29/10/2018

Will Climate Change Split The Liberal Party?

AFR - Andrew Clark

Divided for a decade over climat change ... Protestors dressed in costumes of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull at Bondi Surf Bathers SLSC polling booth for the Wentworth byelection. James Brickwood
Cross-dressing is not a top-of-mind Liberal Party metaphor but, politically speaking, that's what it's doing. Robert Menzies' party of government, where a former Liberal prime minister, John Howard, once warned that "disunity is death", is threatening to fragment over climate change.
It is even taking on some of the historic characteristics of the Labor Party, which spent decades in the political wilderness as a result of dividing over issues like communism. "For many years when we talked splits and factions it was Labor, and the Liberals were much less subject to that," says John Warhurst, Emeritus Professor of Politics at the ANU. "Now the boot is on the other foot."
Divisions over climate change have twice contributed to Malcolm Turnbull's loss of the Liberal Party leadership and the prime ministership. Five weeks after he jetted off to New York, the issue continued to fester and played a significant role in the Liberal Party losing Turnbull's formerly blue-ribbon seat of Wentworth.
To be fair, climate change as an issue has dogged both sides of Australian politics for more than a decade. A global failure to come up with firm emissions targets at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit flummoxed the Kevin Rudd-led Labor government, which had framed climate change as the "great moral challenge" of the modern era.
Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Frank Little with Bob Santamaria with painting of former Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix in the background. Santamaria's formation of the DLP led to a Labor party split that kept the power out of government for years.
Further, an about face on introducing a carbon tax by Rudd's successor and victor in an internal party leadership coup, Julia Gillard, made her an easy target for then opposition leader, Tony Abbott, over what he called a "great big new tax".
But over the past couple of months climate change has morphed into something much bigger and politically destabilising. A centrist like Turnbull, with a past record of supporting an emissions trading scheme (ETS), being forced out of the PM's job by, among others, climate change sceptics like Abbott and Craig Kelly, lent an ideological tinge to a week of brutal blood-letting.
Turnbull and Abbott were bitter rivals with a near decade-old history of supplanting each other as party leader. But the contentious policy issue was Turnbull's carrot-and-stick National Energy Guarantee program. The abandonment of Turnbull's NEG, the role climate change played in the victory of an independent, Dr Kerryn Phelps, in the subsequent Wentworth byelection; and the demonstration effect the Wentworth result, including its climate change element, is having on other, similar, safe Liberal seats, has been stunning.
The metaphor may not be appropriate for climate change, but it's as if an accelerant has been poured on a long-burning fire in Coalition ranks.
This accelerant effect was obvious two weeks before the Wentworth byelection vote at a forum in the iconic Bondi Beach Pavilion. There 14 of the 16 candidates discussed issues ranging from tax policy to the position of refugees on Nauru, population growth and immigration. But the debate kept reverting back to climate change, with many candidates citing the explosive contents of the new IPCC report, released the day before in Incheon, South Korea.
Tony Abbott made Julia Gillard a target over what he called a "great big new tax". David Rowe
'There's always exceptions to the rule'
According to this latest IPCC document, the impacts and costs of a 1.5-degree forecast increase in global warming will be far greater than earlier expected. This follows a decade of record-breaking storms, forest fires, droughts, coral bleaching, heat waves and floods around the world as average mean temperatures increase. The IPCC report, which was based on more than 6000 studies, said the 1.5-degree increase in average temperatures could be reached in as little as 11 years – and almost certainly within 20 years – without major cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
It is these sorts of warnings, combined with what the great American jazz singer Billie Holliday referred to as "stormy weather", that have sharpened differences between Liberal Party moderates like Turnbull, and conservatives like Abbott, over the climate change issue.
It has not split the Liberal Party – so far. But there are reports that independent candidates – many are female, and some, possibly, may even emanate from the Liberal Party – will promote a climate change-related suite of policies, alongside a conservative approach to economic management, in the coming federal election in what had been regarded as safe Liberal seats.
Interestingly, this policy mix does contain elements of earlier peelings away from the Liberal fold. These include the 1966 formation of the Australian Reform Movement – led by the head of the IPEC transport group, Gordon Barton. It sharply differed from the Liberal Party over Australia's military involvement in the Vietnam War while espousing mainstream conservative economic policies. Eleven years later in 1977 former Liberal minister Don Chipp formed the Australian Democrats, a party with centrist characteristics that was later dismissed by then Labor finance minister Peter Walsh as "fairies at the bottom of the garden".
Indeed, "there's little aspects of the story that don't fit", Professor Warhurst acknowledges. "There's always exceptions to the rule. We are yet to see this issue play out and keep the Liberals out of office. But this highly charged situation in the Liberals does remind me of what Labor was like. "
There are echoes going back to the of the great Labor split. The record 23 years Labor spent in opposition from 1949 to 1972 were partly due to the long post-war boom, Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies' political dominance, Dr. H.V. Evatt's erratic leadership of the ALP, and Labor clinging to its nationalisation platform. But the principal factor was the communist bogey.
Soon after Menzies won the December 1949, election, "Doc" Evatt proposed banning the communist party. Not long after the first proxy conflict of the Cold War began in the form of the Korean War, inflaming domestic Australian tensions over the communist issue.

Labor divided
From the start, the ALP was sharply divided. "Doc" Evatt campaigned successfully against a later Menzies-sponsored referendum to ban the Australian Communist Party (CPA), warning against the rise of a police state. However, other labor figures were in favour of the ban.
The referendum was lost but the issue was never far from the headlines. There were persistent claims that Labor was "soft on communism", that left-wing members of the ALP such as Jim Cairns were "lover boys of the communist press", that Labor was suspect on issues such as the US Alliance, opposition to the claimed "downward thrust" of Communist China etc.
The issue was central to Labor's great split in 1954, when a largely Catholic, right-wing, virulently anti-communist faction directed by Bob Santamaria, head of the secretive Catholic Social Studies Movement, peeled away from the ALP to form the Democratic Labour Party, or DLP.
With Labor split, and the DLP distributing its preferences to the Coalition, the ALP remained out of office for another 18 years. The incessant, virulent guilt-by-association rhetoric of Santamaria helped to frame Labor during this long period as untrustworthy. It was a political fault line that lasted until the DLP was extinguished as an effective force by the results of the May 1974, double dissolution election.
Now the Liberal Party is threatening to fragment over climate change. Of course, the parallels are inexact and the Liberals have been in office for five years. But as Professor Warhurst points out, "the same apocalyptic language" is being used now on the climate change issue on the Liberal side "as the language which characterised the debate in the 50s and 60s on the Labor side".
Events in coming months will tell us if the parallels will come closer.

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Climate Change Policy: An Unwieldy Wrecking Ball Claiming PM’s Careers

NEWS.com.au - Malcolm Farr

IT HAS already destroyed four prime ministers. And now the very same wrecking ball is about to smash Scott Morrison as well.
Scott Morrison has “big stick” energy policy.
Picture Kym Smith Source: News Corp Australia
IT’S the uncontrollable wrecking ball of Australian politics which so far has smashed the careers of four prime ministers.
And now it could be swinging Scott Morrison’s way, just as it had towards Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard from Labor, and his Liberal colleagues Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull.
This demolition beast is climate change policy and the inability of politicians to present coherent schemes of their own or to resist misrepresenting those of rivals.
To dodge the ball of policy destruction Prime Minister Morrison is attempting to please everyone.
He wants a system which will lower emissions, encourage coal-fired power stations, force private power companies to divest assets, promote new generating technologies, and cut household electricity bills.
It’s a political strategy more than a global warming response, constructed to appease the array of cemented positions on energy policy within the Liberal Party rather than the wishes of consumers, including business.
It has a touch of former prime minister Tony Abbott’s unsuccessful Direct Action scheme and a taste of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s National Energy Guarantee.
And one of its objectives is to blame the power industry, not government, for everything from electricity reliability, price, and technologies.
Scott Morrison is pushing around power companies, threatening them with his “big stick”, in a way he shrank from doing with banks when he was treasurer.
It’s a way of saying, “It’s not our fault you don’t like your electricity bills.”
Which is the gist of Mr Morrison’s comments on the Seven Network on Friday: “That is why we have to put more pressure on the big energy companies so they are doing the right thing by their customers and we are going to back that up with the laws which will give effect to that.
“As I said, we will take the big stick to the energy companies.”
Victims of the wrecking ball? Former PM Malcolm Turnbull and former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. 
Picture: Saeed Khan Source: AFP
And the timing is right for this blame shifting as the use of cheaper renewables is starting to lower prices.
The Morrison government will be delighted to take the credit. But it underlines the complexity of the power game here.
Australia alone of developed nations has this preoccupation with climate change as a political battleground.
In Australia we can’t even settle on what is at stake.
Is it what Kevin Rudd called the great moral challenge — which portrayed it as something which can’t be measured by a temperature gauge alone — or is it about using more coal?
The climate change debate here can take many identities as political leaders shuffle around priorities to suit their already-existing positions.
So at one moment it’s not about addressing a changing climate, it’s about the unreliability of renewable energy, or about lowering electricity prices, or about supporting coal resources, or about not being told what to do by the United Nations.
There have been times of confusion as to what was being addressed.
Energy policy was a battleground for former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Picture: Mick Tsikas Source: AAP
What has been clear is that the task is hugely difficult for two reasons Kevin Rudd recently underlined.
One is the daunting task of convincing a current generation to make sacrifices for a future one.
And because of the technical complexity of the climate change responses, which understandably baffle most people. That’s one reason why the Prime Minister uses the clunky term “fair dinkum power” instead of “dispatchable power”.
Desperation has driven some political leaders to absurd proposals.
Remember Julia Gillard’s 2010 “citizens’ assembly”? It was in effect a surrender to the issue and a flick pass to populist opinion.
Stubborn refusal to accept there was a problem at all has clogged policy development. Tony Abbott once declared the science of climate change was “crap” and has only toughened his opinion since then.
Desperation has driven other PM’s to surrender on issues of national importance.
Picture: Kym Smith Source: News Corp Australia
And disgraceful political game playing has made it harder for voters to sift the facts from blatant dishonesty.
Barnaby Joyce set the pace by claiming Labor policies would send the price of the Sunday roast to $100. It was of course rubbish.
It’s that political legacy Scott Morrison is attempting to defy, and the real test is whether he can do so and still produce a viable policy.

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How Plants And Animals Are Teaching Scientists To Fight Climate Change

NBC News - James Rainey

In the emerging field of biomimicry, scientists and inventors take inspiration from trees, whales and coral.
A device designed to help trees grow in deforested regions of the Amazon. Nucleario
The immensity of a program to reforest large swaths of the Amazon is hard to conceive — it aims to plant millions of trees over a remote area of Brazil roughly the size of Pennsylvania. If that wasn’t a big enough challenge, there’s also the threat seedlings face from dry spells, non-native plants and the voracious leaf-cutter ant.
Enter a Brazilian industrial engineer and his partners, who think they have a solution. The team calls their invention Nucleario — a circular device that creates a safe oasis for a young tree, complete with mulchy ground cover, a water cistern to conserve rainfall and a wall to keep out invasive plants and creatures.
The invention was recently awarded a $100,000 prize in a worldwide design challenge, sponsored by the Biomimicry Institute, a Missoula, Montana-based nonprofit that supports scientists and inventors who find solutions to man-made problems with designs inspired by the natural world.
The concept of biomimicry has been around for years. Designers have replicated the skin of the octopus to invent a camouflage surface that could help robots change color and texture. They have studied squid and jellyfish to look for a better propulsion system for submarines. And a Boston research hospital mimicked the behavior of underwater worms to develop a glue that knits together fragile heart muscles.
Now, advocates of such bio-inspired engineering are urging inventors to apply nature’s lessons to the challenge of global warming. Along with Nucleario’s forest-restoration device, finalists in the global design challenge have included a window-mounted device, designed like the rose-shaped frailejon plant, to cool buildings with less electricity, and a roadside filter that mimics the straining properties of baleen whales to clean fine particulate pollution from the air.
Blue Planet Ltd. of California makes various forms of rock and sand by combining carbon dioxide pollution with calcium. The process prevents the greenhouse gas from polluting the atmosphere. Blue Planet
Some of the most promising biomimicry designs have already been deployed, including several that capture carbon dioxide that would otherwise spew into the air and use it to make everything from plastics to a key element of concrete.
Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimcry Institute, said the Nucleario concept is emblematic of solutions drawn from nature.
“Learning about the natural world is one thing. Learning from the natural world — that’s the profound switch,” said Benyus, author of the 1997 book, “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.” “We need to restore the rainforest quickly, so it makes perfect sense to study the surrounding ecosystem — how the forest floor and local plants create conditions that nurture new trees — and borrow those strategies to do the same."

Learning from the forest
Nucleario grew out of the profound love three Brazilians had for the rainforest that covers much of their country, but that has been degraded by logging and clear-cutting for new farms and development. The World Wildlife Fund estimates the Amazon lost nearly 3.5 million acres of forest a year in the dozen years after 2000. That’s an area the size of Connecticut stripped annually of oxygen-producing and carbon-absorbing forest.
Nucleario co-founder Bruno Rutman was drawn to the problem of deforestation because of a youth spent kayaking, paragliding and climbing in Brazil’s coastal rainforest. In his day job as an industrial designer he worked on products like furniture, but after hours he thought about how his country might meet its commitment, under the Paris climate accord, to replant nearly 30 million acres of forest by 2030.
A team of three Brazilians -- from left, Bruno Rutman, Bruno Ferrari and Pedro Rutman -- recently won a world design competition for their Nucleario, a device designed to help trees grow in deforested regions of the Amazon. Nucleario
Bruno and his brother and partner, Pedro Rutman, sought out experts in forestry, who taught them that getting seedling trees to survive beyond a year was a huge part of the reforestation challenge. Non-native brachiaria grass, favored by dairy farmers, chokes young trees. Leaf-cutter ants mow away foliage, and intermittent rains can leave seedlings without moisture.
The brothers responded with the circular Nucleario, the size of a small bicycle tire and designed to be set into the ground as a protective barrier for a new seedling. The device’s exterior will biodegrade into mulch that keeps the ground moist. The device collects dew and rainwater into a cistern, modeled on those in the bromeliad plant, which can hold up to three gallons of water.
“Our main customer, in a way, is the seedling,” said Bruno Rutman. “Our second customer is the field worker, who is planting all these trees but does not have the time to come and maintain them.”
The Nucleario is still a prototype, with some 500 installed with seedlings in several test patches around Brazil, according to the Biomimicry Institute. The test groves have been funded by grants from universities and the World Wildlife Fund.

Biomimicry in action
Well beyond prototype stage is another innovation, inspired by the way marine organisms, like coral and clams, grow their hard superstructures. Blue Planet Ltd. of Los Gatos, California, is creating rock-like “aggregate” used as the main ingredient in concrete. It creates the material by relying on two waste streams — disposed and unused cement from building projects and carbon dioxide gas from power plants.
Blue Planet takes the carbon dioxide and combines it with a liquid solution to make a bicarbonate. The company then combines calcium drawn from reprocessed cement and mixes it with the bicarbonate to produce calcium carbonate, or limestone. The limestone can be formed into sand or gravel-sized rock — both major components that are mixed with cement to create concrete.
In nature, corals and mollusks combine calcium and carbon dioxide absorbed in seawater and secrete calcium carbonate skeletons, forming shells and coral reefs.
The ultimate impact of the Blue Planet process is that carbon dioxide — Earth’s principal heat-trapping greenhouse gas — is kept out of the atmosphere and is instead “sequestered” into new buildings. “We are taking something that would be released into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change and making something useful out of it,” said Brent Constantz, a marine scientist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded Blue Planet.
Brent Constantz, is a marine scientist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who figured out a way to "sequester" carbon pollution in building materials. Blue Planet
The company plans to expand, drawing additional carbon dioxide from the Los Medanos power plant in Pittsburg, California, the large natural gas-powered plant that delivers electricity to San Francisco. Already, Blue Planet’s aggregate went into the concrete used to build a new terminal at San Francisco International Airport, which is due to open next summer.
The leader of the agency that oversees air quality in nine San Francisco Bay Area counties said that if the Blue Planet process proves as successful as imagined it could spread to other power plants and heavy polluters, like a cement factory south of San Francisco.
“This process has a lot of promise,” said Jack Broadbent, CEO of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. “Essentially we are learning from nature itself to be able to address a man-made problem.”

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28/10/2018

How To Shift Public Attitudes And Win The Global Climate Battle

Yale Environment 360 - Todd Stern*

The world is making progress in decarbonizing economies, but not nearly fast enough, says Todd Stern the former U.S. chief climate negotiator. Here he spells out what forces must come together to marshal the public and political will needed to tackle climate change.
REUTERS/Stephane Mahe
Climate change is on the front pages again. In the space of three weeks, Florida and North Carolina were battered by severe hurricanes whose destructive power was surely intensified by hotter ocean waters and a warmer atmosphere, which holds more moisture. Between those two violent storms, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a four-alarm warning about the profound dangers of holding global warming even to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius, which not long ago was considered a safe zone. Meanwhile, climate negotiators are currently wrangling with each other to finalize the guidelines and procedures needed to turn the Paris Agreement into an operational regime, a struggle made harder by the absence of U.S. leadership.
These developments serve as a reminder that we are in a race against time. We are making dramatic progress in decarbonizing our economies, but dangerous climate impacts are also coming at us faster than predicted. We need concerted action now, in all major economies, to accelerate the transformation of a world that currently relies on fossil fuels for more than 80 percent of its primary energy and will have to reach net-zero emissions in the next 50 years or less to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
From the perspective of innovation, policy, and cost, we know what to do and can do it. Clean-tech innovation is in full bloom, with an unmatched innovation culture in the United States and progress happening all over the world. We know how to set policy standards, provide incentives, introduce carbon pricing, stoke up research and development. And a clean-energy transformation at full speed and scale would likely be cheaper than continuing our dependence on fossil fuels, even before counting the projected costs of disruptive climate damage.
Major shifts in attitude and behavior have occurred time and again in the social and economic spheres.
But the key ingredients that are in short supply are the human factors: political will and the rapidly evolving norms and attitudes about climate change that can generate that will.
Some may look at the scope of the climate challenge and the obstructive power of the fossil fuel incumbency — with its deeply embedded infrastructure and its political clout around the world — and conclude that a change in people’s thinking won’t be enough. But changing norms and attitudes can move mountains. They are about a sense of what is acceptable, what is right, what is important, what we expect.
Major shifts in attitude and behavior have occurred time and again in the social and economic spheres. Think, for example, of the transformation that occurred with respect to cigarettes, as near-universal social acceptance gave way to smokers being relegated to sidewalks or cordoned-off smoking rooms. Consider the rapid shift in thinking we have seen on same-sex marriage or about what is happening right now in regard to sexual harassment and the #Me Too movement. These are different kinds of issues, to be sure, and decarbonizing the global economy is clearly a challenge on a vastly larger scale. Still, all these issues come down to human attitudes. And when norms change, they can change decisively and drive political action with them. Recall that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both opposed same-sex marriage in their 2008 primary battle. A few years later, that would have been unthinkable, because attitudes and expectations had changed.
Can we expect a similar change in regard to global warming? We don’t know yet, but there is reason to think we can. We are living in a rapidly evolving world when it comes to climate change and clean energy. When our context and surroundings change, new initiatives are launched and the nature of our public discourse shifts, all these things can affect our attitudes and our sense of what seems right and necessary, of what we demand, of what we will no longer countenance. Consider:

The Paris Agreement
The Paris accord was a huge step forward in building up norms and expectations. It sent a powerful signal to the world, from governments to boardrooms to civil society, that leaders had finally made a pivotal decision to tackle climate change, built on strong temperature goals, a system of five-year cycles to ratchet up ambition, and a series of measures to ensure accountability and integrity. Going forward, the Paris regime has the potential to become the symbolic heart of the global climate effort, where countries promote engagement, hold each other to account, take stock of the dangers we face, collaborate in large or small groups, and put their reputations on the line.
With every passing year, the signs from the natural world become starker and more vivid.
Leader engagement
Leader engagement was crucial to getting the Paris Agreement done. We can only make the kind of rapid progress we need with the ongoing involvement of political leaders, which could, for example, take the form of biennial meetings among the heads of key countries, either as a separate gathering or as a day added to an existing summit like the G20. Such meetings could focus on new ways to accelerate the transformation of the global economy and to manage the worldwide impacts of climate change.

Impacts
With every passing year, the signs from the natural world become starker and more vivid. In recent years in the U.S., we have seen mammoth storms and floods, multi-year droughts, and gigantic wildfires scorching California and the West. And this parade of disasters has been matched or surpassed all over the world — in the Philippines, Thailand, China, Japan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, Europe, Colombia, Brazil. People see this more and more. They live through these events, see their family or friends live through them, watch them on smart phones and television. The snide dismissal of a climate link to these phenomena starts to ring hollow. Our context changes.

Clean technology
At the same time that the dangers of climate change become ever-more apparent, so does the reality that solutions are becoming more available and affordable by the day and could come even more quickly with political support. Look at the astonishing progress made in the past decade on clean energy as the costs of wind and solar plummet, and the cost curve for energy storage follows suit. Look at the rapid growth of electric vehicles in countries such as China and Norway, and the announcements from many countries — including China, India, Britain, France, Norway, and the Netherlands — that they intend to end sales of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2025, 2030, or 2040.
A Chinese worker installs solar panels at a solar farm in Yantai, Shandong Province. VCG/VCG via Getty Images
And consider the pivotal moment coming soon, whether in 5 years or 10, when electric vehicles cost no more than conventional cars, are far cheaper to operate and maintain, and can be charged almost anywhere in five minutes. And beyond these marquee elements of the clean revolution, major new research efforts are underway around the world on promising new low-carbon technologies. In addition, surveys show that clean energy is hugely popular both in the U.S. and with a wide swath of the global population.

The market context
Carbon Tracker’s recent 2020 Vision report makes a compelling case that a downturn in fossil fuel markets is coming much faster than most people realize. Carbon Tracker argues that a moment is approaching when demand for fossil fuel products will peak, and that this is likely to happen when alternatives achieve just 5 to 10 percent of total supply. Solar PV and wind already accounted for 6 percent of global electricity supply in 2017 and for 45 percent of the growth in supply. After the peak, the impacts on fossil fuels will start to be felt in financial markets in the form of lower prices, disruptions, and stranded financial assets as investors realize that the days of the industry’s supremacy are numbered.

The business context
Major companies across a broad range of sectors are moving to embrace clean and green solutions, and many are collaborating with each other in a range of initiatives dedicated to climate action and sustainable development. Businesses are increasingly acquiring large amounts of their energy needs from renewable sources, setting voluntary targets to reduce their carbon footprints, and marketing their green bona fides to consumers. They are taking these actions for many reasons: because they see the danger climate change poses to their supply chains, markets, and infrastructure, and because they realize that younger generations — which will bear the brunt of climate change’s impacts — strongly support the clean-energy revolution.
There is also room for more direct efforts at persuasion. For example, in the U.S., many Republicans in Congress know climate change is a real and important issue but see it as a third rail they can’t touch because of their political base. But, at least to some extent, there may be a kind of odd feedback loop at work. An article in The New York Times this summer argued that Republican voters are not so much skeptical about climate change as they are skeptical about Democrats, and they see climate as a Democratic issue. The authors conducted an experiment in which Republicans supported climate policies when told that Republican lawmakers or other notables favored the given policy. These respondents were then ready to follow the party line. So, we may have lawmakers afraid to buck a base that in fact would be willing to follow their leaders in more constructive directions — if their leaders had the nerve.
We cannot treat this existential threat as the environmental issue you glance at occasionally before going back to the essential stuff.
Recent polling by the Pew Research Center demonstrates a distinct generational divide in the GOP, with millennial Republicans (22 to 37 years old) much more inclined than older Republicans to believe that climate change is happening and that government should take action.
If trusted leaders and spokespersons raise their voices and make the case to people in their own communities and “tribes,” it could make a difference. Initiatives should be funded and launched that could hasten the change of norms and attitudes. Plenty of Republicans outside Congress understand that climate change is real and getting worse, and they believe the stance of their party’s leadership is untenable. Of course, all of this is more difficult with a president who beats the anti-climate drum. But he won’t be there forever, and work done now to open minds will pay off.
Outside the U.S., the public is not so divided over the urgency of combating climate change. While there are significant differences in views about climate change and its risks among different regions, a 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that climate change was nevertheless identified by respondents from 38 countries as one of two leading global threats, just behind ISIS.
Another important area is educating opinion makers in places such as companies, think tanks, and universities who believe in the issue but don’t understand the speed and scale of action required and don’t grasp that climate has to be lifted to the top tier of domestic and foreign policy concerns. We cannot treat this existential threat as the environmental issue you glance at occasionally before going back to the essential stuff. Climate, now, is the essential stuff.
The fact is that we have only one home and are subjecting it to extraordinary stress. As Jared Diamond demonstrated in his book Collapse, humans don’t always muddle through. Civilizations have disappeared because they lacked the wherewithal to both recognize and address looming environmental crises. Yet the solutions we need are at hand. We can be defeated by the greed of those who know better but can’t walk away from the next dollar; by apathy; by the demagogues whose only objective is to score points, get ratings, get paid. Or we can recognize the stakes, we can learn and discuss, we can vote, and march, and rise to meet this challenge. 

*Todd Stern is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a distinguished fellow at the World Resources Institute. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the State Department, leading the U.S. effort in negotiating the Paris Agreement and in all climate negotiations in the seven years leading up to Paris. Mr. Stern was a visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School in the fall of 2016. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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27/10/2018

A Difference Of Degrees: The Looming Climate Catastrophe

Australian Strategic Policy Institute - *

Image courtesy of DVIDSHUB on Flickr
The release earlier this month of a major UN-sponsored scientific report on the significant impacts expected from 1.5°C of global warming—the aspirational limit countries adopted in the Paris climate agreement—generated widespread media interest. Much of the commentary has rightly focused on the rapidly closing window of opportunity to achieve the aspiration and the huge scale of the societal changes required.
But the recent coverage has largely overlooked an equally important aspect of the study. Based on the most recent scientific evidence, researchers have now determined that extremely harmful climate impacts will strike at much lower temperature thresholds than previously projected.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C, which was produced at the request of countries adopting the Paris agreement, is an authoritative and cautious document. It’s the culmination of the efforts of 133 contributing authors who analysed more than 6,000 scientific studies and incorporated comments from over 40,000 expert and government reviews.
The report highlights the enormous challenge of limiting global warming to 1.5°. Annual emissions of CO2 will need to be halved by 2030 relative to 2016 levels and renewable energy will need to supply 70–85% of global electricity demand (with coal’s contribution essentially ceasing) by 2050. It notes that systemic changes on this scale would be historically unprecedented and require ‘deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options’.
A key objective of the report is to describe how the climate-related risks at 1.5° would differ from those at 2° of warming (the upper limit agreed in Paris). Not surprisingly, the report concludes that the risks for human and natural systems are higher at 2°, but it is the scale of the difference that is most worrying—particularly given that without further ambition to reduce greenhouse gases, we can expect between 3° and 4° of warming.
For example, that 0.5° difference would, according to the report, result in several hundred million additional people falling into poverty; a 50% increase in the proportion of the global population experiencing water stress; 420 million more people frequently exposed to extreme heatwaves; 184 to 270 million more people exposed to an increase in water scarcity; and a 10-fold increase (from 8 million to 81 million) in the number of vulnerable people affected by changes to crop yields (jumping to a 50-fold increase at 3° of warming).
As distressing as these projections may be, they probably underestimate the actual harm because they don’t generally take account of the cascading impacts of disasters, which can often be more severe than the proximate impacts. The report in effect acknowledges this, noting that ‘The literature on compound as well as interacting risk at warming of 1.5°C and 2.0°C is limited.’ It observes that ‘Multi-sector risks are projected to overlap spatially and temporally, creating new (and exacerbating current) hazards, exposures, and vulnerabilities that will affect increasing numbers of people and regions with additional warming.’
Media coverage of one of the report’s most important findings has been relatively low-key. Recent research has now determined that global warming will trigger highly harmful societal impacts at significantly lower temperatures than was previously assumed.
The IPCC’s 2014 Fifth Assessment Report identified five categories of impacts and determined for each the implications at various levels of warming for people, economies and ecosystems. The categories are: unique and threatened systems; extreme weather events; distribution of impacts; global aggregate impacts; and large-scale singular impacts (so-called climate tipping points). The current study, drawing on the most up-to-date scientific evidence, has determined that the 2014 assessment significantly underestimated the risks in four of the five categories.
For example, in the case of ‘unique and threatened systems’, the threshold for the transition from ‘high’ to ‘very high’ risk has been lowered from 2.6° to between 1.5° and 2° of warming. The change reflects recent research that, among other things, has now determined with ‘very high confidence’ that 2° of warming will result in the total loss of coral reefs from the world’s tropical and subtropical regions.
‘Extreme weather’ is the only category of impacts for which the report’s finding is relatively unchanged from 2014. However, that is largely because, as the authors point out, ‘The impact literature contains very limited information about the potential for human society to adapt to extreme weather events and hence it has not been possible to locate the transition from “high” … to “very high” risk within the context of assessing impacts at 1.5°C versus 2°C global warming.’
Given the hugely disproportionate effect climate change will have on less developed countries and the likelihood of cascading impacts, there is good reason to suspect that plugging this research gap will reveal a significantly lower threshold in this major category as well.
As the scientific uncertainty diminishes, it is becoming increasingly clear that we have greatly underestimated the impacts of climate change. The IPCC report’s findings make it urgent for nations, including Australia, to scale up rapidly their national commitments under the Paris agreement.

*Robert Glasser is an ASPI visiting fellow. His past roles include Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction

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Sweden’s Sustainable Cities A Lesson For Australia

Government News - Georgia Clark

Växjö, a city in southern Sweden, achieved a 17% emissions reduction in 2016-17.
The involvement of local government has been essential to Swedish city’s remarkable carbon emissions reduction success, experts say.
It calls itself “the greenest city in Europe.”
Växjö, a city in southern Sweden’s Kronoberg County, achieved a stunning 17 per cent emissions reduction in just one year, and since implementing a suite of policies in the early 1990s has slashed its carbon emissions by more than half.
A local district heating system that replaces fossil fuels with biomass energy like food waste and waste wood makes up 90 per cent of the city’s energy, while a key scheme taxes emissions and funds carbon-reduction projects.
The promotion of sustainable transport options like cycling has contributed to the city’s carbon reductions, while 25 per cent of the energy for transport and work machinery comes from renewable energy.
The municipality’s energy supply is now 67 per cent renewable, with a goal of going completely fossil-fuel free by 2020.

Lessons for Australian councils 
Mikael Granberg
The secret to Vaxjo’s remarkable carbon reductions is the involvement of local government in driving sustainable development, says Professor Mikael Granberg, director of the Centre for Climate & Safety at the Karlstads University in Sweden.
In Sweden, local government has “substantial financial, constitutional, legal, political and professional resources” and an instrumental role in driving sustainability, Professor Granberg tells Government News.
“Looking at eco-governance, local government has quite wide responsibilities, including sewerage, waste-treatment, recycling, green public purchase, green consumption and green accounts. Swedish local government are crucial actors with a potential to contribute and drive sustainable development,” he said.
Since 1948, Swedish local governments have had responsibility for spatial planning within their own territory – a responsibility which Professor Granberg says plays an immense role in the nation’s overall climate targets.
“Spatial planning is expected to deliver both climate change risk reduction and adaptation, and to balance other societal interests and priorities,” he said.

Australian councils need to ‘step up’ 
Brendan Gleeson
Professor Brendan Gleeson, director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, says Australian councils can learn a lot from Swedish local governments’ success in driving down emissions.
It highlights the value of council leadership in driving sustainable power generation and distribution – a leadership that needs to be reasserted by councils in Australia, Professor Gleeson said.
“Växjö shows that local governments need not be constrained by poor national leadership on sustainability issues and can assert themselves to drive impressive sustainability transitions,” he told Government News.
Växjö illustrates the potential for concerted local action to drive per capita emissions down to very low levels, Professor Gleeson says. “Local action is feasible and potentially powerful even in the context of national inertia on sustainability action.”

Re-establish local ownership 
Many Australian councils once owned important forms of infrastructure including energy and need to consider re-establishing municipal ownership of key assets, such as power generation and transport, as a means to drive change and enhance local economies, Professor Gleeson argues.
Professor Granberg, who collaborates with Australian researchers in the area, agreed that Australian councils could play a key role in helping drive down the country’s emissions.
“Local government is able to deal directly with households and small businesses in ways not possible for state or federal government. Local government has also proved to be an important source of program innovation,” he says.
However, greater local government involvement in sustainable development and carbon reductions would necessitate more resource-allocation to councils, Professor Granberg said.
He added:
“In Australia, environmental protection is a largely unfunded mandate for local government and, accordingly, financial resources are scarce, which ties to the challenge of employing trained and expert staff. So, there are challenges, but I still cannot see how local government can be avoided if we want to mitigate emissions and adapt to climate impacts.”
Professor Granberg says local government needs to “step up and take on this challenge” and perhaps challenge other levels of government on sustainable development and climate change mitigation.
But while local governments are a “key frontline player” in promoting carbon reductions, Professor Gleeson says that strong federal leadership is still needed.
It’s this national leadership in Sweden that has also contributed to the nation’s carbon reductions, he says.

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Climate Change Is No Joking Matter. Except, This Week, It Was.

New York Times - John Schwartz

Late night is heating up. That is, shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” have been focusing on global warming in the past week.
Beer jokes. Al Gore with some startlingly profane rappers. And, of course, digs at President Trump.
We don’t usually get a lot of laughs out of climate change, a topic that gets precious little airtime, even on the broadcast news shows. But comedy shows riff off the news, and there has been a lot of climate science in the news recently, especially the grim report from a United Nations science panel predicting enormous weather disasters by 2040, well ahead of previous estimates.
And then there was Mr. Trump, who gave an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday in which he again expressed his doubts about climate change, even suggesting that it may reverse itself. (Not going to happen, Mr. President.)
He came back to the topic on Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press, explaining that “I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.” (For the record: The percentage of scientists whose work supports the overwhelming evidence for climate change is itself overwhelming.)
Last Saturday’s episode of “SNL” had not one but two segments that dealt with climate change, including that rap number about trees (with a cameo by Mr. Gore).



The program also devoted a “Weekend Update” report to the United Nations climate findings.
Michael Che described the problem of climate change communication this way: If people see it as being about losing everything, “Nobody cares about everything,” he said. “People only care about something.” His example: If Fox News said that climate change would take away “all the flags and Confederate statues, there’d be recycling bins outside of every Cracker Barrel and Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
Mr. Che had similarly pointed suggestions about building interest in climate change among black people and women. For those, you’ll have to watch the video.



Stephen Colbert jumped on Mr. Trump’s statements about climate change, saying: “After a year of massive storms causing untold damage, and our glaciers just shrinking in every direction, Trump was still ambivalent on the concept of climate change. He told the reporter, ‘You have scientists on both sides of the issue.’ That is true, there are scientists on both sides. On one side, all the scientists. On the other, one guy who runs a blog called RealTrueAmericanScienceEagle.jesus.”
He also cited a study that we wrote about in The New York Times that suggests climate change could raise the cost of beer as it shrinks barley harvests. “Or as the brothers at Sigma Phi Epsilon put it, ‘Climate change just got real.’”



Trevor Noah jumped on the beer news, too. “Climate change: Sometimes it feels so hopeless, all you want to do is get drunk and forget about it,” he said. “Well, sadly, that won’t be an option, because of climate change.”
To his credit, Mr. Noah talks about climate change fairly often.
Does joking about climate change blunt the message that it is a threat, even a crisis?
Hardly, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He noted that broadcast media rarely talks about the topic, and it barely came up during the 2016 presidential debates. So for many television viewers, he said, seeing a segment on “Weekend Update” or “The Late Show” means “millions of people just had a conversation or watched on television discussions about climate change that they otherwise never get exposed to.”
What’s more, his center’s own research, he said, shows that “comedy is a really effective means to engage people,” and especially young people, in what he called “a sideways way.” He said that “through humor, people can deal with very difficult and scary topics that people will tend to ignore or avoid.”
The challenge, he suggested, is making any of this funny. “God knows, it’s pretty hard to laugh about most of the things that are going on today.”
Late-night television has long been topical, said Bill Carter, who used to cover the industry and has written two books about the struggle for dominance. But the rapidly spinning news cycle of the Trump administration has focused the comics’ attention on news out of Washington more than ever before, he said. And that fills a need.
“The audience is in a state of anxiety. The country is in a state of anxiety,” he said. “They’re watching the shows to get some relief.”
It helps, he added, that “this administration produces more risible material than any one in history.”

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