Libs’ fight detracts from climate crisis

The deadline to pass the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) approached, and passed, last week, with the Senate extending debate on the issue until this week. The nation’s media was transfixed by the spectacle of the Liberal Party annihilating itself over what position to take.

In part, the Liberals’ problems stemmed from the fact that the Labor government accepted the Liberals’ proposed amendments, making the CPRS even more polluter-friendly than before.

But the Liberals’ crisis also revealed deep division over climate policy —between the party’s climate deniers and climate pretenders.

The pretenders, such as party leader Malcolm Turnbull, are no more serious than the deniers about acting firmly to stop climate change. Rather, they want to present the illusion of action to a public increasingly worried about global warming. The government settled for a pretend policy on climate change long ago.

Turnbull, the so-called opposition leader determined to support the government’s CPRS (after “browning” it down substantially), was due to face a party room leadership ballot on December 1.

With the Senate due to finish debating the CPRS that day, at time of writing it was foreseeable a new leader could change tactics, uniting the party around opposing the legislation.

The Liberals’ crisis has shifted attention and criticism away from the woefully inadequate CPRS.

For the big parties, climate change is just another policy issue. The debates and controversies about the CPRS are detached from the scientific predictions of pending climate disaster.

Yet while politics-as-usual went on inside parliament, a small group of committed climate activists outside spent their third consecutive week in an unusual protest for urgent climate action.

Participants in the Climate Justice Fast began their protest hunger strike on the parliament house lawns on November 6. Some intend to fast until the Copenhagen climate conference ends in mid-December.

Paul Connor was on day 19 of his fast when he spoke to Green Left Weekly. The big parties’ attempt to strike a dirty deal on the CPRS had not lessened his commitment to campaigning on climate change.

“Everything that has happened politically has reinforced what we are doing and why we are doing it”, he said.

“The battle for adequate science-based legislation is a very young one, and we have a long way to go. It’s not going to happen from that building [parliament house] up there until the people demand it. We’re seeing that the leaders are not going to lead. So we need to build a real social movement.”

Connor said the fast had received some media attention, particularly from overseas. However, he also said some journalists had told him they won’t cover the action because they don’t want others to emulate the fasters because it is dangerous.

“If society could only be as risk-averse about climate change as we are about fasting then we’d have noting to worry about”, Conner joked.

The dark history of population control

Book review. Matthew Connelly: Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2008

A select group of billionaires met in semi-secrecy in May 2009 to find answers to a “nightmarish” concern. Their worst nightmare wasn’t the imminent danger of runaway climate change, the burgeoning levels of hunger worldwide or the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

The nightmare was other people – lots of other people.

The self-styled “Good Group” included Microsoft founder Bill Gates, media mogul Ted Turner, David Rockefeller Jr and financiers George Soros and Warren Buffet.

The London Sunday Times said they discussed a plan to tackle overpopulation, something they considered “a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.”

Yet it was far from the first time that the “born to rule” had sought to make rules about who could be born. The brutal fact is that a policy of controlling global population means controlling the poverty stricken – whether the policy be concerned with fertility or migration. More than 90% of projected population growth in the 21st century will occur in the global South. The highest birth rates are in the very poorest nations. The same was true in the 20th century.

However, most supporters say population control is a kindness – a benevolent measure that can lift people out of poverty, hunger and underdevelopment.

Cutting population has been put forward by some as a key measure to address ecological decay and prevent runaway climate change. The simple idea is that fewer people will mean less greenhouse gas emissions. Controlling population is equated with the very survival of humanity.

The fact that, unlike greenhouse gas emissions, population growth is slowing worldwide (the UN projects world population growth will peak by 2050) does not seem to sway the hardcore populationist lobby.

In response, other environmentalists say a focus on population is a dangerous diversion from the urgent need to transition to a zero-carbon economy and keep all remaining fossil fuels in the ground. They say population control schemes are not only ineffective but inevitably treat the victims of social and economic injustice as obstacles to a sustainable society.

Dark past

In these debates, few populationists care to reflect thoroughly on the history of population control. But population control has a dark past, which must be taken into account by everyone who wants to put forward solutions to the ecological crisis.

Matthew Connelly’s exhaustively researched history on the population control movement, Fatal Misconception, describes what happens when powerful, influential groups decide other groups of people are “excess.” “This is a story of how some people have tried to control others without having to answer to anyone,” Connelly says. “They could be ruthless and manipulative in ways that were, and are, shocking.”

He emphasises that population control has never been a global conspiracy. Rather, it reflects a highly conservative social outlook that treats other people as the biggest problem.

“In effect, [populationists] diagnosed political problems as pathologies that had a biological basis. At its most extreme, this logic has led to sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ or ethnic cleansing. But even family planning could be a form of population control when proponents aimed to plan other people’s families.”

Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, has no time for the “pro-life” religious groups who have opposed population control because they are against contraception or abortion.

The denial of a woman’s right to control her own fertility is simply another form of population control. State-run programs to artificially boost population levels are also contemptible.

“No less manipulative were those who were those who denied hundred of millions more people access to contraceptives and abortion because they wanted them to have more babies,” he says.

But his book deals mostly with the policies, influence and actions of those who organised to cut population in the 20th century. Fatal Misconception “is a history of how some people systematically devalued both the sanctity of life and the autonomy of the individual.”

Influence of eugenics

A key actor in this history is the US feminist and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. In a 2008 interview with Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National’s Phillip Adams, Connelly described Sanger as a tragic figure.

She rose to public prominence in the US before World War I as an outstanding representative of the political struggle for women’s right to safe abortion. She was persecuted and hounded by US government authorities for her pioneering stand.

But by the 1920s, she had gravitated from being a campaigner for working-class women’s rights to a supporter of efforts restrict the right of working-class people to parent children.

In 1925 she said:

“If the millions of dollars which are now expended in the care and maintenance of those who in all kindness should never have been brought into this world were converted to a system of bonuses to unfit parents, paying them to refrain from further parenthood, and continuing to pay them while they controlled their procreative faculties, this would not only be a profitable investment, but the salvation of American civilization.”

Sanger’s shift reflected a political compromise she, along with other early feminist activists such as Britain’s Marie Stopes, Japan’s Shidzue Ishimoto and Sweden’s Elise Ottesen-Jensen, made with the flagging eugenicist movement.

In this period, “With few accomplishments, less public credibility, and little access to policymakers [birth controllers] agreed on the need to ally with eugenicists in every country,” says Connelly.

The influence of eugenicist ideas became increasingly marked in Sanger’s public statements. Connelly records her saying:

“I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilisation for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.”

During the interwar years, Sanger played a key role in laying the foundations of a global population control movement.

From the outset, the partnership with the eugenicists warped the movement’s aims. Its prescriptions for the Third World avoided policies that focused on economic development or women’s access to education – despite the proven link between these and lower birth rates.

“But while birth control proponents were quite diverse and usually divided, none took up the cause of women’s education,” says Connelly.

“That would have undermined efforts to forge an alliance with eugenicists, because it would only remind them of how contraception helped educated women avoid contributing to the gene pool. Instead they could agree that the solution was to find a simpler, cheaper contraceptive that could be used by uneducated people.”

Population bomb becomes a Rockefeller baby

However, it wasn’t until the end of World War II that the population control movement began to build real influence in the halls of power.

In this period, the wealth gap between the capitalist West and the global South developed to unheard of proportions. But it was also a period of colonial revolution. Strong nationalist movements in most colonies defeated their colonisers and won independence from European powers in the decades following the war.

The unmistakable poverty in the majority world, along with the periodic rebelliousness of its people, reinforced the support for population control policies in conservative circles.

For those who benefited most from the global status quo, population control measures were a far more palatable alternative to ending Third World poverty or promoting genuine economic development.

“In the aftermath [of WWII], one might have expected the whole idea of shaping populations for political purposed to be discredited, considering the ways in which Nazis tried to control reproduction,” Connelly says.

“Instead, the cause of increasing access to birth control was about to enjoy a remarkable revival. In the years immediately following World War II it won outspoken converts among the leaders of new United Nations agencies. Tentatively at first, but with increasing largesse, it gained the support of the world’s richest foundations. And it would become the official policy of the largest nations.”

By the 1960s, record population growth rates in the global South were exploited to win broader support for population control. Paul Erlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb convinced millions that world’s biggest crisis was overcrowding.

Groups such as the Population Council and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) had already formed but they now began to attract serious private and government funding.

Two of the biggest private sponsors were the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller III served as the Population Council’s first president.

The formation of this new “American population elite” was the subject of a famous 1970 essay by Steve Weissman inRamparts magazine, titled “Why the Population Bomb is a Rockefeller Baby.”

“In the hands of the self-seeking, humanitarianism is the most terrifying ism of all,” Weissman concluded.

Controllers, not doctors

Flush with funds and political clout, the search was on for a suitable method for population control on a mass scale. In the early 1960s, Western-sponsored population control programs in rural India and Pakistan experimented with contraceptives. But the programs failed, mostly because the villagers themselves saw no reason to take the pills.

The populationists turned to a highly intrusive method: the insertion of intrauterine devices (IUDs) into targeted women. The practice of inserting the spiral or ring shaped IUDs inside a woman’s vagina was widely discredited in medical circles. It was known for causing very high rates of infection, pain and bleeding.

Despite this, J. Robert Willson, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Temple University, told the 1962 Population Council conference IUDs should be rolled out regardless. “We have to stop functioning like doctors,” he said.

“In fact, it may well be that the incidence of infection is going to be pretty high in the patients who need the device most. Again, if we look at this from an overall, long-range view (these are the things I have never said out aloud before and I don’t know how it is going to sound), perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilisation but not lethal.”

Willson’s fellow obstetrician, Alan Guttmacher, an influential figure in the Population Council and IPPF, extolled the benefits of IUDs in a similar vein: “No contraceptive could be cheaper, and also, once the damn thing is in the patient cannot change her mind. In fact, we can hope she will forget it’s there and perhaps in several months wonder why she has not conceived.”

However, in its broader publicity the population control groups took more care to portray their “family planning” programs as a compassionate way to overcome poverty.

But as Connelly notes, “the most effective propaganda for population control in the period did not threaten or cajole, or invoke poor victims. It played on the anxieties about crime, contagion and mass migration, but without actually naming them. It made people feel, viscerally, that it was already too late, and that they were living in a nightmare.”

By the late 1960s, population control became official US government policy. US President Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) openly tied aid to India with it agreeing to push ahead with a population control program. He said: “I’m not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.”

Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon (1969-74), dismissed democratic freedoms as condition for countries to qualify for aid, but “population control is a must … population control must go hand in hand with aid,” he said.

A new phase of population control had opened. And it was sterilisation of the “expendables,” rather than contraceptives or IUDs, that was to become the most used method, with horrendous results.

‘War against the poor’

Western populationist groups had been active in India for decades. But by the early 1970s, population control advocates had won over much of the country’s upper-caste political elite.

Remarkably, family planning programs made up 59% of India’s total health budget before the 1973 oil shock, Connelly says.

By the mid-1970s, the Indira Gandhi government had declared the country to be on a “war footing” to stop population growth. Gandhi was open that this “war” would entail undemocratic measures. She said: “Some personal rights have to be kept in abeyance for the human rights of the nation, the right to live, the right to progress.”

Connelly describes the Indian campaign of as an undeclared “war against the poor.””Sterilisation became a condition not just for land allotments, but for irrigation water, electricity, ration cards, rickshaw licences, medical care, and rises and promotions,” he writes.

“Everyone from senior government officials to train conductors to policemen, was given a sterilisation quota. This created a nationwide market, in which people bought and sold, sometimes more than once, the capacity to reproduce. Of course, for the very poorest, with no money and nothing else to sell, sterilisation in such conditions was not really a choice.”

Connelly cites figures from the state of Uttar Pradesh. People from lowest caste made up “29% of the population, but were 41% of those vasectomised”.

Government officials soon discovered that offering incentives and disincentives was not enough to meet the ever-rising sterilisation targets set. More repressive measures became common.

In 1976, the state of Maharastra proposed jailing parents with more than three children who refused sterilisation. The central government said it would not block the plan. In one case, a village in the state of Haryana “was surrounded by police, hundreds were taken into custody, and every eligible male was sterilised.”

India’s state teachers were also brought into the hysterical population control campaign. According to Connelly, teachers “like everyone else could be demoted, fired, or threatened with arrest. They, in turn, sometimes expelled students when their parents did not submit to sterilisation.”

China

In China, after years of promoting an artificially high birth rate, the ruling Chinese bureaucracy flipped to the complete opposite. It embarked on its own population control program in 1979.

For many years couples has to apply to the state for permission to have a child. One permit from the 1980s said: “Based on the nationally issued population plan targets combined with the need for late marriage, late birth, and fewer births, it is agreed that you may give birth to a child during [198-]; the quote is valid for this year and cannot be transferred.”

Each Chinese province worked out its own system of incentives and disincentives to meet its population control quota. Connelly give a typical example from Hubei province:

“If parents had only one child, they were to be given subsidies for health care, priority in housing and extra retirement pay. The child was also favoured with preferred access to schools, university and employment. But if the parents had another child, they were required to repay these benefits. As for those who had two or more children, both mother and father were docked 10% of their pay for a period of 14 years.”

But as in India, population control in China also relied on repressive force. In the “most coercive phase in the whole history of China’s one-child policy [in the 1980s] all women with one child were to be inserted with a stainless-steel tamper-resistant IUD, all parents with two or more children were to be sterilised, and all unauthorised pregnancies aborted.”

Defeat of the ‘old guard’

As knowledge of the human rights abuses spread, and a determined women’s rights movement arose (especially in the South), the institutional powerbase of the population controllers in the West gradually receded. Connelly cites the 1984 formation of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights as an important moment in the fightback. The feminist network of activists “condemned both abusive population control programs and the efforts to force women to bear unwanted children.”

The “old guard” of the international population control movement suffered a big defeat at the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo. Under pressure from Third World delegates, the conference formally renounced population control as its aim.

“The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they know it themselves”, Connelly concludes.

“But if the idea of planning other people’s families is now discredited, this very human tendency is still with us. The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the ‘unfit’, or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them.

“It appealed to the rich and powerful because, with the spread of emancipatory movements and the integration of markets, it began to appear easier and more profitable to control populations than to control territory. That’s why opponents were correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished history of imperialism.”

Connelly ends his history with a call for a “commitment to reproductive freedom, not just a fear of the future … [the future] must be both pro-life and pro-choice, combining forces to oppose population control of any kind.”

Truth, lies and the CPRS

Could the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) get any worse? The unfortunate answer is yes. It can, it has already and it’s likely to get worse still before parliament ends for the year.

Radical action is needed to avert an irreversible climate change disaster. Australia has some of the best conditions in the world for wind and solar power. An emergency program to phase out fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy in a decade is needed.

Given the crisis, it’s hard to imagine a more useless response than an emissions trading scheme.

Carbon trading schemes now exist in 35 countries worldwide. Yet nowhere have they successfully driven down carbon emissions.

In their various forms, however, all have proved to be highly lucrative for a new breed of carbon speculators, who can profit from trading in a new commodity — our air.

Friends of the Earth said the European Union’s emissions trading scheme will be worth about US$3.1 trillion by 2020.

Such cap-and-trade schemes face increasing criticism as failures mount, but profits — and emissions — rise.

In July, the billionaire financier George Soros told a London School of Economics conference that carbon trading was the wrong response to climate change. “The system can be gamed; that’s why financial types like me like it — because there are financial opportunities.”

Australian climate activists and most environment groups have condemned the proposed CPRS as a woefully inadequate response to the global warming crisis. Its weak targets ignore the scientific evidence that rapid emission cuts are needed.

The federal climate change department’s own figures suggest that the scheme won’t lead to a significant drop in Australia’s emissions for at least 20 years. Climate scientists say that’s far too late to prevent runaway climate change.

The low targets are a ghastly joke in the face of a looming climate disaster. But even worse, they are not real targets at all.

The CPRS will allow business to meet the emissions cuts targets through buying carbon offsets from overseas — that is, they can pay projects in other countries to make 100% of the cuts on their behalf.

The scheme gives A$16.4 billion taxpayers’ money as “compensation” to polluting industries, diverting resources away from direct investment in solar thermal, and wind power, energy efficiency measures and public transport.

The proposed payouts have grown so large the federal treasury was forced to revise its revenue projections for the CPRS on November 2, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) said. Treasury now expects it will be $2.5 billion in arrears by 2019-20.

Critics also point out the scheme’s subsidies will keep polluting industries in business, rather than phase them out.

In its first year, the CPRS carbon price will be capped at $10 a tonne — a rate so low it’s certain to price renewable energy alternatives out of the market.

So much for the supposed ecological benefits of a “free market” in pollution.

The only thing truly “free” in this scheme is the 95% of permits the government will hand to the dirtiest and richest companies at no charge.

The climate depravity of the two big parties is hard to overstate. Negotiations between the ALP and Coalition to get the scheme passed by the Senate are certain to add even more loopholes for the big polluters.

The ALP government has ruled out any negotiations with the Greens, who want far stiffer cuts in emissions.

Emissions from agriculture are the latest casualty of the political horse-trading. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on November 15 agriculture would be permanently excluded from the CPRS. It was a key demand of the climate denier-riddled opposition.

After stationary energy, agriculture is the next biggest contributor to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan to cut emissions in this crucial area is now official: we have no plan. But in truth, this is only a marginal change from the Rudd government’s climate policy for other sectors. There we have a plan that is sure to fail.

Other Coalition amendment proposals include: triple compensation payments to electricity producers; lock in the weak targets for 10 years instead of five; and exempt mining companies from having to worry about the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from coalmines.

At least some of these proposals will become part of the final legislation if it is to pass into law.

A question arises as to whether the big environmental NGOs, who were suckered into backing the CPRS in May, will now finally distance themselves from the polluter-friendly scheme.

The ACF has said many times it would end its support of the CPRS if it was “substantially weakened”. Yet the exclusion of agriculture from the CPRS — amounting to about 16% of Australia’s emissions — still hasn’t led to a policy change.

As the circus surrounding the CPRS draws to its miserable finale, new evidence of the looming climate catastrophe has emerged. It is almost as if the warnings from climate scientists become more dire in inverse proportion to the worsening of Australia’s climate change policy.

On November 20, parts of New South Wales were placed on “catastrophic fire danger” alerts. South-eastern Australia braced for more days of searing heat and fierce winds.

Meanwhile, a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience by a group of climate scientists from the Global Carbon Project said average temperatures are highly likely to rise by 6°C by the end of the century.

The scientists assessed that such a rise was probable given current emissions. The study said world emissions rose 28% between 2000 and 2008. In the 18 years from 1990, the rise was 41%.

They also confirmed the rate of emissions is now higher than ever — at a time it should be coming down fast. In the 1990s, emissions rose by about 1% a year. Since the turn of the century, the yearly rise has been about 3%.

The November 18 London Independent pointed out that a 6°C rise “would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilisation”.

Lead author of the study, Professor Corinne Le Quere, told the Independent December’s Copenhagen climate talks had to make a strong commitment to cut emissions.

“If the agreement is too weak, or the commitments not respected, it is not 2.5°C or 3°C we will get: it’s 5°C or 6°C — that is the path we’re on”, she said.

But any hopes that the Copenhagen conference will deliver the agreement the planet so desperately needs are misplaced.

US President Barack Obama announced on November 14 that no legally binding agreement would be made — exactly what the rich countries, including Australia, have pushed for over the past few months, against the wishes of the poor nations. The setting of binding targets will be delayed for at least a year.

In a display of outrageous hypocrisy, Rudd called on world leaders to show greater “political courage” at Copenhagen, said ABC Online on November 18.

Real political courage is exactly what is required. But it won’t be found in the pro-corporate political parties or the international gatherings of the so-called world leaders, who will lead us only to oblivion.

The political courage we need is the courage of the street, of the activists, of the people. The courage to fight for the measures we need and not give up. The courage to take decision-making power out of the hands of the elites who have so grievously abused it.

The courage to tell the truth about climate change. The courage to demand what science and justice dictate, not what is desperately inadequate but “politically acceptable”.

The courage to keep building a movement that can make governments fear the people, and fear the consequences of just pretending to act on climate change any longer.

That kind of political courage is all that stands between a safe climate future and climate chaos.

Interview with Clive Hamilton on Higgins by-election

Well known author and environmentalist Clive Hamilton recently announced he will stand for the Australian Greens in the December 5 by-election for the seat of Higgins in Melbourne.

The by-election promises to be one of the most interesting and important Australian electoral contests for some time. The ALP will not contest the seat. The Liberal party candidate, Kelly O’Dwyer, is a bank executive and an ex-staffer for former Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello.

Hamilton spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Simon Butler about his campaign.

*****

How much was the threat of dangerous climate change a factor that convinced you to stand in the Higgins by-election?

It was the only factor really. I’ve spent the last 14 months writing a book on climate change titled Requiem for a Species, which will come out in March. I’ve lived and breathed climate change for that period and it’s made me truly fearful about the future.

If you start to truly listen to what the leading climate scientists are saying you recognise that we are in very, very deep trouble. We’re almost beyond the point of no return and we certainly will be within a few more years unless we take radical action.

So when I was asked to throw my hat into the ring for the Higgins pre-selection for the Greens I felt as though I really had no choice. I felt it was more of a duty given how afraid I am [of climate change] and how important I see it as being.

It’s possible that we can make Higgins a turning-point in Australian politics. That’s certainly our objective: to raise the profile of climate change so high as to send a powerful message to Canberra that we want much more radical action.

The by-election is going to be just before the Copenhagen climate conference. What’s wrong with the ALP government’s climate change policy?

We all hoped that the Rudd Labor government would take a leadership role, and certainly Kevin Rudd spoke some bold and reassuring words early in the piece.

But it’s quite clear the greenhouse mafia — the term the fossil fuel lobbyists use to describe themselves — have been extremely effective in Canberra at capturing the government.

So the polices Labor is pursuing are really pathetic. They won’t go nearly far enough to tackle Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. They’ve been designed to pacify the carbon lobby. So Labor has failed grievously on this the most important issue.

To hear Rudd excoriate the climate skeptics other day was one of the worst examples of political hypocrisy we’ve heard for quite a long time. If he backed his words with action he’d be cutting our emission by at least 25% in real terms — not through fancy accounting — by 2020, and go beyond that.

Rudd reminds me more and more every day of Tony Blair: all spin and no substance.

Is Labor’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) worse than nothing?

Right from the outset I’ve regarded the CPRS as worse than nothing because once it goes ahead it will lock in a very weak target for a very long time.

I’m very worried that we might get locked in a scheme that is hopelessly inadequate. And that makes it all the more worrying that some environment groups, notably the Australia Conservation Foundation, backed the Labor government’s CPRS.

I found it absolutely mystifying that a major environment organisation campaigning on climate change could give its endorsement to such a pathetically weak scheme.

You’ve said you also intend to campaign on the need to build a new, sustainable economy. Can you explain what you mean?

A sustainable economy is one that has very sharply reduced environmental impacts. We absolutely know the direction we need to go in and that we need to go a very long way.

One of the things that very few people, and certainly the main parties, are unwilling to face up to is that it will require difficult structural change. Which means, inevitably, people in the old energy industries will be displaced. That’s unavoidable when you have major structural change in economies.

But a “just transition” would be one in which governments intervened in a substantial way. It would need to provide for those at the cutting edge of this transition, to ease the change, to provide financial support, to provide retraining and do all we can to ensure they not only have jobs but have better jobs as a result of the transition. I think that’s a feasible target for any government to aim at.

During your campaign, what will you say about the kind of refugee policy Australia should have?

I think many progressive people have been disturbed at the turn of events over the last month or so, in which the spectre of Pauline Hanson has been conjured out of thin air and now stalks the halls of Parliament House.

So a lot of us have been dismayed by the role of Rudd in particular, and the intemperate language he has used — ostensibly directed at people speakers, but we know it’s dog-whistling and it’s really applying to the asylum seekers themselves.

We argue that we have both an obligation under international law and a moral obligation to provide refugee for people who are fleeing persecution.

We should go through the proper processes: bring them onto the mainland, assess them quickly, accept those in genuine danger — especially Tamils fleeing from Sri Lanka, where there is serious repression going on — and do the right thing.

The truth is we don’t have a big asylum seeker problem in this country. Proportionately, there are very few people seeking asylum in Australia, so it’s something we can deal with without any difficulty. It’s really the Hansonite fears that are being stirred up and dictating the way in which the government is responding.

And what about Christmas Island detention centre, Should it remain open or should it be closed?

It’s alarming that although the Rudd government corrected some of the worst excesses of the Howard government’s policy it kept open the Christmas Island detention centre, which is excised from Australia legally and therefore limits the rights of genuine refugees.

They should all be brought to the mainland and given their full rights and treatment, quickly processed, and those assessed as genuine refugees should be taken into our country.

Polls now show a big majority support same-sex marriage rights. What’s your position?

I’ve done a lot of work at the Australia Institute on happiness and well-being. Consistently, the research evidence shows the principal factor determining people’s happiness is the quality of their relationships.

I take the view that society should recognise and endorse all relationships that are caring and loving because that’s going to make for a better society.

We should recognise that same-sex marriage has the same value as marriage between people of the opposite sex.

Is Kelly O’Dwyer, your main opponent, one of the group of Liberal party climate change deniers?

A journalist said to me that getting O’Dywer’s opinions on anything is like getting blood from a stone. But she said in the Age recently saying she does believe that global warming is happening — well hallelujah for that.

But it seems to me that she was really hedging her bets. A principal-backer of her campaign, who features in her election material, is Hugh Morgan — the godfather of climate change denial in Australia.

Morgan is the man who set up [climate denial organisation] the Lavoisier group and who has attacked environmentalism and global warming science on several occasions.
For someone who believes in global warming [O’Dwyer] keeps some pretty odd company.

What has been the response you’ve received since you announced you would contest Higgins?

My candidacy has certainly energised the local Greens. There have been a lot of volunteers offering help. We’ve had tremendous support in that regard. What we lack in funding compared to the Liberals we certainly make up for in enthusiastic volunteers.

Also, the climate action groups and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition have decided to become very active in the Higgins campaign. They’re not endorsing anyone but certainly we can expect to see large numbers of climate activists in the streets of Higgins over the next three weeks.

But my candidacy has also brought out some strong opposition. There are two or three candidates who are running in Higgins explicitly to oppose me.

Cartoon released on ‘Carbon Supermarket’

Kate Evans (aka Cartoon Kate) has released a new cartoon on carbon trading.

The Carbon Supermarket — Your Future for Sale?, is available for free download.

For the less visually-inclined, Carbon Trade Watch’s Kevin Smith has a posted a stirring indictment of carbon trading’s failures on the China Dialogue site.

He says: “Carbon trading isn’t working, and doesn’t show any signs of improving either. The biggest experiment in carbon trading so far, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, has been a spectacular failure, which has not made significant emissions reductions, has absorbed enormous amounts of political will and attention and has acted as a huge subsidy for some of the biggest polluters in Europe, with a handful of energy companies making billions of Euros in profit without having to reduce their emissions.”

Climate logic of the mad house

As the November 2-6 international climate change talks in Barcelona ended in poorly-concealed acrimony and weary expressions of “official optimism”, a funny thing happened in the mainstream Australian media.

The biggest story of Barcelona, the last before December’s climate talks in Copenhagen, should have been about Australia — for all the wrong reasons.

But instead, as the Barcelona conference closed, Australian media headlines were dominated by a November 6 speech by PM Kevin Rudd, where he ferociously denounced climate change sceptics.

On November 5, top African negotiator and chairperson of the G77 group of underdeveloped nations Lumumba Di Aping singled out Rudd and British PM Gordon Brown as responsible for undermining the negotiations.

African delegates walked out for part of the conference in protest at the rich nation’s refusal to consider emissions cuts based on climate science.

In particular, ABC Radio’s PM said Di Aping was most angry that rich nations like Australia had flat refused to agree to legally binding emissions cut targets at Copenhagen.

“The issue about whether there is a politically binding agreement and a legally binding agreement”, he said. “I do not know of anything called politically binding agreement.

“If there is anything that you know about politics and political manifestos … is that they’re worth very little. Tell me of any politician who delivered on his political manifesto. Was it Gordon Brown? Was it Kevin Rudd?”

It was an extraordinary attack. The chief representative of a bloc of 132 nations held up Australia as an example of hypocrisy on climate change. In essence, he said Australia was guilty of playing a double-game — of saying one thing but doing another.

In the discreet language of international climate diplomacy, Di Aping’s public rebuke of Rudd was the equivalent of scratching out an opponent’s eyes.

Yet by the next morning the story was dead — pushed aside by policy speech by Rudd to the conservative think-tank, the Lowy Institute.

Suddenly, the big news was not that Australia’s name was mud with most countries in the world for helping to sabotage a strong international climate agreement. Rather, the “news” was what the Australian government said about itself.

“Climate change deniers are small in number, but they are too dangerous to be ignored”, Rudd said.

“And the danger they pose is this — by collapsing political momentum towards national and global action on climate change, they collapse global political will to act at all. They are the stick that gets stuck in the wheel that despite its size may yet bring the train to a complete stop.”

It was left to Crikey.com’s Bernard Keane to respond on November 9: “If the Prime Minister is so angry about the efforts of denialists to derail action on climate change, then here’s a suggestion: stop giving them taxpayers’ money. Government funding flows through a variety of means to some of Australia’s biggest polluters and opponents of an effective emissions trading scheme.”

The federal government currently gives fossil-fuel intensive industries an estimated $9 billion a year in subsidies. Its misnamed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will hand out billions more to the biggest polluters if it passes a November vote in parliament.

More than anything else, Rudd’s speech was designed to prepare the electorate for complete failure at Copenhagen — a failure his government is helping to engineer.

Climate activist Geoff Lazarus pointed out that this is not a new tactic for the Labor government in the November 11 Canberra Times. “For many months, Rudd and Wong have attacked the Coalition parties for not being fair dinkum on climate change.

“While they are absolutely guilty as charged, it’s been a hypocritical political charade more to do with outmaneuvering the Coalition parties with voters as well as placating the mining industry and major industry associations, than meeting the challenge of potentially devastating global warming.”

The tiny Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives is one of the few nations that is taking on this challenge. The Maldives is the lowest-lying nation in the world and is at dire risk from rising sea-levels.

On November 10-11 it hosted the Climate Vulnerable Forum — composed of 11 countries most immediately at risk from dangerous climate change. There, it repeated its pledge to become carbon-neutral by 2020 and urged other nations to follow its example.

In his opening address to the conference, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed attacked the rich countries for steering Copenhagen towards a “global suicide pact” when it must be a “global survival pact”, said Voanews.com.

“At the moment every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first”, Nasheed said. “This is the logic of a mad house, a recipe for collective suicide.”

Maldives, Costa Rica are climate ‘role models’ says website

A new website that gives information of individual country pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions was launched on November 6.

The site reveals the commitments made by the biggest polluters are nowhere near enough to prevent dangerous climate change.

Climateactiontracker.org says the pledges made by the developed countries amount to only 8-12% cuts on 1990 levels by 2020 — poor countries insist cuts of 40% or more are needed.

The site politely describes the climate policies of Australia, New Zealand, the US, the European Union and Canada as “inadequate”.

Meanwhile, it says the tiny nations of the Maldives and Costa Rica are climate “role models”. Costa Rica has pledged to go carbon-neutral by 2021. The Maldives will convert to a zero-emissions economy by 2019.

The Maldives has publicly urged the rich nations to follow its lead with climate policies based on the science.

At a two-day conference in the Maldives on November 9-10, attended by 11 countries most at risk from climate change, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed attacked the rich nations for steering upcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen towards a “global suicide pact” when it should instead be a “global survival pact.”

“It is easy to assume that it can be solved by a messy political compromise between powerful states”, Nasheed said. “But the fact of the matter is, we cannot negotiate with the laws of physics. We cannot cut a deal with mother nature.

“At the moment every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first. This is the logic of a mad house, a recipe for collective suicide.”

The Climate Action Tracker website is a project of Ecofys and Climate Analytics with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research (PIK), with funding from the European Climate Foundation.

Travel company: carbon offsets don’t work

A British travel agent has said it will no longer offer its customers carbon offsets because they are a diversion from dealing with climate change.

The company, Responsibletravel.com, made the announcement via its website on October 16. It said: “We believe that offsetting distracts from the real issues — that is we all need to be reducing our carbon emissions as much as possible. Offsetting flights has too often been seen as an opportunity to go on flying the same amount or more.”

Managing director Justin Francis said the travel industry wrongly used offsets to justify expanding its operations.

He said: “Carbon offsets distract tourists from the need to reduce their emissions. They create a ‘medieval pardon’ for us to carry on behaving in the same way (or worse).”

Carbon offsets rely on the idea that a consumer, or a large company, can pay someone else to cut emissions on their behalf. Rather than encouraging the biggest polluting nations to reduce carbon pollution, it encourages poor countries to make the cuts instead.

The company was among the first to offer carbon offsets to its customers in 2002. It claims it is now among the first to drop offsets on ecological grounds.

“Carbon offsetting is an ingenious way to avoid genuinely reducing your carbon emissions”, Francis told the November 7 Independent. “It’s a very attractive idea — that you can go on living exactly as you did before when there’s a magic pill … out there that allows people to continue polluting.”

Carbon offsetting is now a multi-billion dollar industry. The Independent said about half of the European Union’s projected emissions cuts by 2020 will be made up of offsets.

In Australia, the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, due to be voted upon in parliament this month, will allow companies to meet 100% of their emission targets with carbon offsets bought from projects in the global South.

Francis said he was convinced by a June report on carbon offsets by Friends of the Earth (FoE).

The report said: “Offsetting does not work and will not work. Offsetting does not lead to promised additional emissions cuts in developing countries; it delays essential structural change in developed-country economies; and it institutionalises the idea of cuts in either the north or the south, when science demands reductions in both.

FoE called offsetting a “dangerous distraction” which should be abandoned because it “is profoundly unjust, fundamentally flawed and cannot be reformed”.

Copenhagen: Africa denounces rich countries

African nations have walked out of climate talks in Barcelona on November 3, blaming rich nations for undermining the negotiations. The Barcelona meeting was the final international meeting before the UN-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen in December.

The chairperson of G77 group of poor nations Lumumba Di-Aping said rich countries had refused to put serious emissions cuts targets on the table, the November 5 Guardian reported.

“We call on developed countries to step up to the challenge”, he said. “We believe they have a moral, financial and political responsibility to live up to the challenge”.

African nations have said an emissions cut target of 40% (on 1990 levels) by 2020 is the absolute minimum needed to prevent runaway climate change. However, the aggregate offer from countries such as Australia, the European Union and the US is only 16%.

Greenpeace Australia’s John Hepburn said the Australian delegation had helped provoke the walkout in a November 4 post on Crikey.com’s Rooted blog.

He said the African delegation walked out of the Barcelona conference following a meeting between African nations and the infamous “umbrella” group of big polluters. The “umbrella” group is chaired by Australia. The bloc was accused of helping to scuttle a strong agreement at last year’s climate talks in Poznan, Poland.

The world’s richest and biggest polluting nations are already downplaying chances of a strong agreement to limit climate change at December’s Copenhagen conference. However, it is likely they will attempt to blame developing countries for a bad outcome.

But the Rainforest Action Movement’s Joshua Kahn Russell said the African nations’ walkout was justified.

“So the shit is hitting the fan”, he wrote in Grist.org on November 3. “And Africa isn’t taking it. We should applaud their courage, and be skeptical anytime the media tries to shift the blame for the breakdown of negotiations onto G77 countries. Make no mistake, these talks have been polluted by self-interested corporations and governments.”

John Bellamy Foster on ecological crisis

Links has posted a fascinating new video of one of the world’s leading ecosocialists, John Bellamy Foster, discussing the roots of the ecological crisis.

See the video here.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and author of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (with Fred Magdoff), Ecology Against Capitalism, Marx’s Ecology and The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.

This video was part of the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series. The video was made available via MRZine.