Climate Action Rally in Bellingen August 17, 2019

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

 

 What does your local community do to mitigate climate change?

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Forests, logging and climate change: IA

Related: Can Earth be saved? Climate change is threatening the world's food supply, according to a UN panel.: Al Jazeera

Australia's PM Scott Morrison blasted by Pacific heat: The Guardian

Scott Morrison blasted by Pacific heat while trying to project calm on climate

Things are not under control when it comes to Australia meeting our Paris target, even if Scott Morrison wants us to believe that. 

We’ll get to climate, and the rumble in the Pacific, but I want to begin closer to home. It’s been a busy news week, so you might have missed an excellent story from my colleague Adam Morton on Tuesday revealing that a coalmine in Queensland has nearly doubled its greenhouse gas emissions in two years without penalty under a Morrison government mechanism that is supposed to impose limits on industrial pollution.

According to documents released under freedom of information laws, mining company Anglo American was given the green light under the safeguards mechanism to increase its emissions by about 1m tonnes at its Moranbah North mine, in central Queensland. The case study matters, because it helps us separate spin from substance.

Read the excellent The Guardian article

Denmark sees resolution soon to EU rift on 2050 climate goal: Reuters

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The new energy and climate minister of Denmark, a frontrunner in fighting climate change, said on Friday he was confident fellow EU countries would soon agree to go carbon-neutral by 2050 despite resistance in the east of the bloc.

A push by most European Union nations for the world’s biggest economic bloc to go carbon-neutral by 2050 was dropped to a footnote in June after fierce resistance from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary who fear it would hurt economies like theirs dependent on nuclear power and coal. 

“I think it will happen in the near future,” energy and climate minister Dan Jorgensen said, referring to an EU-wide commitment to achieving a balance between carbon emitted and removed from the atmosphere within the next three decades. 

Read the complete Reuters article

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

Forests, logging and climate change: IA

Logging has a serious effect on climate change, writes Frances Pike.

THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL for Climate Change (IPCC) recommends that "natural solutions" are employed to deal with climate change emergency. The immediate protection and restoration of natural systems for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are preferred to geo-engineering and B.E.C.C.S — burning biomass as a fossil fuel substitute while using some sort of carbon capture and storage.

It is clear that the resilience of natural systems must be enhanced to withstand climate change impact, lest they falter and collapse, inhibiting their capacity for CDR.

The fairytale that burning wood instead of coal is carbon neutral continues to wreak havoc on the world’s extant forests. But that fairytale could soon end, taking with it the myth that the industrial logging of the world’s native forests has been and is now "sustainable".

For a long time, the falsity of carbon emission accounting for forest bioenergy has been apparently invisible to many policymakers. A Weekend Australian commentator said, in relation to UK power station Drax which has converted to wood: “The CO2 it emitted as a coal station was causing climate change; the increased CO2 now emitted from burning wood is defined by the EC bureaucrats as not existing”.

Read the complete article 

Related: Want to beat climate change? Protect our natural forests: The Conversation

Can Earth be saved? Climate change is threatening the world's food supply, according to a UN panel.: Al Jazeera

Report after report have been warning about the dangers of climate change - and that it is happening right now.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has put the minds of more than 100 scientists together.

What they are saying is alarming: Not only are rising temperatures threatening the planet, but so are the world's eating habits.

The way food is farmed is drastically degrading the Earth's land, and scientists predict that is making global warming worse and will lead to food shortages.

So, how will governments respond to this warning?

Presenter: Mohamed Jamjoom


Guests:
Simon Lewis - Professor of global change science at University College London
Patrick Holden - CEO of Sustainable Food Trust
Jan Kowalzig - Senior climate policy adviser at Oxfam Germany

DESMOG Newsletter

Message From the Editor This week was all about the Kochs. Drawing from a major new archive on the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers, Sharon Kelly explains how its documents help illuminate the origin story for Charles and David Kochs' powerful network of influence. DeSmog also launched a new research tool, the Koch Network Database, to profile the dozens of organizations and individuals linked to Charles Koch or other members of the Koch family, Koch Industries, and related entities. The Koch political network includes a wide range of groups working to spread the Kochs’ free market vision on a range of civic issues, which includes fighting against regulations on carbon emissions and denying the existence or seriousness of man-made climate change. Now, you can find this network’s members and activities, all in one place. We have around 50 profiles to start and many more to come. Please let us know if you have any information or documents to contribute. Have a story tip or feedback? Get in touch: editor@desmogblog.com. Thanks, Brendan DeMelle Executive Director