15/10/2019

Traditional Owners Urge Climate Change Policy Makers To Witness Mangrove Devastation

ABC News - Jane Bardon

Patsy Evans said she was devastated by what she saw when visiting the mangroves of the Gulf of Carpentaria. (ABC News: Jane Bardon)
Key points
  • Scientists have said the severity of the mangrove dieback is on a par with Great Barrier Reef bleaching
  • The Top End is experiencing sea level rise at two to three times global averages
  • The CSIRO is warning the world is not on track to halt sea level rise


Traditional owners are devastated by the lack of recovery at the site of Australia's worst recorded mangrove dieback and are calling for action to limit climate change threats.
Traditional owner Patsy Evans had hoped there would be signs of recovery at the site of the mangrove dieback, in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
But during a recent visit to the area for the first time since 2015, when she and her husband alerted the Northern Territory Government to the extent of the damage, she was devastated by the scene.
"This is bad, worse, it's unbelievable, I can't even believe what's happening here," Ms Evans said.
She said she wanted policy makers to see how climate change was affecting the land near her home on the Limmen River, 750 kilometres south of Darwin.
"Go out and see what's happening, be aware and look at it, and don't make decisions where you are," she said.


The Top End is on the front line of Australia's most severe climate challenges (ABC News)

The mangroves were once nurseries for the mud crab, barramundi and prawn fisheries, but now consist mainly of dead trees and dusty earth.
The few live seedlings coming through are exposed, and vulnerable to damage from the fallen dead trees.
"Through the mangroves you get a lot of bush tucker, mud mussels and shells, and they're all just dead. It just makes me feel sad," Ms Evans said.
Scientists from Queensland and Northern Territory universities said one contributing factor was a temporary drop in sea levels, caused by a change in the trade winds, which left the forests unusually high and dry.
But they said another factor in the dieback along 1,000 kilometres of coastline was climate change and a sharp increase in the sea temperature.
Dead shellfish now line the coastline, where mangroves used to thrive. (ABC News: Jane Bardon)

On par with Great Barrier Reef bleaching
"We can't see any other driver of the dieback other than the extreme climatic envelope has shifted," Charles Darwin University professor Lindsay Hutley said.
Dr Hutley said the extent and duration of the dieback was on a par with the severity of Great Barrier Reef bleaching.
"It's the canary on the coastline; it's quite significant, probably globally significant," he said.
Madeline Goddard and Lindsay Hutley are seeing mangroves move inland. (ABC News: Jane Bardon)

Along with colleague Madeline Goddard, Dr Hutley has been researching other impacts of climate change on mangroves.
They've found mangroves have been adapting to climate change and sea level changes by moving inland.
"In parts of the Top End we are experiencing some of the highest sea level rises in the world," Ms Goddard said.
"If we give mangroves space, the whole forest can move landward, until they hit manmade barriers, and then they are at risk of drowning.
"That they are shifting, to this large degree, because of these climate change influences, is a warning to us."
Polar icecap melting underestimated
The CSIRO has mapped the average sea level rise of the Top End at between six and 13 millimetres a year — two to three times the rate off southern Australia and the global average.
Professor Stephen Garnett has said the Top End may have a sea level rise of a metre by the end of the century. (ABC News: Jane Bardon)
"That is partly because north of here we've got the Arafura Sea, which lies on top of the Continental Shelf, and so it's very shallow and so it warms up very quickly," Stephen Garnett from the Charles Darwin University Research Institute for the Environment said.
"So, we're looking at a metre rise by the end of the century, and we've already had a fifth of that," Professor Garnett said.
CSIRO Sea Level and Coastal Extremes senior researcher Kathy McInnes said even if the Global Paris emissions reduction targets were met, that would not be enough to stop this rate of sea level rise.
Dr McInnes said the impacts of polar icecap melting on sea level rise had also been underestimated.
Northern Australia's mangroves could be under threat from rising sea levels. (ABC News: Nick Hose)
She warned that would leave the Top End vulnerable to more impacts like mangrove dieback.
"We can expect greater frequency at which extreme events can occur, and this can lead to cascading impacts on society and ecosystems like the massive dieback of mangroves," she said.
"The compounding effect of that can be felt years down the track because of the flow on effect into our fishing industry, when stocks of both prawns and fish species drop."

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If Warming Exceeds 2°C, Antarctica’s Melting Ice Sheets Could Raise Seas 20 Metres In Coming Centuries

The Conversation -  | 

During the Pliocene, up to one third of Antarctica’s ice sheet melted, causing sea-level rise of 20 metres. www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-ND
We know that our planet has experienced warmer periods in the past, during the Pliocene geological epoch around three million years ago.
Our research, published today, shows that up to one third of Antarctica’s ice sheet melted during this period, causing sea levels to rise by as much as 20 metres above present levels in coming centuries.
We were able to measure past changes in sea level by drilling cores at a site in New Zealand, known as the Whanganui Basin, which contains shallow marine sediments of arguably the highest resolution in the world.
Using a new method we developed to predict the water level from the size of sand particle moved by waves, we constructed a record of global sea-level change with significantly more precision than previously possible.
The Pliocene was the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were above 400 parts per million and Earth’s temperature was 2°C warmer than pre-industrial times. We show that warming of more than 2°C could set off widespread melting in Antarctica once again and our planet could be hurtling back to the future, towards a climate that existed three million years ago.

 Overshooting the Paris climate target
Last week we saw unprecedented global protests under the banner of Greta Thunberg’s #FridaysForFuture climate strikes, as the urgency of keeping global warming below the Paris Agreement target of 2°C hit home. Thunberg captured collective frustration when she chastised the United Nations for not acting earlier on the scientific evidence. Her plea resonated as she reminded us that:
With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO₂ budget [1.5°C] will be entirely gone in less than eight and a half years.
At the current rate of global emissions we may be back in the Pliocene by 2030 and we will have exceeded the 2°C Paris target. One of the most critical questions facing humanity is how much and how fast global sea levels will rise.
According to the recent special report on the world’s oceans and cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), glaciers and polar ice sheets continue to lose mass at an accelerating rate, but the contribution of polar ice sheets, in particular the Antarctic ice sheet, to future sea level rise remains difficult to constrain.
If we continue to follow our current emissions trajectory, the median (66% probability) global sea level reached by the end of the century will be 1.2 metres higher than now, with two metres a plausible upper limit (5% probability). But of course climate change doesn’t magically stop after the year 2100.

 Drilling back to the future
To better predict what we are committing the world’s future coastlines to we need to understand polar ice sheet sensitivity. If we want to know how much the oceans will rise at 400ppm CO₂, the Pliocene epoch is a good comparison.
Back in 2015, we drilled cores of sediment deposited during the Pliocene, preserved beneath the rugged hill country at the Whanganui Basin. One of us (Timothy Naish) has worked in this area for almost 30 years and identified more than 50 fluctuations in global sea level during the last 3.5 million years of Earth’s history. Global sea levels had gone up and down in response to natural climate cycles, known as Milankovitch cycles, which are caused by long-term changes in Earths solar orbit every 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years. These changes in turn cause polar ice sheets to grow or melt.
While sea levels were thought to have fluctuated by several tens of metres, up until now efforts to reconstruct the precise amplitude had been thwarted by difficulties due to Earth deformation processes and the incomplete nature of many of the cycles.
Our research used a well-established theoretical relationship between the size of the particles transported by waves on the continental shelf and the depth to the seabed. We then applied this method to 800 metres of drill core and outcrop, representing continuous sediment sequences that span a time period from 2.5 to 3.3 million years ago.
We show that during the Pliocene, global sea levels regularly fluctuated between five to 25 metres. We accounted for local tectonic land movements and regional sea-level changes caused by gravitational and crustal changes to determine the sea-level estimates, known as the PlioSeaNZ sea-level record. This provides an approximation of changes in global mean sea level.

Antarctica’s contribution to sea-level rise
Our study also shows that most of the sea-level rise during the Pliocene came from Antarctica’s ice sheets. During the warm Pliocene, the geography of Earth’s continents and oceans and the size of polar ice sheets were similar to today, with only a small ice sheet on Greenland during the warmest period. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would have contributed at most five metres to the maximum 25 metres of global sea-level rise recorded at Whanganui Basin.
Of critical concern is that over 90% of the heat from global warming to date has gone into the ocean. Much of it has gone into the Southern Ocean, which bathes the margins of Antarctica’s ice sheet.
Already, we are observing warm circumpolar deep water upwelling and entering ice shelf cavities in several sites around Antarctica today. Along the Amundsen Sea coast of West Antarctica, where the ocean has been heating the most, the ice sheet is thinning and retreating the fastest. One third of Antarctica’s ice sheet — the equivalent to up to 20 metres of sea-level rise — is grounded below sea level and vulnerable to widespread collapse from ocean heating.
Our study has important implications for the stability and sensitivity of the Antarctic ice sheet and its potential to contribute to future sea levels. It supports the concept that a tipping point in the Antarctic ice sheet may be crossed if global temperatures are allowed to rise by more than 2℃. This could result in large parts of the ice sheet being committed to melt-down over the coming centuries, reshaping shorelines around the world.

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From Kerri-Anne To The Masked Stinger: How Australia's Media Covered Extinction Rebellion

The Guardian - 

The Daily Mail promised nudity, the Daily Telegraph tried to generate buzz while the West Australian ran a blank front page
Studio 10’s Kerri-Anne Kennerley suggested Extinction Rebellion protesters be used as speed humps or be locked up in jail and starved. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP 
Daily Telegraph reporter Mitchell Van Homrigh got dressed up in a bee costume to go “undercover” with Extinction Rebellion but his stunt wasn’t even the most foolish response to the mass protests we saw this week.
After making all the bee puns he could think of, Van Homrigh admitted he found the protesters “passionate and kind and helpful to this blind little bee”. But he finished by reverting to the Joe Hildebrand school of argument about how little the protest would help their cause.
“Would these people be better off directing their passions towards developing programs and policy that enact their vision?” he wondered as he removed his bee head.
Hildebrand had earlier declared in his weekly news.com.au column that global action for climate change was a waste of time unless the protesters had a solution, as “passion on its own achieves nothing without a practical plan to back it up”.
“Romeo and Juliet were passionate and look what happened to them,” the Studio 10 co-host wrote, before conceding that marching was at least better than doing drugs.
But it was Hildebrand’s occasional co-host on Studio 10, Kerri-Anne Kennerley, who stole the headlines with the most offensive response to the protests.
Kennerley suggested that protesters be used as speed bumps. Or better still locked up in jail and starved: “Put ’em in jail, forget to feed them,” she said.
“Personally, I would leave them all superglued to wherever they do it,” Kennerley said when the panel discussed the disruption to the cities the protesters were causing. “The guy hanging from the Story Bridge. Why send emergency services? Leave him there until he gets himself out. No emergency services should help them, nobody should do anything and you just put little witches’ hats around them or use them as a speed bump.”
Channel 10, which this week narrowly missed censure for an earlier ill-advised comment by Kennerley, later insisted the veteran TV presenter was only joking.
“This morning on Studio 10 Kerri-Anne Kennerley made comments regarding climate protesters that were said in jest,” a spokesman said. “Before the show concluded, Sarah Harris reiterated the tone of her remarks, affirming that Kerri-Anne wasn’t inciting violence.
“Kerri-Anne confirmed that she was indeed speaking in hyperbole and her words were clearly a joke. There was no intent to cause offence. Over the past few days, Studio 10 has extensively addressed a range of opinions on this subject.”
The Australian’s media editor, Leo Shanahan, saw nothing amiss with KAK’s call, describing her rant as “sage advice”.
“Kerri-Anne Kennerley has some sage advice to Extinction Rebellion protesters: just stay on the road”, the Oz said.
It wasn’t just Ten that was all class this week. The media tripped over each other to put the worst light on the protesters who were using civil disobedience to get the attention of governments. Seven breakfast host Samantha Armytage said the protesters were annoying people to get on TV.
“So you deliberately want to annoy people, so you appear on national television,” Armytage said. “What is your message? What are you trying to do?”
Nine’s A Current Affair took the theme of the inconvenienced punter to the extreme, finding a woman stuck in traffic who was on her way to clear out her late mother’s nursing home. Her mother had died on Sunday and now she had been blocked by the protest.
“Fuck the environment,” the distressed daughter said. “People are more important.
“They think [protesting] is so important but what is important is the everyday, good Australian people just trying to go about their everyday lives. It’s not fair.”
The Daily Telegraph blogger Tim Blair kept score of the arrests in each city, as if it were a sporting competition. His best line in National Climate Comp: Sydney Going for Gold was suggesting that the protesters must be on “electric lettuce”, also known as marijuana.
The West Australian editor, Anthony De Ceglie, thought he had an even better gimmick, running a large blank space on his front page.
“The climate change ‘rebellion’ plans to bring its protests to the doors of the West Australian today,” he editorialised. “This is a democracy. And we support free speech and peaceful demonstration. In that spirit, here’s a blank front page for your placards. Use it wisely.”
But the last word should go to the Daily Mail, which got way too excited about the possibility of nudity, with activists planning to “get their gear off”.
“A NAKED parade and traffic stopping rave: how Extinction Rebellion plan to bring Australia to a standstill during week of mayhem over climate change,” the headline said on Tuesday.

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14/10/2019

Parliamentarians Deserve Our Wrath For 30 Years Of Inaction, Not Climate Protesters

The Guardian - 

Supposedly progressive leaders like Annastacia Palaszczuk make you wonder if Gen X is worse on climate than baby boomers
‘Our media discourse this week was flooded with comments by 40- and 50-year-olds wondering who the Extinction Rebellion are trying to convince: “I’m all for action on climate change, but ...” and “Don’t they realise you catch more flies with honey?” ’ Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP
One of my favourite lines in an article on the climate crisis is by American science journalist Sharon Begley: “If a rich technologically advanced nation won’t put its own house in order, then developing countries have a perfect excuse to do nothing.”
She also wrote in the same article: “For those who fear that the greenhouse will arrive – and no responsible scientist denies that possibility – it seems imperative to take immediate steps to mitigate it.”
Great lines. Written 30 years ago.
Begley wrote them in the same 1989 Newsweek magazine that reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is astonishing how little has changed.
In the same article she noted that car companies like Ford were strongly opposing any moves to introduce emission cuts that targeted the industry – “it would throw industry into a tailspin and have minimal environmental impact”, one spokesperson suggested. This week the Guardian found that car manufacturers have “been pouring millions of dollars through industry bodies into lobbying efforts to challenge attempts to tackle global heating in the past four years”.
And in the 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall that nothing has changed is a damning indictment on our political and media systems.
But it would be wrong to blame only those in power 30 years ago, for what we have seen this week is that blame can be well and truly passed down to the following generation of political leaders.
Gen X is as guilty as the much-maligned baby boomers.
As a member of that most cynical and sarcastic generation, who spent our youth mocking baby boomers who preached revolution and then sold out into the Me Generation as soon as a high-income tax cut and four-bedroom home with a two-car garage was dangled before their eyes, we must acknowledge that the answer to the question of “Are we the baddies?” is yes.
All that cynicism has mostly been translated into complacency.
Our media discourse this week was flooded with comments by 40- and 50-year-olds wondering who the Extinction Rebellion are trying to convince: “I’m all for action on climate change, but ... ” and “Don’t they realise you catch more flies with honey?”
We thought we were Rage Against the Machine but we are really FM Easy Listening.
Thirty years of inaction. Thirty years of waiting. Thirty years of playing nice.
If you think that strategy has worked, then you probably think the Queensland Labor party is a progressive government.
You can understand the reaction to protesters by arch-conservative Gen Xers like the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, who it appears sees a day without stripping people of their civil liberties as a day wasted. But when you see notionally progressive Gen X leaders like the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, rushing through legislation to prevent these protests you have to wonder not only what is the point of the ALP, but whether my generation is worse on climate change than baby boomers.
Palaszczuk tweeted that “everyone has the right to protest in this state” but then added the caveat: “It’s when extreme protesters using dangerous devices put at risk our emergency services & hinder people going about their daily business that it oversteps the mark.”
Forget that there is zero evidence that anyone in the Extinction Rebellion movement is using dangerous devices, but if hindering people going about their daily business is the new standard, then protest in the state has effectively become something allowed only in cases when it is neither seen nor heard. Which, it seems, would suit Palaszczuk just fine.
It is rather disappointing that she is so eager to embrace laws that Joh Bjelke-Petersen and any number of conservative autocrats would embrace. After all she had to battle oppression and malevolent forces all through her youth to get to the point of *checks notes* taking over the safe parliamentary seat her father held for over a decade.
Still, at least her opposition to climate change protest is not one that will see her alienated in the ALP. This week, federal MP Joel Fitzgibbon suggested Labor should adopt the LNP’s Paris agreement target of a 26%-28% cut in emissions from 2005 levels. That cut in reality is closer to 15% once you take into account carry-over credits and dodgy accounting, and which is massively short of the minimum 45% cut that scientists argue is needed.
It is rather disappointing that Fitzgibbon is so eager to capitulate to the government. After all he had to had to battle oppression and malevolent forces all through his youth to get to the point of *checks notes* taking over the safe parliamentary seat his father held for over a decade.
Look I get it – it is annoying to have you day disrupted. But don’t come at me with arguments that amount to basically doing what has been done for 30 years and expecting anything real to happen.
The problem is it has been easy to ignore climate-change activism and as a result ignore the issue completely. Non-violent resistance is about resisting, not just being non-violent.
And it is about provoking the inevitable overreaction by those in power – the same overreaction that occurred during civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests. An overreaction that saw the New South Wales and Victorian police demand bail conditions on protests so onerous you would assume they were dreamed up in a Palaszczuk-Dutton group chat.


'The arrests make a point,' say Extinction Rebellion protesters in Australia.

Thankfully those like the ALP’s Mark Butler quickly condemned Fitzgibbon’s suggestion, and others in the party have criticised Palaszczuk’s new laws, so perhaps there remains some hope for it (but, as Richard Marles would suggest, prepare to be disappointed).
This week also came a report from the IMF that suggested even with a $111 carbon price, Australia would be unable to meet its Paris target. When the Gillard government introduced a carbon price seven years ago it was just $23.
That is the price of inaction.
At some point we need to get angry, but if your anger is directed at those protesting rather than at parliamentarians then I suspect you have consigned yourself to expecting nothing to change.
That’s fine, but own it. Realise if you are annoyed by them it’s because you have become more annoyed by protest than a lack of action. Don’t pretend to still be seeking change when your anger is directed at those trying desperately to make up for the past 30 years of wasted cynicism and complacency.

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If You Are Under 34, You Have Never Experienced A Month Of Below Average Temperatures

The Guardian - 

Of course the Extinction Rebellion protesters are angry. You should be too
  Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP 
This week has seen a mass worldwide protest on climate change. The Extinction Rebellion is playing for keeps, and the protesters are setting out to make noise and force politicians and authorities to deal with them.
If you think those protesting are just a bit too angry and annoying, let us remember the situation is urgent and is no longer something for future generations to worry about – we are at a point where a majority of Australians now living will be affected by its impact.
Last month came the news that July 2019 was the hottest month on record.
No big deal, just the hottest global average temperature in the 140 years of records kept by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not coincidentally, in the same month, Arctic sea-ice coverage hit a record low of 19.8% below average. Down our end of the planet, Antarctic sea-ice also shrank to an unprecedented level – some 4.3% below the 1981-2010 average.
The northern hemisphere summer just gone was the hottest on record as well. All this during a period when there was no El Niño to drive higher temperatures.
Oh, for the days when the deniers could proudly (if incorrectly) say “the world hasn’t warmed since 1998”. Back in 2008 Andrew Bolt was suggesting that was something that the mainstream media wanted to hide.
By 2010 he had changed to saying “the world hasn’t warmed since 2001”.
Here’s the reality: 16 of the past 21 years have been warmer than 1998.



At some point you would think the deniers would admit they have been found completely wanting. But no. Why do that when there is money to be made and votes to be won from making stuff up.
Here’s a little statistic to wrap your head around. The last year to experience global annual temperatures below the 1951-1980 average was 1976 – so if you are less than 43 years old you have never experienced a year with below average temperatures.
If you are under 34 you have not even experienced a month of below-average global temperatures – because the last such month was February 1985, and even that was a bit of an oddity as it was just the second such month in six years.
Even if you are 65 years old and ready for retirement, 79% of your life has been spent in a world with above-average temperatures:



But looking at total life is somewhat deceptive because of the past 42 straight years of above-average temperatures.
One way to show the real change is to look at what it was like for people’s first 40 years. If you are under 40 obviously you are stuffed – every year and almost every month has been above average.
The first lot of baby boomers – those born in 1946 – spent 52% of their first 40 years in a world with above-average temperatures. That is essentially what you would expect.
By contrast, I was born in 1972 and 89% of my first 40 years were hotter than the 1951-1980 average.



So it is clear the climate crisis is something that has affected younger people more, but let’s not be too suggestive about it being a young person’s problem. Because here’s the thing, 57% of Australia’s population is under 43 years old. Thus a sizeable majority of our citizens have never experienced a year with below-average global temperatures.
It’s a point that also makes you realise that “millennials” are not young any more. They are in their 30s and now getting to positions of power, but they remain a minority.
While 57% of our population has never experienced a year of below-average temperatures, only 45% of people above voting age can say that. And of current parliamentarians, just 18% of MPs and 11% of senators have never known a below-average year.

So you might understand why some are getting a tad impatient with the lack of action by those in power, and why they are not so impressed with talk about meeting Kyoto targets when it is obvious that accounting tricks are used to ensure Australia can say we are reducing emissions.
And you can understand why people are getting rather antsy about the fact that even with the carry-over credits and dodgy accounting of land use, we are still unlikely to meet our Paris target of 26% below 2005 levels.
And what is worse is that if we exclude land use, that 26% cut is a mere 15% below 2005 levels:



You can understand why people are ready to annoy those in authority when we look at where temperatures are going.
If we start from the climate-change deniers’ landmark year of 1998 (when climate change was said to have stalled), even a linear trend to the future has global temperatures reaching 2C above pre-industrial levels by 2056.
But no one thinks it will be a linear trend. The path suggested by the IPCC is closer to an exponential trend, in which we will hit 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2029 and 2C by 2042, when my daughter will be 10 years younger than I am now.



My father, a baby boomer, lived his first 40 years experiencing average temperatures. I, a typical Gen-Xer, spent 80% of my first 40 years with above-average temperatures, and my daughter faces a world where temperatures will be 2C above the pre-industrial average by the time she is 40.
Half of Australia’s current population is younger than 37. By 2042, the oldest will be just turning 60 – not even retired.
So are those involved in the Extinction Rebellion angry? You’re damn right they are.
And so should you be.

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It's No Accident That Girls Are Leading The Climate Movement

Sydney Morning Herald - Niamh O'Connor Smith*

I was sitting around a campfire at the beach when I started organising a strike for the first time. Six months later I was stepping onto the stage to MC the largest climate strike in Australian history – Melbourne’s September 20 School Strike for Climate.
Tens of thousands stood in solidarity with Climate Action then marched through the streets of Melbourne. Credit: Chris Hopkins
It was exhilarating yet nerve-racking, getting ready to speak to the sea of people in front of me, all there because they care about climate action and climate justice. It brought me such a powerful feeling, of hope and courage, that together we will create a safe future for everyone.
School Strike for Climate started with just one girl: Greta Thunberg. Now it is a huge movement; 7 million people strong. In Australia, Milou, Harriet and Callum started the strikes in my home town, Castlemaine.
You may have noticed some of the key players in this movement are girls. The person who started it all is a girl. Two of the three people who got the strikes going in Australia are girls. This empowers me and fills me with courage for the future of girls in leadership.
All over the world girls are leading this movement. But we are not alone. And we need everyone, regardless of age, gender and nationality to stand with us to call out the people in power for their inaction; to show the world we need climate justice action.
Getting everyone involved is the key to the movement. When more people get up and strike, it makes our collective voice stronger.
Girls possess a valuable quality of encouraging people to use their voices for what they believe in and empowering others around them. Not every girl has to lead, but through the many conversations they have every day, they spread the message and make people believe in a power everyone possesses inside of them.
Spreading courage and hope and being able to instil this power in others is an asset girls bring to this movement. With this strength, the climate strikes will only become more powerful.
Castlemaine schoolkids strike for the environment.
As the movement grows, it will reach more people and our government will have to listen and take action.
Often people come to the strikes calling for a safe green future. This is a major reason many choose to strike. A lot of them don’t realise people are already suffering the effects of the climate crisis. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and Pacific islanders are on the front lines of this crisis, facing rising sea levels, worse storms and crop failures. That is why climate justice is an integral part of School Strike for Climate in Australia. The strikes can raise the awareness of the hundreds of thousands who attend.
I must admit it’s frustrating when adults in positions of power tell us to go back to school, when they won’t listen to the science. If they took the advice of the world’s best climate scientists, we wouldn’t have to take days off school to strike.
As the strikes have grown in size, some politicians and commentators have chosen to criticise and bully. This will not stop us. In fact, it makes us stronger. With support from those around us, we will continue to fight through their torments because it means we are winning.
They say we as a nation are doing enough to tackle the climate crisis, while at the same time they are approving new coal mines and subsidising fossil fuels with taxpayers' money.
Our government is clearly not doing enough. We see the broken structure that is letting our planet die. As young people and girls, we are in a unique position to change the system, and so we strike.
Then they say that as students we should value our education. We do. We value our education very highly. As organisers, we dedicate many hours of our free time to making these strikes happen.
We make a choice to sacrifice our education on strike days because as students we don’t have the right to vote, so this is a way to make sure people in power hear our voices.
Everyone has a voice. For some of us, it is harder to use that voice and harder to make it heard. But when we band together, we can use our voices to fight for what is right. To fight against the injustice that is being dealt to this planet and its people.
As a girl, I have stepped up as a leader, and so can you. You can be the one stepping on the stage, making your voice heard and changing the world.

*Niamh O'Connor Smith is one of the original organisers of the Australian climate strikes.

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13/10/2019

A Little More Confusion Added To The Climate Policy Debate

Canberra Times - Michelle Grattan

Joel Fitzgibbon was on his mobile at a cafe at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney on Thursday when he encountered Scott Morrison getting a mid-morning coffee.
"You're making a lot of sense," Morrison said to Labor's resources spokesman, who'd set off a firestorm in his party by suggesting the ALP revise its climate policy to adopt the upper end of the government's target of reducing emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030.
"Your love won't help me, Prime Minister," Fitzgibbon shot back.
Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon during question time. Picture: Alex Ellinghausen
He's right there. Fitzgibbon's radical proposal has burst open the conundrum the opposition has in reshaping one of the ALP's centrepiece election pitches.
It's a great deal more complicated than, for example, dealing with the franking credits plan, which Labor can't afford to keep in its present form. That can be restructured, or dumped, without much political angst.
But the climate policy - for a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 and a target of net zero by 2050 - has become an article of faith within Labor, and among many of its supporters. It's also a policy that in the election split the voters Labor needed, attracting some but driving away others.
Weaken the policy and there will be a reaction from the ALP's inner city constituents, who tend to look toward the Greens out of the corner of their eye. Keep a very high target and lose people once again - to the Coalition or minor parties on the right - from the traditional base, including in regional areas, especially in Queensland where coal mining is a thing.
Fitzgibbon maintains that by adopting the 28 per cent target, Labor would not just be more acceptable to blue collar voters but would put more pressure on the government to act - although this latter point seems a stretch.
Getting to 28 per cent without destroying blue collar jobs or harming the economy would also provide "a great foundation" for prosecuting the case for further action, he claims.
Among the multiple problems Labor has in reviewing its policy is that it will be considering a more pragmatic, less ambitious approach just when the climate debate is once again taking off in public consciousness.
Protesters take over Commonwealth Avenue in a staged "die-in" in protest of climate change inaction. Picture: Peter Brewer
It's hard to assess precisely the extent to which the step-up in activism represents the wider public view. Indeed the civil disobedience demonstrations are infuriating some people because of the disruption. Nevertheless, the period ahead could see the issue biting more, as the ALP is considering easing back.
Given how quickly things change and the relevance of what other countries do, in strict policy terms Labor arguably would be best not to settle a policy until, say, early 2021, for a 2022 election. But the government (and the media) will be able to exploit a Labor vacuum, so that holding out does carry political cost.
Fitzgibbon, who represents the NSW coal seat of Hunter and experienced voter wrath in May, won't get the ambit claim he outlined this week. That would be going too far for the party, and for its climate spokesman Mark Butler who has a lot of reputation at stake. As soon as Fitzgibbon made public his proposal, Butler said it wouldn't be embraced by Labor, declaring it was "fundamentally inconsistent with the Paris Agreement and would lead to global warming of 3 degrees."
Fortunately for the government, Fitzgibbon's intervention reduced the attention on its energy policy, the inadequacy of which was again highlighted this week.
As the Coalition pushes ahead with seeking to get its "big stick" legislation to deal with recalcitrant power companies through parliament, criticisms of its policy came from, among others, the chair of the Energy Security Board Kerry Schott and the Grattan Institute.
Schott, whose board advises federal and state governments, wrote in The Australian Financial Review, ahead of the paper's energy summit, that "government interventions to cap prices and to effectively subsidise certain generation projects will not encourage the considerable new investment and innovation that is needed".
The Grattan Institute, which released a report on Australia's electricity markets, said the government's "fight to avoid the impending closure of the Liddell coal power station in NSW makes it harder for Australia to achieve its emissions reduction targets, and is likely to increase electricity prices and reduce the reliability of supplies".
The AFR summit saw much finger pointing, with Energy Minister Angus Taylor blaming industry for the lack of investment, and industry blaming the government.
Taylor said dismissively: "Time and again we've seen industry participants and commentators swept up in the excitement of complex new programs represented by the latest fashionable acronym that everyone pretends to understand but few ever do." Origin Energy's CEO Frank Calabria said "the mere existence of the big stick is acting as a handbrake on investment, right when we need investment the most".
In theory, Morrison could have tried to use the great authority his unexpected election win gave him to pursue more appropriate energy and emissions reduction policies. Admittedly, it would have been extremely difficult, as it would have contradicted much the government had been saying and doing.
But it was never an option. Morrison is either wilfully blind to what needs to be done (although when treasurer he supported the more rational policy of a National Energy Guarantee), or he is afraid to stir those powerful naysayers in his party.
So where are we left?
With a government stubbornly tied to a set of policies that experts insist won't deliver effective results. And an opposition that's in a funk about where it should position itself in the future.
Meanwhile Australia's overall emissions rise (although electricity emissions are down, as some coal fired power goes out of the system); high electricity prices remain a burden on private and business consumers alike; and there is nervousness about the summer power supply.

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