Australia coal use is 'existential threat' to Pacific islands, says Fiji PM

The prime minister of Fiji has warned Australia to reduce its coal emissions and do more to combat climate change as regional leaders prepare to gather in Tuvalu ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum this week.

Speaking in Tuvalu at a climate change conference ahead of the forum on Monday, Frank Bainimarama appealed directly to Australia to transition away from coal-powered energy and asked its government “to more fully appreciate” the “existential threat” facing Pacific nations.

Read the complete article in The Guardian 

Related: Forests, logging and climate change: IA

‘We have lost Australia for now,’ warns climate scientist in wake of election upset.

"The unexpected victory of conservatives in Australia's election is bad news for the future of global climate action."

“Australians elected someone who once brought a lump of coal into Parliament urging us to dismiss the warnings from climate scientists, and to dig up more coal instead,” Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, an Australian cognitive scientist, told ThinkProgress in an email. “There is little doubt that his government will do precisely that.”

“We have lost Australia for now,” warned Penn State climatologist Michael Mann in an email.  “A coalition of a small number of bad actors now threaten the survivability of our species,” he said."


"These include “the fossil fueled Murdoch media empire, which saturated the country with dishonest right-wing campaign propaganda” working with a few “petrostates including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Trump’s America, and now Australia.”




"Rupert Murdoch’s grip on the Australian media — and his support of climate disinformation around the world — led one Australian scientist to write in 2011, “The Murdoch media empire has cost humanity perhaps one or two decades of time in the battle against climate change.”"

Read the ThinkProgress article 

Related: 

A Postmortem for Survival: on science, failure and action on climate change

Is the Australian coalition government suggesting we shouldn’t try to limit global warming to below two degrees?

The cost of doing nothing about climate change

"Not explicitly, but it is worth asking. 

One of the odd things about the Coalition’s analysis is that it is partly based on a World Bank-backed study that found global carbon prices in 2030 would need to be between US$50 and US$100 to limit global warming to two degrees. But it doesn’t acknowledge that the Coalition has also committed to the two degrees goal (and more) by signing the Paris agreement.

Should we also assume the equivalent of up to a US$100 carbon price under Coalition policies? Or is it walking away from its commitment to Paris?

Media reporting often focuses on the cost of climate policy while ignoring the other side of the equation – the cost of doing nothing. Several studies have suggested it is significant.

A paper in the journal Nature estimated warming of between two and a half and three degrees could cut per-capita economic output by between 15% and 25% this century. Four degrees would be worse again.

This sort of scenario is increasingly being considered and factored in by insurers and long-term investors, who say they want action to avoid it. Whether political leaders and newspaper editors are listening is another question."

Read The Guardian article

The (Australian) government thinks we’re idiots and is not serious about reducing emissions : The Guardian

Australia's gas comparative emissions 2016- Click to enlarge

"Tackling climate change is tough and Scott Morrison’s latest policy is an insult"

"This fund of $2bn over 10 years is not just a rebranding of Tony Abbot’s Direct Action, it is actually a diminishment of it. At $200m a year on average it is less than half the money a year that was spent on Direct Action – a policy that was so laughably bad that a government with any level of shame would quietly have dumped it and pretended it never happened.

Yet, here we are. Nine years after Lenore Taylor ripped apart 
 

Vote for my future climate

the Liberal party’s policy of reliance on “soil magic”, we have the prime minister still thinking such measures of carbon sequestration are worth pursuing and will achieve anything close to what is required."

Read the excellent, original The Guardian article 

Related: California votes to extend cap-and-trade climate law to 2030

#carbon emissions  #carbon   #Australia   #scottmorrison   #climate action   #2degreesC

Scott Morrison to reboot Tony Abbott's emissions reduction fund with $2bn : The Guardian

Scott Morrison

Comment: Dodgy accounting and a huge expenditure of taxpayers money for a scheme not proven. A typical 'snow job' by the conservatives not yet fully convinced that climate change exists.

"But a chart released in advance of Monday’s speech makes it clear the looming abatement exercise will rely significantly on accounting measures as well as on practical emissions reduction.

According to projections done last December, the government will count a 367 megatonne abatement from carry-over credits (an accounting system that allows countries to count carbon credits from exceeding their targets under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol periods against their Paris commitment for 2030) to help meet the 2030 target.

It is also factoring in emissions reduction from Turnbull’s pet

There is no Planet B for our children

project, the Snowy 2.0 expansion (which the Morrison government has not yet formally signed off on); energy efficiency measures; an electric vehicle strategy (that it has not yet unveiled); the rebadged climate solutions fund; additional hydro projects and just under 100Mt of abatement from “technology solutions” (which aren’t specified) and “other sources of abatement” such as projects under development but not yet contracted."

Read The Guardian article 

See also

The Australian article which says,

"Labor climate change spokesman Mark Butler said last night the Abbott-era direct-action fund, which has been depleted from an initial $2.5bn to about $226 million, was an ineffective policy that charged taxpayers for carbon-emissions cuts that would have happened anyway.

“This is just another example of the government’s inability to deliver real climate policies,” he said.

“As Malcolm Turnbull famously said: “It is a fig leaf to cover a determination to do nothing.”

See also

Fact-checking Morrison on climate change  

The emissions reduction fund was deeply flawed – and no rebranding will change this

 

If the Coalition has had a climate epiphany, I'm Beyoncé

 

 

'Climate-change refugees' quit mainland farming in search of greener pastures in Tasmania: ABC News

See ABC story

"This week, farmers in parts of western Queensland saw their stock drown and die from exposure in disastrous flood conditions which Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said will likely claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of cattle.

The floods come after an extended period of drought, when many paddocks across the region were reduced to dust.
But for some farmers, these hellish conditions are a distant dream.

Rob and Sally McCreath quit mainland Australia to farm in Tasmania in 2016, where they foresaw an easier life.
They call themselves "climate-change refugees"."

Read the ABC News Story

Pacific shames PM on climate policy: SMH

PM Scott Morrison

"Mr Morrison's visit, which follows a trip to Papua New Guinea last year where he announced a naval base on Manus Island, reflected a new awareness of the need to counterbalance China's growing influence in the region.

The visit was not only diplomatically and symbolically significant. Mr Morrison and his counterparts announced a range of cooperative projects, overwhelmingly funded by Australia, on infrastructure, migration, border protection, military capacity, sport, economics and more.

But while Mr Morrison's gesture in showing the flag was welcome, his trip was marred by a lack of leadership on the region’s biggest issue, global warming – which poses an existential threat through rising sea levels and the increased frequency of catastrophic weather events."

Read the SMH article

#scottmorrison  #global heating  #climatechange  #Pacificnations   #LiberalNationalgovernment

CCR: COP24: Capricious foes, Big Sister and high-carbon plutocrats

"If you ignore rising emissions from aviation and shipping along with those related to the UK’s imports and exports, a chirpy yarn can be told. But then why not omit cars, cement production and other so-called “hard to decarbonise” sectors? In reality, since 1990 carbon dioxide emissions associated with operating UK plc. have, in any meaningful sense, remained stubbornly static.[1] But let’s not just pick on the UK. The same can be said of many self-avowed climate-progressive nations, Denmark, France and Sweden amongst them. And then there’s evergreen Norway with emissions up 50% since 1990.
Sadly the subterfuge of these supposed progressives was conveniently hidden behind the new axis of climate-evil emerging in Katowice[2]: Trump’s USA; MBS’s Saudi; Putin’s Russia; and the Emir’s Kuwait – with Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, quietly sniggering from the side-lines. But surely no one really expected more from this quintet of regressives. It’s the self-proclaimed paragons of virtue where the real intransigence (or absence of imagination) truly resides. When it comes to commitments made in Paris, the list of climate villains extends far and wide – with few if any world leaders escaping the net."

Read the full Climate Code Red article 

#carbonemissions  #Sweden  #France  #aviation emissions  #cementproductionemissions

IPD Article: Denials Down Under: Climate Change and Health

Who are the climate criminals?

 "The Morrison Government, hived off from such concerns, is more focused on immediate, existential goals." ....

...  "The note of the (IPCC) report is one of manageable mitigation, shot through with a measured fatalism: “Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” While admitting that, “Some impacts may be long-lasting and irreversible, such as the loss of some ecosystems (high confidence)” stabilising temperatures at 1.5ºC would at least draw a ring around the catastrophe. “The avoided climate change impacts on sustainable development, eradication of poverty and reducing inequalities would be greater if global warming were limited to 1.5ºC rather than 2ºC, if mitigation and adaptation synergies were maximised while trade-offs are minimised (high confidence).”

For the Morrison government, these words, admittedly technical and dry, are the stuff another galaxy, pressed to the outer reaches of the cosmos. The IPCC report did not, according to the prime minister, “provide recommendations to Australia,” leaving his government to pursue policies to “ensure electricity prices are lower.”

25 Oct 2018

Stop the Climate Criminals says Adam Bandt Australian Government MP

Take Action

“This is coal. Do not be afraid. Do not be scared. It will not hurt you.” -- Scott Morrison, February 9, 2017.

At a time when the world is burning, the climate deniers in the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government are wrecking our climate and locking us into a future dependent on coal.

It wasn’t long ago that Scott Morrison, the new Prime Minister, brandished and then lovingly stroked a lump of coal, provided to him by his mates in the Minerals Council, on the floor of the House of Representatives. 

We need to kick this mob out. Add your name to our petition and help us kick out these climate criminals.

Information

 

Why is this important?

Coal will hurt you. In fact, it is hurting millions of people right around the world. Coal kills.

This year, in winter, bushfires have scorched this country. 100% of NSW is in drought. The Arctic Circle is on fire.

The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government has given up on climate action. They've proven that they are incapable of enacting a coherent, effective climate policy.

The only option left for our planet is to KICK. THIS. MOB. OUT.

Join us.

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