Palaszczuk Says She Will Veto Federal Adani Loan As She Accuses LNP Of 'Smear'

The Guardian - Joshua Robertson

Queensland premier says the LNP ‘intends to smear me and my partner’ over his work for PwC on Adani’s application for funding through Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility

Annastacia Palaszczuk, campaigning with deputy premier Jackie Trad on Friday. The Queensland premier has accused the LNP of intending to smear her. Photograph: Darren England/AAP

The Queensland government will veto Adani’s application for a $1bn commonwealth loan to build a rail line for its massive Carmichael mine, Annastacia Palaszczuk has said.
Palaszczuk said the dramatic move, amid her campaign for re-election, came in response to what she believed was a federal Coalition plan to “smear” her and her partner, Shaun Drabsch, over his role in Adani’s loan application to the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (Naif).
As the government is in caretaker mode, any move to veto the loan would need bipartisan support.
The move will be a heavy blow to the Indian mining giant’s attempt to win finance in China for the controversial coalmine, but puts the state Labor government on the right side of opinion polls on the issue.
Palaszczuk has accused some in the federal government of breaching commercial in confidence obligations around Naif to try to sabotage her campaign.
But the upshot of the rumours is that Palaszczuk has discovered she unwittingly had a perceived conflict of interest because her partner worked on an Adani loan bid her government may have been asked to sign off on.
Palaszczuk said she learned on Tuesday of “a rumour circulating among LNP senators” about Drabsch’s work as managing partner for PwC, which helped Adani with its Naif loan application.
“I am told they planned to use this during the election campaign to impugn my character and suggest something untoward,” she said.
Drabsch was involved in PwC’s work for Adani and its bid for the federal loan but she did not know this until after the rumour arose this week, Palaszczuk said.
Palaszczuk sought the advice of the Queensland integrity commissioner, who told her “a reasonable member of the public, properly informed” would perceive she now had a conflict of interest.
Palaszczuk said she now wanted to “remove doubt about any perception of conflict” by notifying the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, that “my government will exercise its ‘veto’ to not support the Naif loan”.
The premier said she had kept a 2015 election promise that “not one cent of taxpayers’ money would go to this company” and stopped the former LNP government “gifting $500m of taxpayers’ money to Adani” through a state loan for its Carmichael rail line.

Fact v fiction: Adani's Carmichael coal mine – video explainer

Palaszczuk said her announcement on Friday in Brisbane would be the first Adani was hearing of her decision. She will ask LNP leader Tim Nicholls to endorse her decision.
If Nicholls refuses, the issue of enabling federal financing for Adani will likely become the decisive dividing issue for Labor and LNP in the Queensland campaign until polling day on 25 November.
Labor strategists believe voters in regional Queensland who support the mine - and whom the party needs to win over to retain power - will not feel so strongly about taxpayer support being withdrawn.
“In terms of the project itself, Adani representatives have been on the public record numerous times indicating that they do not need Naif to proceed with this project,” Palaszczuk said.
“Malcolm Turnbull can still give taxpayers’ money to Adani if he wants to, but I won’t stand for his LNP operatives trying to smear my good name.”
Palaszczuk said she still supported the project and jobs for north Queensland but “I do acknowledge many Queenslanders have concerns about the potential for the federal government providing a loan to Adani”.
She released the integrity commissioner’s advice, which said it could be perceived that Palaszczuk “may personally benefit” from influencing decisions in favour of Drabsch or against rival Naif contenders.
The integrity commissioner, Nikola Stepanov, told Palaszczuk her conflict arose through her role in the government’s Cabinet Budget Review Committee (CBRC) – the state’s “approving authority” to execute Naif loans – and Drabsch’s business dealings.
The premier’s move to veto the loan goes well beyond the strongly “preferred option” recommended by Stepanov – that Palaszczuk declare a conflict of interest and exclude herself from CBRC discussions and decisions on Naif projects.
Palaszczuk also released letters in 2015 showing the integrity commissioner raised no concerns about her ethical position when Drabsch joined PWC to advise on infrastructure projects at a federal but not state level.
Palaszczuk said Drabsch had kept his work on the Adani application from May 2016 a secret from her under his “commercial-in-confidence” obligations.
“Shaun has always told me he’s worked at PwC, working on infrastructure, and that is it,” she said.
The only people who knew were PwC and Naif, and of course the Naif reports to the federal government,” Palaszczuk said.
“I understand LNP senators were seeking to use this as a smear against me in the middle of an election campaign.”
Palaszczuk’s chief of staff David Barbagallo told her on Tuesday that he had, after becoming aware of “rumours being circulated by LNP senators in Canberra”, confirmed that Drabsch worked on the Adani bid.
Palaszczuk said the LNP senators “obviously” sought to “break that commercial in confidence” around Drabsch, saying the extent of knowledge about this was a matter for both Turnbull and Nicholls to address.
“What does that say about the federal government when they are breaching commercial in confidence arrangements between a company and the federal government?”
Efforts to discredit her would involve “trying to allege there was a massive conflict of interest and seeking to tear down my position as premier of this state and tear down my integrity and honesty”, she said.
“I’m putting on the record every step I have taken and to put beyond any doubt about this, we will veto that loan.
“I entered politics to make a change, I actually want to make a change to people’s lives, not to be smeared at.
“And this sort of level of politics, I think the public find truly and utterly disgusting, as I do.”
Federal resources minister Matt Canavan was quoted by the ABC as saying the Queensland government had been “all over the shop on Adani”.
“Last year, they wrote to the Commonwealth Government suggesting that we look at funding the Adani rail line through the NAIF. Then, in May this year, the Deputy Premier, Jackie Trad, said the Labor Government wouldn’t participate in any NAIF loan to the Adani project, which would effectively block federal funding. The next day, Treasurer Curtis Pitt contradicted her, saying the Labor Government’s position was to support Adani being funded by NAIF, he was quoted as saying.
“This is a circus, and it puts thousands of people’s real jobs and real businesses at risk.”
The Guardian has been told the state Labor government was first warned by federal colleagues weeks ago that the LNP planned to raise in federal parliament allegations about a conflict of interest involving a Queensland minister. It was not clear at the time this was Palaszczuk.
The Queensland government does not assess Naif loans but can veto them by objecting at both a project’s “due diligence” and “investment decision and execution” stages.
Labor was first pressed on its veto power over the Adani loan when activists and others, including Greens Maiwar candidate and environmental lawyer Michael Berkman, raised it earlier this year.
The state government had previously refused to contemplate its veto power. Strategists within Labor judged that - even while polls show a majority in the state and nationwide oppose Adani receiving the government loan – supporting the project was a critical step to retaining marginal seats in regional Queensland, especially Townsville.

Links

• Why Adani's planned Carmichael coalmine matters to Australia – and the world
• Palaszczuk refutes claim report backs case for new coal-fired power
• Anti-Adani protests dog Palaszczuk's regional Queensland campaign
• Barnaby Joyce condemns Queensland's refusal to process federal loan for Adani rail line
• Adani mine: Palaszczuk faces factional fight to seal new royalties deal
• Adani offered $320m deferment of Carmichael coal export royalties

Climate Change 'Will Create World's Biggest Refugee Crisis'

The Guardian - Matthew Taylor

Experts warn refugees could number tens of millions in the next decade, and call for a new legal framework to protect the most vulnerable

Successive droughts, like those seen in sub-Saharan Africa, could cause millions to migrate to Europe. Photograph: Peter Caton/Tearfund

Tens of millions of people will be forced from their homes by climate change in the next decade, creating the biggest refugee crisis the world has ever seen, according to a new report.
Senior US military and security experts have told the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) study that the number of climate refugees will dwarf those that have fled the Syrian conflict, bringing huge challenges to Europe.
“If Europe thinks they have a problem with migration today … wait 20 years,” said retired US military corps brigadier general Stephen Cheney. “See what happens when climate change drives people out of Africa – the Sahel [sub-Saharan area] especially – and we’re talking now not just one or two million, but 10 or 20 [million]. They are not going to south Africa, they are going across the Mediterranean.”
The study published on Thursday calls on governments to agree a new legal framework to protect climate refugees and, ahead of next week’s climate summit in Germany, urges leaders to do more to implement the targets set out in the Paris climate agreement.
Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, told the EJF: “What we are talking about here is an existential threat to our civilisation in the longer term. In the short term, it carries all sorts of risks as well and it requires a human response on a scale that has never been achieved before.”

The report argues that climate change played a part in the build up to the Syrian war, with successive droughts causing 1.5 million people to migrate to the country’s cities between 2006 and 2011. Many of these people then had no reliable access to food, water or jobs.
“Climate change is the the unpredictable ingredient that, when added to existing social, economic and political tensions, has the potential to ignite violence and conflict with disastrous consequences,” said EJF executive director, Steve Trent.
“In our rapidly changing world climate change – and its potential to trigger both violent conflict and mass migration – needs to be considered as an urgent priority for policymakers and business leaders alike.”
Although the report highlights to growing impact of climate change on people in the Middle East and Africa, it says changing weather patterns – like the hurricanes that devastated parts of the US this year – prove richer nations are not immune from climate change.
But Trent said that although climate change undoubtedly posed an “existential threat to our world” it was not to late to take decisive action.
“By taking strong ambitious steps now to phase out greenhouse gas emissions and building an international legal mechanism to protect climate refugees we will protect the poorest and most vulnerable in our global society, build resilience, reap massive economic benefits and build a safe and secure future for our planet. Climate change will not wait. Neither can we. For climate refugees, tomorrow is too late.”

Links

• Climate change made Lucifer heatwave far more likely, scientists find
• From heatwaves to hurricanes, floods to famine: seven climate change hotspots
• Climate change: ‘human fingerprint’ found on global extreme weather
• Europe faces droughts, floods and storms as climate change accelerates
• Climate change will stir 'unimaginable' refugee crisis, says military
• Agriculture and overuse greater threats to wildlife than climate change – study
• Statue of Liberty and Venice among sites at risk from climate change, says UN
• French minister warns of mass climate change migration if world doesn't act

U.S. Report Says Humans Cause Climate Change, Contradicting Top Trump Officials

New York Times - Lisa Friedman | Glenn Thrush

Smoke rose from trees burned in a wildfire in Wrightwood, Calif., last year. A report from 13 federal agencies says extreme weather events have cost the United States $1.1 trillion since 1980. Credit Jonathan Alcorn/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Directly contradicting much of the Trump administration’s position on climate change, 13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report on Friday that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization.
Over the past 115 years global average temperatures have increased 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to record-breaking weather events and temperature extremes, the report says. The global, long-term warming trend is “unambiguous,” it says, and there is “no convincing alternative explanation” that anything other than humans — the cars we drive, the power plants we operate, the forests we destroy — are to blame.
The report was approved for release by the White House, but the findings come as the Trump administration is defending its climate change policies. The United Nations convenes its annual climate change conference next week in Bonn, Germany, and the American delegation is expected to face harsh criticism over President Trump’s decision to walk away from the 195-nation Paris climate accord and top administration officials’ stated doubts about the causes and impacts of a warming planet.
“This report has some very powerful, hard-hitting statements that are totally at odds with senior administration folks and at odds with their policies,” said Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center. “It begs the question, where are members of the administration getting their information from? They’re obviously not getting it from their own scientists.”
While there were pockets of resistance to the report in the Trump administration, according to climate scientists involved in drafting the report, there was little appetite for a knockdown fight over climate change among Mr. Trump’s top advisers, who are intensely focused on passing a tax reform bill — an effort they think could determine the fate of his presidency.
The climate science report is part of a congressionally mandated review conducted every four years known as the National Climate Assessment. The product of hundreds of experts within the government and academia and peer-reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, it is considered the United States’ most definitive statement on climate change science.

Read the Full Climate Science Special Report
“It is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report states.

“The climate has changed and is always changing,” Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said in the statement. “As the Climate Science Special Report states, the magnitude of future climate change depends significantly on ‘remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth’s climate’” to greenhouse gas emissions, he added.
Despite the scientific consensus presented in the report, the Environmental Protection Agency has scrubbed references to climate change from its website and barred its scientists from presenting scientific reports on the subject.
The E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, has said carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to warming. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, asserted Wednesday that “the science is out” on whether humans cause climate change.
Their agencies referred questions to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversaw the research.
The report has provoked consternation in scientific circles for months. Though the study has been in the works since 2015, several scientists said the election of Mr. Trump, who has labeled climate change a “canard” and appointed cabinet members who disputed the scientific consensus, caused them to worry the report would be blocked or buried.
That did not happen. Scientists who worked on the report said none of the 13 agencies that reviewed it tried to undermine its findings or change its wording.
“I’m quite confident to say there has been no political interference on the message,” said David Fahey, a NOAA scientist and a lead author of the report. “Whatever fears we had weren’t realized.”
Responsibility for approving the report fell to Gary D. Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, who generally believes in the validity of climate science and thought the issue would have been a distraction from the tax push, according to an administration official with knowledge of the situation.

Phoenix experienced record highs in June. The report says there are “no convincing alternative explanations” other than human activity to account for rising global temperatures. Credit Ralph Freso/Getty Images

One of Mr. Cohn’s top policy deputies, Michael Catanzaro, had the authority to block, delay or change the report. But Mr. Catanzaro, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush and former Speaker John A. Boehner, chose instead to follow the lead of the Obama administration by referring the report back to more than a dozen federal agencies for feedback.
That review, according to two people familiar with the process, went relatively smoothly, surprising some scientists who worked on the report who had expected more resistance.
The only significant turbulence, according to one person familiar with the process, came from a midlevel political appointee at the Department of Energy who grilled the report’s authors on changes that had been made to temperature and other climate data over the years. The authors responded by adding a more detailed explanation of their methodology and all of the agencies then gave their approval, the person said.
Mr. Trump was barely aware of the report’s existence, several White House officials said.
Some critics of climate change science attacked the report as the product of holdovers from the Obama administration and chastised the Trump administration for allowing it to be published.
“I’m saddened that they have decided they will let the permanent government, the civil servants, continue down this road without supervision,” said Myron Ebell, director of global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group.

Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions.
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Scientists said the report’s findings were clear.
“This new report simply confirms what we already knew. Human-caused climate change isn’t just a theory, it’s reality,” said Michael E. Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. “Whether we’re talking about unprecedented heat waves, increasingly destructive hurricanes, epic drought and inundation of our coastal cities, the impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. They are upon us. That’s the consensus of our best scientists, as laid bare by this latest report.”
The report says the Earth has set temperature highs for three years running, and six of the last 17 years are the warmest years on record for the globe. Weather catastrophes from floods to hurricanes to heat waves have cost the United States $1.1 trillion since 1980, and the report warns that such phenomena may become common.
“The frequency and intensity of extreme high temperature events are virtually certain to increase in the future as global temperature increases,” the report notes. “Extreme precipitation events will very likely continue to increase in frequency and intensity throughout most of the world.”
In the United States, the report finds that every part of the country has been touched by warming, from droughts in the Southeast to flooding in the Midwest to a worrying rise in air and ground temperatures in Alaska, and conditions will continue to worsen.
“This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report states. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
The findings, other researchers said, create an unusual situation in which the government’s policies are in direct opposition to the science it is producing.
“This profoundly affects our ability to be leaders in developing new technologies and understanding how to build successful communities and businesses in the 21st century,” said Christopher Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Choosing to be dumb about our relationship with the natural world is choosing to be behind the eight ball.”

Links

• What the Climate Report Says About the Impact of Global Warming
• Scientists Fear Trump Will Dismiss Blunt Climate Report
• Trump Team to Promote Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power at Bonn Climate Talks
• 52 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump
• From Heat Waves to Hurricanes: What We Know About Extreme Weather and Climate Change

Punk Rocker Patti Smith Says We've 'Raped And Pillaged' The Planet Ahead Of Climate Change Benefit Concert

New York Daily News - Spencer Dukoff

Patti Smith doesn't know what she'd say to President Trump about climate change because she has doubts that he has "a core." (Jason Davis/Getty Images for NAMM) 

Rocker Patti Smith was just a kid when she first became aware that humans were wreaking havoc on the environment.
"I'd go to play by a stream near my house when I was young and it would be all filled with weird oil and dead minnows," Smith told the Daily News. "I would ask my father what happened, and he'd say, 'I don't know, something is seeping through the ground. Somebody is dumping something.'"

In addition to being a punk legend and celebrated author, Patti Smith is a lifelong activist. (Michael Buckner/Getty Images for BFCA)

Smith rattles off memory after memory of factors that contributed to the punk legend's rising consciousness as a climate change activist.
"In my lifetime, I've seen how our world is changing," she says. "The beautiful glaciers that I saw, and friends of mine took photographs of 25 years ago in Greenland, are now 60% melted away. They look just like tortured skeletons instead of these beautiful, magnificent floating sculptures."
Smith, 70, was born in Chicago, but later lived in Philadelphia and different parts of New Jersey as a child, where she had another disturbing experience.
"I saw my first really horrendous dump site when I was about 10," Smith says. "I lived in rural South Jersey and there was a lot of illegal dumping. I saw how beautiful areas were being destroyed by all this dumping."
"We're given the Earth and it's beautiful, and we've just raped and pillaged it," she added.

On Sunday, Smith will join other artists like R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, Joan Baez and Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as environmentalists like Bill McKibben at Carnegie Hall for Pathway to Paris: Concert to Fight Climate Change.

The effects of climate change around the world. VIEW GALLERY

Pathway to Paris, a group of artists, activists, academics, musicians and politicians who "fight for climate justice," was founded by musicians Rebecca Foon and Jesse Paris Smith, who also happens to be Smith's daughter.
Foon believes that addressing climate change is a matter of life or death.
"Can we do it fast enough so we can be able to survive? And if we can, that means we’ve gotten to the crux of this issue and are a more enlightened species," Foon told the Daily News.
While Smith has participated in previous Pathway to Paris events, she feels a greater sense of urgency with this year's concert given the Trump administration's embrace of climate change skepticism and the President's June announcement that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
"It goes right up to the top in America," Smith said. "We have a terrible person in the EPA. We have an administration that seems to have a completely deaf ear to any environmental concerns."
When asked what she would say to President Trump about climate change if given the chance, Smith isn't sure she — or anyone — could be persuasive with him.

Smith points to melting glaciers as evidence that climate change is a dire issue for the planet. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) 

"Despite all the detestable things, the embarrassing things, does he actually have a core?" Smith wondered. "And what frightens me is I don't believe he actually has one. So it's hard for me to answer when I feel in my heart that I wouldn't be talking to a real person."
But regardless of Trump's personal beliefs and policies, Smith asserts that progress starts with individual citizens, and that it's her responsibility as an artist to use her platform for advocacy.
"When my husband and I wrote, 'People Have the Power,' it's what we meant," Smith said, referencing her late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and their 1988 single. "The people vote, the people protest, the people en masse have to make a change."
Pathway to Paris first started in 2014 as a small concert at (Le) Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village, but has since grown to a global initiative that partners with the United Nations Development Program and international environmental group 350.org to help turn the Paris Agreement into action.

Patti Smith performs at Pathway to Paris at Le Trianon, Paris, in 2015. (MARTIN BUREAU/AFP/Getty Images) 

Sunday's event will feature the unveiling of a new Pathway to Paris campaign, 1000 Cities, which seeks to get 1000 cities worldwide to pledge to transition off fossil fuels and move to 100% renewable energy by 2040.

Links

• NYC rally calls for climate change action 5 years after Sandy
• NYC junior ambassadors from city schools out to change world
• Climate change missing from new Interior Dept. strategy: report
• EPA cancels appearance of scientists at Rhode Island event

Fossil Fuel Companies Undermining Paris Agreement Negotiations – Report

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Exclusive: report says outcomes of climate negotiations have been skewed to favour biggest corporate polluters

The report questions the role of the world’s biggest polluters sponsoring the negotiation meetings. Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images

 Global negotiations seeking to implement the Paris agreement have been captured by corporate interests and are being undermined by powerful forces that benefit from exacerbating climate change, according to a report released ahead of the second meeting of parties to the Paris agreement – COP23 – next week.
The report, co-authored by Corporate Accountability, uncovers a litany of ways in which fossil fuel companies have gained high-level access to negotiations and manipulated outcomes.
It highlights a string of examples, including that of a negotiator for Panama who is also on the board of a corporate peak body that represents carbon traders such as banks, polluters and brokers.
It also questions the role of the world’s biggest polluters in sponsoring the meetings in return for access to high-level events.
The report argues that as a result of the corporate influence, outcomes of negotiations so far have been skewed to favour the interests of the world’s biggest corporate polluters over those of the majority of the world’s population that live in the developing world. It finds that influence has skewed outcomes on finance, agriculture and technology.

We have the wrong people at the table and we’re looking to the wrong people for advice.
Corporate Accountability's Jesse Bragg

It comes as the 2018 deadline approaches for member countries to finalise the rule book that guides the implementation of the Paris Agreement. That rule book will determine things such as how compliance will be monitored and enforced and how the developing world will receive finance and support.
“We’ve been at many crossroads on climate change but this is perhaps one of the last of those that we have left,” said Jesse Bragg from Corporate Accountability. “If parties don’t arrive at a set of guidelines that actually facilitates the transition we’ve been talking about and keeps us under 1.5C, we may never have another shot at this.”
“We’re doing this wrong right now. We have the wrong people at the table and we’re looking to the wrong people for advice. If we don’t course-correct at COP 23 and the next inter-sessional in Bonn, we’re in real trouble. And you can look at what’s happened so far to see the evidence of that.”
Examples of the infiltration of polluters into the official negotiations include:

• The UNFCCC’s Climate Technology Network, which advises on how to develop and transfer green technology to the developing world, includes a member of the World Coal Association, and its board has included managers at Shell and EDF – one of the world’s biggest electricity producers.
• A negotiator for Panama is currently a board member of the International Emissions Trading Association (Ieta), and was previously its president for several years. Ieta was set up by the fossil fuel companies including BP and Rio Tinto in order to make sure climate action caused “minimal economic harm”. Today its members include Chevron, BHP, Dow, Duke Energy, Repsol, Xcel Energy, Veolia and Statoil.
• Sponsorship of the COP21 meeting in Paris gave fossil fuel companies access to the “communications and networking area” inside the rooms where the negotiations were taking place.
• Big agricultural corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Yara have been lobbying heavily at UNFCCC meetings, with Monsanto even co-charing the World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s Climate-Smart Agriculture working group.

The report argues this access has influenced outcomes at the UNFCCC, undermining the Paris agreement in the following ways:

• Market-based solutions to climate change have become dogma at UNFCCC meetings, despite many developing world countries urging alternative mechanisms such as direct regulation, and despite studies suggesting they can allow big polluters to continue polluting, according to Corporate Accountability.
• The US and Canada have adopted agricultural corporations’ approach to “climate-smart agriculture”, and argued against regulation of non-CO2 emissions from agriculture.
• Most of the funds from the Green Climate Fund have so far been allocated to private sector projects.

The report argues that if the UNFCCC process results in a rulebook being developed in line with what the world’s biggest polluters want, then the Paris agreement is doomed to failure.
“If those rules are written in a way to give weight to the provisions that industry is in favour of, and ignores those things that the industry is against, then you’re almost renegotiating the Paris agreement,” Bragg said. “What you’re doing is cherry-picking out of the Paris agreement the things that they want, and leaving behind the things that the global south [developing] countries need.
“It’s where you lose any nod to incorporate non-market mechanisms into article 6. It’s where ‘climate smart agriculture’ becomes the only focus of agricultural negotiations, and so big ag is dominating negotiations there and petrochemicals are the solution. And the fossil fuel industry dominates the conversation around technology so we’re just hoping for a successful large-scale carbon capture and storage to get us out of this mess. It’s those things that are at risk in the rulebook negotiations.”
Momentum has been building over the past couple of years to have an official conflict-of-interest policy agreed on at the UNFCCC.
In Marrakech in 2016 moves instigated by a group representing the majority of the world’s population – the Like Minded Group of Developing Countries – were thwarted by the US, EU and Australia.
Australia’s delegation has argued that “there is no clear understanding of what a conflict of interest is and it means different things to different people” and that fossil fuel companies were “the providers of the biggest and best solutions”.
But in May this year in Bonn, the group succeeded in getting the UNFCCC to agree to improve “transparency”, and discussions will continue in May 2018.
The World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control successfully implemented a conflict of interest policy that has widely been acknowledged as a key ingredient in its success.
Corporate Accountability says a similar policy is needed for the UNFCCC.

Links

• Big companies' climate change targets are 'unambitious', say analysts
• Protecting forest dwellers goes hand in hand with protecting forests, Whitehall told
• Trump seeking quickest way to quit Paris climate agreement, says report
• Marrakech climate talks: giving the fossil fuel lobby a seat at the table
• Paris climate change agreement enters into force
• Maldives urges rich countries to rapidly ratify Paris climate agreement
• Paris agreement is a strong signal that 'we will solve climate crisis', Al Gore says
• Paris climate change agreement: the world's greatest diplomatic success
• Paris climate agreement ‘may signal end of fossil fuel era’
• Paris agreement a victory for climate science and ultimate defeat for fossil fuels

Australia Has A Climate Change Lesson For The World

New York Times - Waleed Aly*

A steel mill in the industrial town of Port Kembla, south of Sydney, Australia. Credit Tim Wimborne/Reuters 

MELBOURNE, Australia — No issue has been such a political graveyard in Australia as climate change. At least three prime ministers from the last decade have had their tenure buried there: John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard all lost their jobs, at least in part, for trying and failing to deliver polices to combat climate change.
To this list, you could add Malcolm Turnbull’s stint as opposition leader, which ended when Tony Abbott challenged him as party leader over his acceptance of the emissions cap-and-trade plan of the prime minister at the time, Mr. Rudd.
Today, of course, Mr. Turnbull is prime minister (a role he seized, in turn, from Mr. Abbott). And he is the latest to run this gantlet, having just announced a new energy policy that he describes as a “game changer” in Australia’s never-ending climate wars.
He might even be right. But it’s hard to tell because what he has offered is not so much a policy as a framework for what might become a policy.
Years of political conflict over the environment have left Australia with no effective climate-change strategy. Political realities have imposed unworkable limitations on policy options. In particular, a series of scare campaigns and political backflips has meant no form of carbon pricing has taken hold, and even emissions intensity schemes and clean energy targets have been rejected. As a result, Australia’s power grid is stretched thin, consumer energy prices are exorbitant and carbon emissions are rising.
Our experiences provide the rest of the world a lesson on climate change: You can ignore it if you wish, but you cannot outrun it. Eventually the science and economics will catch up with you.
Any form of carbon pricing has become taboo in Australia — particularly in Mr. Turnbull’s conservative Liberal Party — even though such a market-based approach is the most efficient, cheapest way of reducing emissions. Last week, a report from Australia’s Productivity Commission reiterated this point, declaring Australia must “adopt a proper vehicle for reducing carbon emissions that puts a single effective price on carbon.”
Instead, Australians have contorted ourselves to look like we’re responding to climate change without really doing so. We’ve paid some companies taxpayer dollars to reduce their emissions, while imposing no penalties on those who don’t. We’ve legislated a “renewable energy target,” then announced it was under review, then finally reduced it. While we reviewed, we watched investments in large-scale renewables drop an astonishing 90 percent in a year.
As a target was settled, investment recovered. But, even then, because there was no carbon price — charges for those who emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — to make investments in renewable energy more commercially attractive, energy retailers weren’t giving investors the long-term contracts they needed to get bank loans. This naturally makes investment a shorter-term affair, limiting its scope and ambition. It also means that investments in renewable energy weren’t being directly connected to the retail market.
With the lost years and disconnections between investors and retailers, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that whatever renewables investment Australia now has, it should have had more. Meanwhile, Australia hasn’t even enjoyed the short-term financial benefits of repealing the carbon tax, which was demonized for making electricity unaffordable. As a result, Australia now has the most expensive energy prices in the world, and a power supply so unreliable that summer blackouts are now a real possibility.
There are many reasons for this, including an underdeveloped renewable energy grid and coal-fired power stations on which Australia has for so long relied that are nearing the end of their operating lives.
Enter the Turnbull government’s National Energy Guarantee. Perhaps its most fundamental change is that it addresses energy retailers, rather than generators. It’s a useful idea, ensuring that energy investments have a home in the consumer market.
The policy plan makes two fundamental requirements of the retail companies that sell energy to consumers. First, retailers have to meet a quota for reliable energy — “dispatchable” energy that can be made available immediately. This seeks to minimize the chance of blackouts, which the government has argued are at least partly a function of how renewable energies like solar and wind can fluctuate with weather unless effectively stored. This may be read as a way of giving an advantage to coal, though that seems less likely as storage of renewables increases.
Second, there is a limit on the amount of emissions intensity that will require retailers to purchase “clean energy” from energy generators. It’s a proposal that manages to obey the current laws of Australian politics. There’s no carbon price, no taxes and no explicit focus on renewable energy. The reliable energy quota is deliberately agnostic on the sources of energy, thereby making it a blank political canvas. If you really believe coal is the future, the quota can accommodate that. Same if you think renewables are becoming cheaper and more reliable every year. The policy plan holds at least the potential for broad support, which is something Australia has never achieved.
But that’s only possible because, for the moment, it’s largely content-free. Just about everything depends on what the relevant reliable energy quotas will be, but no one yet knows. Will they be set low and then increased? If so, how quickly? What relationship will they bear to Australia’s commitments under the Paris climate accord? Will they shift the emissions burden to the electricity sector, or will they require other sectors to make disproportionate reductions? And precisely how severe will the penalties be for retailers that fail to meet these targets?
These are not mere policy details. They are the essence of the political differences that remain on climate change.
That this is the best we can do — indeed that this is a relative triumph for Mr. Turnbull — illustrates just how tangled Australia’s climate politics have become. The country has taken a long, hard look at every warning about the costs of delayed climate action and ignored them all. And, subsequently, it has paid for those costs through high energy prices and curtailed investment.
At last, having long understood that a carbon price would be the most efficient solution, we’ve opted for what is a fairly blunt form of regulation. It’s where nobody would have recommended we be a decade ago, and it is not ideal. But it is something. And if we can find a way to work with it, perhaps the next decade will be better than the one before.

*Waleed Aly is a columnist and broadcaster and a politics lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne.

Links

• Australia's greenhouse gas emissions soar in latest figures
• Productivity Commission says Coalition should adopt price on carbon
• Investment in large-scale renewable energy falls 90 per cent in 12 months, Bloomberg New Energy Finance report shows
• Energy Market Operator issues mixed blackout forecast for SA, Victoria during summer

Ocean Acidification Research Makes A Strong Case For Limiting Climate Change

Phys.org

In several long-term experiments with the KOSMOS mescosms, the BIOACID members have investigated the impact of ocean acidification on marine oceosystems. Credit: Maike Nicolai, GEOMAR (CC BY 4.0)

Experiments and analyses carried out by more than 250 scientists from 20 German institutions clearly indicate that ocean acidification and warming, along with other environmental stressors, impair life in the ocean.
A brochure summarises major outcomes of the project for policymakers and the public. Members of the project Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification (BIOACID) will also be present at the United Nations climate change conference COP23 in Bonn.
As a gigantic carbon sink, the ocean absorbs about a third of the carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere by human activities. But when absorbed by seawater, the greenhouse gas triggers chemical reactions causing the ocean to acidify.
Ocean acidification affects ecosystems and important benefits the ocean provides to humankind. This includes the regulation of the Earth's climate, food provision, recreation and biodiversity as a condition for intact and functioning ecosystems.
"Humans need to see themselves as part of a global system and understand the many ways we depend on the ocean and its services. Because everyone in this global community will be affected by climate change, it will be for our own benefit if we manage to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in such a way that global warming is limited to less than 2 degrees Celsius", says Prof. Ulf Riebesell, marine biologist at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and coordinator of BIOACID.
"The future of this planet depends on us. Wouldn't it be a great achievement if the anthropocene, the age of human dominance on Earth, goes down in history as an era of rethinking and changing behaviour?"

Cold water coral reefs also belong to the ecosystems that are affected by oceanic acidification. Credit: JAGO Team, GEOMAR (CC BY 4.0)

According to Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-coordinator of BIOACID, all countries would need to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions drastically by the middle of this century if they wish to reach the Paris climate targets.
"The current world climate report indicates clearly that net-zero emissions are a precondition for limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
However, reducing CO2 emissions alone may not be sufficient. Net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere would have to contribute.
"This is already technically possible, but the challenge is to develop and implement the respective technologies at a larger scale. The later the emission reductions start and the longer this process takes, the more difficult and costly it becomes to stay in line with the Paris agreement."

Important BIOACID results:

• Changes in the ocean carbonate system impact the acid-base balance in marine organisms. This can negatively affect key processes such as calcification.
• Many organisms are able to withstand ocean acidification, but may lose this ability if also exposed to other stressors such as warming, excess nutrients, loss of oxygen, reduced salinity or pollution.
• A reduction of regional stress such as nutrient runoff or the loss of oxygen can mitigate the impact of global stressors like ocean acidification and warming.
• In a natural community, the impact of stressors on a species can be amplified or diminished by associated shifts in biotic interactions such as competition, predation or parasitism.
• Even small alterations at the base of the food web can have knock-on effects for higher trophic levels.
• Marine life is able to adapt to ocean change through evolution and can partly compensate for negative effects. However, since ocean acidification happens extremely fast compared to natural processes, only organisms with short generation times, such as microorganisms, are able to keep up.
• About half the tropical coral reefs can be preserved if carbon dioxide emissions are limited to concentrations that keep global warming below 1.2 degrees Celsius. However, additional risks posed by ocean acidification are not included in this forecast.
• Ocean acidification reduces the ocean's ability to store carbon.
• Climate change alters the availability of prey for fish and as a consequence may affect their growth and reproduction.
• Ocean acidification and warming reduce the survival rates of early life stages of some fish species. This will likely reduce recruitment of fish stocks and ultimately fisheries yields.
• The distribution and abundance of fish species will change. This will have a significant impact on economic activities such as small-scale coastal fisheries and tourism.
• It is crucial to consider ocean acidification and warming in the management of fish stocks and marine areas.
• Following the precautionary principle is the best way to act when considering potential risks to the environment and humankind, including future generations. Even if the extent of possible risks is not fully understood, precautionary measures need to be taken in order to avoid or reduce the harm.
• A more sustainable lifestyle and economy require an interaction between society, businesses and politics. Political frameworks should regulate the phase-out of fossil fuels. It is crucial for every one of us to reconsider concepts of normality and adjust behaviour in everyday life.

The Kiel research vessel ALKOR with the KOSMOS mesocosms in the Gullmar Fjord, Sweden. Credit: Maike Nicolai, GEOMAR (CC BY 4.0)

In 2015, an experiment with the KOSMOS mesocosms was conducted in the Raunefjord, Norway. Credit: Maike Nicolai, GEOMAR (CC BY 4.0)

Links

• Ocean warming and acidification impact on calcareous phytoplankton and reduce its ability to sequester atmospheric CO2
• Rising water temperatures and acidification affect important plankton organism
• Ocean acidification amplifies global warming
• Expert assessment: Ocean acidification may increase 170 percent this century
• Ocean warming to cancel increased CO2-driven productivity
• Acidification affects the ability of bacteria to clean our oceans
• Climate change could decrease Sun's ability to disinfect lakes
• Can corals adapt to climate change?
• Intensifying winds could increase east Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise