating because they don’t have the answers.
You can be much older and still part of a youth movement, if you refuse to do things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done. I believe that young people just have a natural distillation of the world that is so pure. I’ve always felt that social movements, and youth movements in particular, should continue to be the moral compass that guides our vision.

GT Yes, it always reminds me a lot of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone believes in this lie, that only a child dares to question.

AOC Right. When I was first running [for office], people often mocked me as a child. I’m much older than you! But I was still very young for someone who was running for such a powerful seat. People would say, “But don’t you know this is how it’s always been done? He has so much money, and power. There’s no reason you should challenge someone in your own party – we should challenge people in other parties.” And so on and so forth. And they were all veiled ways of saying I was too inexperienced, too naive, too young, and too powerless.
I think the mere refusal to accept that can change our world. That’s exactly what you’ve done.

GT I think we’ve both done that.

GT I don’t fly for climate reasons so it’s not 100% yet, but we are figuring it out. It’s very hard, but I think it should be possible.

AOC That’s incredible. I’m so excited to follow that. Let us know how we can help from over here. I think one of the things that we need to start communicating is that this a global struggle, and it’s not about what is Sweden doing, and what is the US doing – it’s about what are all of us doing, as one movement? I think the power of that is very real. I wish you well, and I know many members of Congress who would be thrilled to meet you.

GT Thank you so much.

AOC Thank you so much, Greta. Be sure to let us know when you have an arrival date. If you land in New York, we will give you a Queens’ welcome!

Greta Thunberg says that she is planning to travel to the US in August, so she can attend the UN Climate Action summit on 23 September.

Links

• ‘Now I Am Speaking To The Whole World.’ How Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Got Everyone To Listen
• The Uncanny Power Of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric
• The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future
• Green New Deal: Ocasio-Cortez unveils bold plan to fight climate change
• ‘People are dying': Ocasio-Cortez delivers fiery speech on climate inaction – video
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's controversial Green New Deal is America's most ambitious — and criticised — climate policy to date