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.

6000km run for safe climate begins

A relay team of 25 people began a 6000 kilometre run across Australia on November 2 to urge a rapid transition to a carbon-neutral future.

The Run for a Safe Climate started in Cooktown in Far North Queensland. It will continue for 28 days through Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide, before ending at Melbourne’s St Kilda Beach on November 29.

The runners all work in emergency services. Among them are firefighters, police and a nurse. On the run, they intend to visit some of the communities most at risk from the impacts of climate change. Thirty events will be held in towns and cities along the route.

The Run for a Safe Climate also aims to raise funds for Safe Climate Australia (SCA) — an NGO launched in July that wants to develop a comprehensive transition plan towards a zero-carbon economy.
SCA estimates it will need $1.6 million a year for three years to develop the plan.

The group says Australia’s climate policy must be based firmly on the climate science. “There is already too much carbon in the atmosphere”, it said on its website, “and this demands the rapid and near total de-carbonisation of all sectors of the economy, and the sequestration of around 200 billion tonnes of existing atmospheric carbon pollution.”

The group supports a cut in greenhouse gas levels to a safe level of between 280 and 325 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide — down from the today’s 390.

“We face a sustainability emergency and speed is of the essence”, SCA said. “For the high-polluting nations such as Australia, annual emissions cuts in the range of five to ten per cent a year may be necessary, and five per cent or more of world production may be required for a sustained period to build a global renewable energy system and a low-pollution world economy.”

CPRS opponents “dinosaurs” says ACTU

Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sharan Burrow has emailed tens of thousands of union activists with a plea to back the federal Labor government’s flawed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).

An October 23 email to the Your Rights at Work campaign elist (reproduced below) called on unionists to pressure MPs and Senators to pass the controversial climate bill when it is presented to parliament for the second time in November. Coalition, Greens and Independent Senators rejected the CPRS bill in August.

A union campaign to support the CPRS is needed because a “small group of dinosaurs in parliament are planning to vote against climate change laws”, the email said.

However, Burrow’s “dinosaurs” include Greens parliamentarians who will vote against the CPRS because it would set pitifully weak emission cuts targets, ignore the climate science, hand-out billions of dollars to the big polluters and allow Australia’s emissions to rise.

Greens Senator Christine Milne told the National Press club in June: “Supporting the CPRS would mean Australia would have the same greenhouse gas emissions in 2013 as today … Rejecting the CPRS gives us hope that real solutions could be implemented … bringing down emissions far faster and cheaper.”

Most of Australia’s environmental NGO’s also oppose the CPRS laws. The more than 150 climate action groups present at January’s national Climate Summit said they would campaign “to prevent the CPRS from becoming law”.

Burrow said her email was on behalf of the Union Climate Connector Team. Union Climate Connectors is a joint initiative of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), the ACTU and nine unions.

It was launched in August to provide training and resources for union activists who want to take action on climate change.

The Union Climate Connector website does not specify support for the proposed CPRS.

On October 12, ACF campaigns director Denise Boyd said the Greens’ proposed amendments to the CPRS bill “were exactly kind of improvements we need if we want Australia’s emissions trading scheme to be environmentally effective”. However, Boyd also said the ACF’s support for the CPRS would continue unless the bill was further weakened.

In her email, Burrow said the CPRS would “help Australia cut greenhouse gasses and create up to million jobs.”

Yet the Australian Institute’s Richard Denniss said government claims about the CPRS were “spin” in an October 6 Crikey article.

“The Treasury modelling of the CPRS tells you all you really need to know about the CPRS”, said Denniss. “First, Australia’s domestic emissions will be no lower in 2019 than they were in 2008. Second, the carbon price will be so low that no coal fired power stations will be forced to close down. Third, all of the ‘reduction’ in emissions will come from importing permits from other counties.”

Table shows the projections for Australia's emissions under the CRPS. Emissions will remain relatively stable before declining slowly, while the import of carbon offset permits from overseas will rise.

*****

Sharan Burrow’s email to the Your Rights at work elist

“From: The “Your Rights at Work” Team
[mailto:listmaster@www.rightsatwork.com.au]
Sent: Friday, 23 October 2009 3:33 PM Subject: Union Climate Action

Dear

As we all know, a majority of Australians want action on climate change. But some politicians and business groups are acting like dinosaurs by continuing to block important climate change laws.

These laws will help Australia cut greenhouse gasses and create up to a million jobs in our new clean energy and existing traditional industries. In short, they are laws to create a cleaner environment and a stronger economy.

In November, this small group of dinosaurs in parliament are planning to vote against climate change laws for a second time.

I want to take this opportunity to talk to you about what else we can do and how we need your help for strong action on climate change

We have talked with many people across Australia about ramping up our activities by joining together with other community activists. It is clear we need to take our message to the suburbs, towns and regions to ensure all MPs and particularly Senators understand that Australians want these climate laws passed.

Between now and the end of November, we will be holding activities in conjunction with unions and local Trades and Labour Councils, taking our message to the streets in the same way we did in the Your Rights at Work campaign.

It will be simple and fun and designed to be educative.

If you would like to get involved, give us your contact details and we will link you up with activities in your area. Visit http://www.rightsatwork.com.au/campaigns/cleanenergyjobs/connectorssignup

This will make sure we get a strong message to those MPs and Senators who need our help to evolve.

In unity
Sharan Burrow and the Union Climate Connector Team

New anti-protest laws for Copenhagen

Rich countries block effective climate action at Copenhagen, condemning billions of the world’s poorest to the awful impacts of runaway climate change — legal. Protesting against this outrage — illegal.

The Danish government is preparing new “anti-riot” laws in time for the UN-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen.

Proposed changes to police powers to arrest and detain climate protesters were announced on October 18. Indymedia Denmark said the laws would likely pass through parliament before the conference begins on December 7.

Under Danish law, police already have the right to carry out “preventative arrests” if they suspect a crime may be committed in the future. The current “preventative” detention limit is six hours. The proposed new law would double the limit to 12 hours.

Those convicted of “hindering the authorities” also face much tougher penalties. Indymedia Denmark said a first time offense normally results in small fine. The new laws would punish those convicted with up to 40 days imprisonment.

Penalites for “vandalism in a situation where the public peace and order is disturbed” are set to double — with a maximum sentence of three years. Fines for “breaching the peace” would more than quadruple under the changes.

In an August 10 statement, Danish police said “open-air meetings may be prohibited when it is feared that they may constitute a danger to the public order”.

Face coverings or masks are strictly illegal. The police also warned they can legally break up any protest “after the crowd has three times been called upon to disperse in the name of the Queen and the law and such warnings have gone unheeded”.

Tens of thousands of people will attend a series of demonstrations during the conference to demand urgent action on climate change.

Climate Justice Action has called a protest to coincide with the conference opening on December 7. Friends of the Earth International is preparing a “Flood for Climate Justice” on December 12, where protesters will “‘flood’ through the streets of Copenhagen with our demands for climate justice”.

The largest protest will be the December 12 “People First – Planet First” mass march, which is endorsed by more than 150 organisations worldwide.

Climate activists in Denmark have condemned the proposed laws and have appealed for international supporters to forward letters protest to Danish embassies worldwide. A briefing paper for activists about their legal rights for protesters in Denmark has been issued.

A letter from one Danish activist posted on the Another Green World blog on October 31 said: “These measures, if approved, will effectively criminalise protests involving any degree of peaceful civil disobedience … the law is aimed at the many thousands of climate activists, from all over the globe, who will be coming to Copenhagen.”

“We therefore call upon the Danish government not to pursue this legislation and to allow protesters to demonstrate and congregate without police harassment.”

An international petition has been launched in defense of the right to protest in Denmark. It said: “[The laws are] a threat to democratic participation during the summit and in the future. The new law package, if its implemented, will cause polarisation, confusion, and promote passivity. This is not useful in the situation we are in faced with the climate crisis.”

The petition can be signed here.

[Contact the Danish consulate in Sydney or Melbourne.]

Will Copenhagen be like Poznan?

Last year’s UN-sponsored international conference on climate change was held in the Polish city of Poznan. This year’s event will take place in the Danish capital Copenhagen.

The Poznan conference was a failure and the Australian government bears some of the responsibility.

The Australian delegation to Poznan chaired a so-called “negotiating bloc” of some of the largest polluting nations, including the US, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Canada. The bloc helped scuttle chances of an agreement on a proposed 25%-40% emissions reduction by 2020.

Another, less well known issue with the Poznan conference was the allocation of space. More conference space was given to side events outside the UN process – almost all of which were hosted by corporations – than to environmental groups running official UN ’side events’. See the Poznan conference site map below from the Climate Crashers blog.

The Copenhagen website lists information for NGO’s to book space for the side-events (applications have ended). But there’s nothing about how much space the corporate greenwashers will be granted at Copenhagen.

Despite the proven scientific imperative for strong climate action, it appears the rich countries will again try to sink a strong agreement at Copenhagen.

In a recent New Matilda article, Climate Code Red co-author David Spratt said, “an agreement with teeth that would actually limit warming to even 2 degrees [a still disastrous target] seems most unlikely at Copenhagen.”

NSW power plants – will they be coal or gas?

Will the two new power stations in New South Wales (NSW) be coal or gas? The NSW government says it has a “fuel neutral policy”.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they aim to “neutralise” fossil-fuel use. Rather it means they will allow private energy companies to make the decision. It means coal is in.

The two new power stations have been flagged as either “coal or gas”. A recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald gave the impression that NSW Premier Nathan Rees had ruled out the more carbon intensive coal option.

The SMH even reported that Rees had written to energy minister John Robertson to ask him to develop a plan for a “green power revolution”. Were this true then gas would be off the agenda too and the government would invest in available solar thermal and wind power energy generation.

But a recent exchange in the NSW parliament between Greens MLC John Kaye and Robertson reveals the ALP government won’t stand in the way of more coal-fired plants.

It also demonstrates how the SMH uncritically reported the government’s spin as fact and helped generate confusion about this — absolutely terrible, lazy, purile “journalism”.

Robertson claimed the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) would encourage the private companies (who both have heavy investments in coal) to make the plants gas-fired.

However, the CPRS gives billions in compensation to coal-fired energy. New coal-fired power stations would qualify for the free loot. Plus, the ready availability of coal in the Lithgow area and the Hunter Valley make coal the most “economical” choice — even though it costs the planet.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen has called coal “the single greatest threat to civilisation and all life on our planet”.

He also pointed out: “The Australian government was elected on a platform of solving the climate problem, but then, with the help of industry, it set emission targets so high as to guarantee untold disasters for the young, let alone the unborn. These governments are not green. They are black – coal black.”

The NSW ALP government’s “green energy revolution” is “coal black” too.

See below for the parliamentary text, posted to the Grassroots Climate Oz list on November 2 by Greenpeace Australia’s Julian Vincent. Relevant statements from Robertson are bold and italicised.

*****

Dr JOHN KAYE:
“My question is directed to the Minister for Energy. Has the Minister received a letter from the Premier requesting that he “develop a comprehensive energy policy with a strong emphasis on clean energy”? Can the Minister confirm that either or both of the new baseload power generator proposals at Mount Piper and Bayswater B are now to be restricted to be gas-fired only and not coal?”

The Hon. JOHN ROBERTSON:
“It is true; the Premier did write to me about a clean energy policy. I can advise the House — I do not think it is a State secret because it was in the Sydney Morning Herald — that the Premier had written asking me to develop a clean energy policy.

It is worth my making the point that this government is the first in the country to put the portfolios of energy and climate change and the environment into one office. That presents significant opportunities to develop policies that deal with, particularly, clean energy and how we deal with energy in an environment where we will operate with a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. We will see a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme introduced at some point, and we will see climate change continue to have an impact.

As part of the government’s reform strategy, a number of generation
development sites identified by the existing government-owned generators will be made available to the private sector. The private sector, not the government, will decide where new investment in generation will occur and what fuel will be used for that generation.

The following sites have been identified as gas only: Bamarang, Marulan and Tomago. The State has a fuel neutral policy for Bayswater B in the Upper Hunter and Mount Piper 3 and 4 in the Central West. Ultimately, any private-sector investors that make a decision about fuel type and technology must do so in the knowledge that any new power station will be participating in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

What I will say is that gas is obviously a more competitive source of fuel for a prospective power station due to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme — which is another reason why the government supports it.”

NSW plans more fossil-fuel power

NSW Premier Nathan Rees launched a government “education program” about climate change in May. Yet it seems the “educators” are the ones most in need of global warming “education”.

The “what you can do in your world” program urged NSW householders to cut carbon pollution by using less energy and switching to energy-efficient light bulbs and electrical appliances.

A television campaign featured black balloons escaping from household appliances — each balloon represented 50 grams of carbon dioxide pollution. A government website for the campaign boasts householders had pledged to save almost 4 million balloons.

What the website doesn’t say is that the government plans to increase NSW’s emissions by billions of “balloons” — canceling out any household efficiency gains many times over.

Public submissions into government plans to build two new coal or gas-fired power stations closed on October 26.

More than likely, the plants will be coal-fired. If approved, they would contribute a further 23.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year.

That’s about a 34% rise in the state’s pollution from stationary energy.

Do “what you can do in your world” to cut emissions. But in Nathan Rees’ world new power stations could spew out an extra 466 billion black balloons every year.

Add in the government’s proposed redevelopment of the central coast’s Munmorah coal-fired power station and the estimated extra emissions would come close to 600 billion balloons.

One of the power plants is planned near the existing Bayswater coal-fired power station near Muswellbrook in the Hunter Valley. The other is planned at Mt Piper, near Lithgow.

Renewable energy alternatives, such as solar thermal or wind power, are excluded from the government’s proposal.

The Nature Conservation Council of NSW called for the ALP government to abandon plans for the new coal-fired power plants. “To build new coal-fired power stations in the face of dire predictions about the potential impact of climate change on the environment is extremely irresponsible, if not negligent”, it said.

NSW Greens MLC John Kaye denounced the state government’s energy policy at an October 23 protest outside the Financial Review Energy Conference. He said the Rees government energy plan is “driven by corporate profit more than the needs of the community”.

“What is the absolute worst thing we could do for the climate?”, Kaye asked. “While the rest of Australia is distracted by a CPRS that will not reduce carbon pollution and will only make the polluters more wealthy, back here … the NSW government’s been hatching a plan not only to sell-off the existing coal-fired power stations, not only to sell off the retailers, but also to build two new coal-fired power stations.”

“Well this is child abuse. Its not just corrupt, its child abuse. Every child who lives today will inherit not only a degraded environment but also an economy that is addicted, that is sick with its coal”, he said.

As public outrage grew, Rees told the October 19 Sydney Morning Herald the new power-stations would be powered by gas, not coal. However, he has since failed to confirm this and the NSW government planning department still lists the proposed power plants as coal or gas.

Even if the new power stations were gas-fired, it would still increase NSW’s emissions hugely, at a time when climate scientists urge rapid emissions cuts.

“There is only one solution”, Kaye said at the October 23 protest. “That solution is in the sunshine and the wind. That solution is in the households for energy efficiency. There are no solutions that involve burning fossil fuels.”

A rally and march against the proposed power stations will take this message to the NSW ALP conference on November 14.

[The ‘No new coal power stations’ protest will meet at 12.30pm, Town Hall on November 14.]