by Bryony Edwards

By Bryony Edwards, Save the Planet/CACE

Just months ago in Australia pre COVID-19, it would have been unthinkable that:

• privately owned businesses could be put on hold en masse for the common good 
• Australia could suddenly produce over $80 billion to deal with a viral outbreak 
• large wage subsidy be provided in an attempt to secure jobs
• free childcare be provided
• schools would be shut down 
• banks, lenders and landlords be asked to waive all overheads including rents and mortgage repayments for at least the next six months
• the US govt would invoke a law enabling it to compel any private company (eg. General Motors) to produce a product for the common good (breathing equipment).

We are seeing both use of ‘command and control’ (centralising powers to deal with an emergency) alongside massive public spending focused on the common good with funds that were not supposed to exist. Both are an anathema to a neoliberal government. The curtain has dropped, and we can see what governments are actually capable of doing if they want to.

It’s from a crisis that opportunities arise and that long term change is most likely to occur. We can’t blow this opportunity. It’s not enough to just say the standard operating model is wrong - what are the concrete ideas we have to replace the neoliberal operating system that puts corporate profits ahead of the common good?

The LNP’s 'stimulus' package for coming out of COVID-19 will most likely focus on pumping more public funds into corporations and sectors that donate to the party in the name of jobs, including mining and fossil fuels. There is evidence that mining firms are taking the COVID-19 opportunity to increase automation - there go the jobs. Fossil fuel extraction is a dying sector and we would only be investing Australia’s future in stranded assets.

We are also seeing environmental destruction ramp up under the cover of COVID-19. In Victoria alone we’ve seen the extension of agreements that exempt the logging industry from conservation laws for 10 years and the onshore gas moratorium rolled back. 

But what should the government’s response look like, understanding that the impact of COVID-19 will likely take years to recover from and could be more serious than the Great Depression when unemployment reached 30%?

Once isolation is over, a massive fiscal stimulus will be required. Where would the funds come from? Our government, with the support of Parliament, can create those funds digitally. Yes, federal governments with floating sovereign currencies can do this and all they need is approval of Parliament/Congress. The Australian $80 billion-plus released so far for COVID-19 was created this way but the amount was then traded in government bonds. Federal bonds don’t raise capital - they are not a loan to the government. At the federal level, the government creates the dollars required and then gets investors to accept the liability of those dollars for the promise of a financial return. 

Adding money to the economy this way should not cause inflation unless the economy is approaching full employment, and in the context of a stimulus post COVID-19 there would be plenty for that money to do - this is at least the premise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Links below provide relevant background to MMT.  The risk of inflation is irrelevant when contrasted with the risk of no fiscal stimulus - and inflation is easily controlled for using taxes and interest rates. 

As radical as this may sound, the stimulus should put the wider common good at the centre. As such, the response should be a climate emergency investment package because the climate emergency is the ultimate crisis we face, and the climate emergency requires a ‘wartime’ mobilisation effort. 

And there would also be likely support for such a response. The Australia Institute recently found that two thirds of Australians (66%) agree that Australia is facing a climate change emergency and should take emergency action, as was taken during the world wars.

A true climate emergency response if implemented globally is one that could stop and then reverse global warming to ultimately restore a safe climate. Such an effort at a national level would create:

• A society with a spectrum of ample meaningful work across many current and emerging sectors, including land management, transport, stationary energy, etc. The scope of the work is daunting, and would include much R&D. 
• A society that is ‘steady state’, not a ponzi scheme based on the idea of infinite growth. This means cradle to cradle manufacturing and different KPIs to guide society and the economy. Models such as ‘Doughnut Economics’ would be central.

But most importantly, a global climate emergency response creates the possibility that we might actually have a future. Under the current trajectory, we don't have a future.

What should the climate emergency response and stimulus look like?

• Emergency targets for transition to a negative carbon economy (zero emissions plus greenhouse gas drawdown); the more ambitious the targets for net zero and negative emissions, the more rapid the change and the more work that will be created. 
• The investment can be locked in at a proportion of GDP annually over decades. It would need to start high (eg. 20-40%) for a couple of years and then drop lower (noting that during WWII, Aus GDP on the war effort reached about 45% and in the UK, 55%) The percent of GDP used for the climate emergency would in part be based on the targets that were set (Eg Net zero by 2030, Negative emissions by 2035). 
• The stimulus would include ample R&D and be governed by the type of governing infrastructure put in place by a Climate Emergency and Mobilisation Act, such as this draft one here.
• Naturally, fossil fuel extraction, land clearing and other climate degrading practices would cease and we would walk away from many of the destructive trade agreements signed up to over the last few years that allow corporations to sue the government for negatively impacting their profit margins. 

As to the details - these have been worked on and modelled by groups such as Beyond Zero Emissions, Zero Carbon Britain and others. Plans exist. A ‘negative carbon Australia’ is possible. 

The climate emergency package can also look however we want it to - based on our priorities and the key performance indicators we put in place to guide our society. For example, how central is equity? Education? Etc.

And why would Australia go out on a limb to do this when it can’t save the planet alone? Because Australia has vetoed stronger action on climate for over 20 years. Previously we stood in veto with the US and now stand in proud veto with Russia and Saudi Arabia. If Australian coal and gas exports were taken into account, we would be in the ranks of the top emitters globally, and we have the equal highest per capita emissions. Australia now needs to lead.

Yes, the likelihood of the proposed climate emergency action under the current government is next to laughable, but the alternative is giving up on a safe planet. We can’t let the Aus government use this opportunity to further entrench neoliberalism and prioritisation of corporate profits, corruption, and authoritarian lawmaking. We have to be louder than the lobbyists and loud in the media via letters to the editor, op eds etc. We need to contact our MPs and share this vision with them.  

Are you lucky enough to be able to sit at home in isolation? Use at least some of your time in isolation to give our future a chance.

Links

Modern Monetary Theory, COVID-10 and the economy. Dr Steven Hail

We're in 'emergency mode' for coronavirus — we can do the same thing for climate. Margaret Klein Salamon,
Things we can learn from COVID-19 to help with the climate emergency, The Fifth Estate

A Green Stimulus to Rebuild Our Economy: An Open Letter and Call to Action to Members of Congress

VIDEO - Prof Stephanie Kelton - The Deficit Myth - 2020 Harcourt Lecture - 15 Jan 2020
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Australians Want Gov. to Mobilise Against Climate Change Like a ‘World War’, the Australia Institute

Today is the first day of 2020 and I think 2019 needs to be the last year of a thirty year era of climate campaigning and action.
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Across the country fires are raging, with a scale and intensity that confirms that Australia and the world is now living in the early stages of truly catastrophic climate change.  Climate disaster has become a now issue. It is not surprising that the Oxford Dictionaries selected "climate emergency'" as the 2019 word of the year.

Across the globe people have spent the last 30 years incrementally working to reduce emissions in the hope that we can stop the warming before it becomes dangerous. But after those 30 years we have reached the point where the climate IS clearly dangerous, right now (and worse and worse is in the pipeline if current trends are allowed to continue).
The climate movement needs to rediscover the climate issue afresh, as it actually is now (and not as we have became habituated to thinking about it over past decades).

Let's work through the logic given the situation we are in, at the start of 2020.

The world is dangerously too hot now.  Because of current climate change impacts, much of the doubt about the reality of climate change is evaporating.  More and more people are beginning (very reasonably) to demand that governments take action to protect them –immediately.
Two scenarios could unfold from here.

With fires, droughts, heatwaves on land and in the seas, storms, floods etc. battering people and ecosystems, the cost of coping with impacts and recovering and taking adaptive action to lessen the impacts is mounting so rapidly that it would be very easy for societies to switch most of their 'climate' expenditures into dealing with here-and-now impacts.

What might this world start to look like?  Water shortages will be dealt with principally by investing in desal plants.  Forests and woodlands will be too dangerous to live near and they will be mercilessly control-burned or perhaps even cleared.  Agriculture will need to be shifted as much as possible into controlled environments (ie. into vast buildings). Across the globe, anyone too poor to invest in such controlled environments will be abandoned (ie. a large percentage of the rural poor and indigenous people living on country),  Sea walls will be built, or deltas and coasts abandoned. Marine and terrestrial natural ecosystems will be abandoned. Borders will be closed and people will close their hearts to the struggling and the dying. Wars and insurrections will become more and common in areas too poor to adapt, and quite possibly beyond, and the culture of global cooperation will die.  But remember that this is a world that is 'dealing ' with climate change and investing huge amounts very urgently in the process.

Is there a better scenario that we could bring into being instead? What might things look like if enough communities around the world decide to do two big things simultaneously, that is:

1. take effective short term protection action so that that tragic impacts are limited and so societies maintain their capacity for effective action; plus
2. implement a new prevention/rescue strategy to restore a naturally safe climate as fast as possible so that the adaptation/recovery burden is contained to a manageable level.

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What has to be done to achieve the second point?

If the earth is dangerously too hot now it means that:

• the Paris +1.5°C target is even more dangerous and should be unacceptable  (the current global temperature is +1.1°C
• we need to work out how to cool the planet in an environmentally beneficial way
• there is no emissions budget left (because any emissions add to an unacceptable climate state)
• we need to stop adding greenhouse gas emissions to the air 'immediately' - in just a few years not decades
• we need to take all the excess CO 2  out of the air at emergency speed ie. in decades, not centuries
• we need to provide temperature relief 'immediately' to try to stop and reverse tipping points and to prevent further damage to the earth systems and to protect people and nature in the here and now.​

Do we know how to carry out any of these steps?

Zero emissions: Over the last 50 years a huge amount of work has been put into developing zero emissions energy technologies and this effort has finally delivered technologies that are cost competitive against fossil fuels.  So the main things we need to do now is mobilise the political will to urgently close down emissions generating energy systems (covering the use of coal and gas and oil). We also need to accelerate the development and deployment of zero emissions technologies across all the other sectors of the economy.  While we absolutely must adopt zero emissions technology at emergency speed, doing so will result in cleaning up the air in regions that burn a lot of coal. This necessary clean-up process will remove particle pollution that has a net cooling effect (lowering the warming effect of coal burning). So, by itself, going to zero emissions (which we must do) will by itself raise the global temperature, once-off  by about half a degree. So something more needs to be done.

Full scale CO2 drawdown:  The earth can be cooled (eventually) by taking all the excess CO2 out of the air.  The lowest cost CO 2 capture and storage technologies depend on photosynthesis-driven biological systems – but these systems cannot be scaled enough to deal with all the CO2 that has to be taken out of the air.  So additional physical/chemical methods will need to be developed that are affordable at the necessary scale. We know that full-scale CO2 drawdown could take many decades or even hundreds of years to complete. So the cooling effect of the drawdown strategy will not be strong enough for a long time – meaning that massive damage could be done to human societies and natural ecosystems and biodiversity in the meantime.

Direct cooling using solar reflection methods.  It is already known that the earth can be cooled back to the pre-industrial level at relatively low direct financial cost using solar reflection methods – and the target temperatures could be reached in just a few years.  What is not known is whether this can be done with clear environmental/social net benefit globally (ie. would damaging side effects outweigh the direct benefits?).  Clearly solar reflection methods should not be used if the net environmental/social benefit is not positive. But given the staggering social and ecological damage that will be done if temperature relief is not delivered very fast indeed, it seems like it would be highly prudent and ethically compelling to immediately ramp up research and development aimed at creating net beneficial solar reflection methods.

What does our new situation mean for action and activism? We need to commit to a maximum protection approach to climate action and therefore be clear about:

• who and what we are trying to protect
• what conditions need to be created, by when, to deliver that protection.

Policy and activism needs to be driven by a transparent chain of custodial care linking every action step from the protection goals to the final implementation step.

We need to bring the urgency of real and timely protection to bear on climate campaigning.
We can no longer approach climate campaigning largely via a string of drawn out limited target campaigns.

We have to press governments to deliver a climate emergency action package that covers “everything”:

• climate adaptation
• building a zero emission economy in less that a decade
• creating a set of CO 2 drawdown industries on a huge scale
• urgently boosting research, development and assessment of solar reflection methods
• engaging other countries in this program too.

Ideally we would want the national government to take the lead from the start and to mobilise the country around this action program.  But for practical purposes the current government is best understood as “the fossil fuel industry in government”. And even if Labor won the next federal election, its culture is currently focused on trade-offs and “doing a bit of everything, good and bad, fairly slowly”.

Instead, for our immediate action, we need to look a bit further down the government hierarchy to find the critical next focus for action.

Between 2016 and 2019, 83 local councils passed climate emergency declarations in Australia (and over 1000 globally).  This process needs to be extended to more councils to build the community base, and extended to cover the adoption of an effective action program.

But the big qualitative shift for 2020 needs to be to get a number of state governments to declare a climate emergency and adopt the action program described above.  This process focusing on the states and territories began on 16 May 2019 when the ACT Legislative Council declared a climate emergency and the potential was further indicated on 25 September 2019 when the South Australian Legislative Council passed a motion calling for a declaration of a climate emergency.

We need to be practical, recognising that the fossil fuel industry has its claws less securely into the body politic in some states and territories more than others.  You can see this with the ACT, South Australia and Tasmania. There is also potential in NSW and Victoria. If these two big states could be got over the line then the country would really start to shift.

Australia is a hybrid polity – part democracy, part monetocracy.  To shift Victoria and NSW we will have to convince a large segment of the business community that their wellbeing doesn’t depend on following the interests of the fossil fuel industry, quite the opposite in fact.

Building a powerful business alliance against the fossil fuel industry is not a crazy idea.  In the 1970s and 80s the mining industry took on the manufacturing industry to press for the elimination of import tariffs.  The manufacturing industry was the Goliath with 25% of the business dollars in the economy and the mining industry was the David controlling only about 5% of the business dollars.  But the mining industry was eventually able to build an alliance that controlled more than 25% of the dollars in the economy and the alliance together with some skilful strategising rolled the manufacturers and got the tariff change they wanted.

The fossil fuel industry in Australia is still a minority economic force controlling less than 10% of the business dollars.  But the rest of the economy is not yet fully aware that its interests do not lie with the fossil fuel industry.

A campaign to get the NSW and Victorian governments on side for a climate emergency program will depend on mobilising both the community and business around a climate emergency action demand..  And doing both these things will depend on getting support across the political spectrum. Already there are signs that the Liberals and Nations are facing very real internal tensions over the climate issue.

The climate emergency campaign began in Australia in 2016 and was created by grassroots climate activists.  In the 3 years since then the campaign has built momentum globally, culminating in the passage of a climate emergency motion by the European Parliament on 28th November 2019.

The challenge for 2020 is for all of us climate activists to do what we can to get the mainstream climate movement to come at the climate issue afresh, acknowledging that the strategies of the last 30 years are past their use-by date.

Now that we are living in the early stages of catastrophic climate change, we have to pull off a massive, urgent and improbable climate rescue.  That will require new thinking and new action.

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by Bryony Edwards

​Don't use 'climate emergency' in vain! (target setting in the climate emergency)

As climate emergency talking and thinking shifts further towards climate emergency action, it is imperative that ‘climate emergency’ is not co-opted to mean something ‘convenient’ or ‘pragmatic’ (ie. weak goals and slow action). Climate emergency has to stand for safe climate principles: for restoring a safe climate.

Where are we today in the climate emergency campaign?

In the space of 5 months, the phrase climate emergency has become household. Several months ago, the hashtag #climateemergency resulted two tweets a week from a handful of the usual suspects. A snap count now shows 80 odd tweets in the past 30 minutes, including from mainstream voices.

For the last few weeks, 1000s with Extinction Rebellion are blocking central streets and bridges in London, demanding that their government implement a climate emergency response.

Just a few weeks ago, the Australia Institute released findings from a nationwide survey that the majority of Australians believe we face a climate emergency and want to see a ‘climate emergency’ response including the type of ‘mobilisation of resources undertaken in WWII’. The fact that we are hearing this language from any mainstream institution is a paradigm shift. These majority findings were found across different party persuasions.

As of today, the phrase, climate emergency’ is used by:

• The UK, which passed a non-binding opposition motion at the beginning of May. Wales and the Scottish National Party declared earlier in the week.
• Over 500 councils across seven countries having declared a climate emergency (Aust, US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, Italy and Germany) with many more councils in the pipeline.
• Universities; the University of Bristol recently declared
• School Strikers
• The Club of Rome, an international organisation with members including eminent scientists, business leaders, ex-politicians or retired heads of state.
• 14 MPs in Australia of different stripes
• Political parties, including the UK Labor Party and Scottish National Party
• Wales, which has declared a climate emergency
• Large eNGOs, which have just now adopted the term.

What does climate emergency actually mean?

Climate emergency is a call for the necessary urgent action to be taken to restore a safe climate, understanding that:

• We are too hot now. Our inaction over decades has set off positive feedback loops that speed up global warming. This means targets decades out are suicidal; we need to start now and we need to do it as fast as is humanly possible.
• At current emissions levels (400+ppm CO2 / 470ppm+ CO2 equivalents) we have already built in 25m+ of sea level rise. All atolls are estimated to unliveable by 2050, not to mention other coastal areas where millions - a billion live or grow food.
• A Google search provides sweeping evidence of ecological collapse across numerous systems; too many to name here.

Because we have an extremely dangerous climate now and going to zero still leaves us with today’s, or a future-year’s, greenhouse gas emissions, zero is unacceptable as an end target.

As such, we need to go to negative emissions to restore safe (pre-industrial) greenhouse gas concentrations (safe at about 280-300ppm) and restore a safe climate. Getting to negative emissions ASAP means:

• Zero emissions across all sectors as fast as possible
• To begin drawing down excess greenhouse gas emissions on an industrial scale using available strategies and investigating new strategies. We don’t know how long it will take but given using current land based tech (revegetation, soil carbon, biochar), it may take over 100 years.
• Create an immediate cooling. At present with all that pollution, we are currently geo-engineering almost 1 degree of shade (solar reflection). If the world went to zero emissions today, the global average temperature would jump almost 1 degree celsius.

While these 3 demands are a tall order and extremely ‘inconvenient’, there’s a high chance anything less is giving up on a livable planet and our futures.
If we are not very clear with our expectations, it will not happen:

• If we don’t demand emergency speed transition to zero emissions across each sector, it will not happen.
• If we don’t demand industrial scale drawdown, it will not happen.
• If we don’t demand economic restructuring toward a safe climate, this response will not happen.​

A climate emergency response goes way beyond not doing more bad stuff, it also means doing more good stuff than we ever thought possible to restore a safe climate.

Where did the term ‘climate emergency come from?

Dedicated grass-roots climate campaigners started using the term to represent what was needed to restore a safe climate. In Australia, it was probably formalised in 2016 with the ‘Climate Emergency Declaration’, which translated in the US by ‘Climate Mobilization’.

The thinking for what climate emergency in action looked like was based on earlier work or organisations such as that of Beyond Zero Emissions.

More detail on the history of climate emergency is captured here.

Does everyone talking climate emergency understand what climate emergency means?

Is everyone talking climate emergency prepared to act climate emergency? No! For example, there are councils passing climate emergency declarations that are aiming for net zero by 2050; this includes large councils such as the London Assembly and Vancouver.

After declaring, London quickly went on to approve another runway and Gatwick. Although the UK made a ‘resolution’ for a climate emergency, Labor and Tory Councillors in Cumbria went on to back a new coal mine.

The UK’s Committee on Climate Change (the CCC), an independent, statutory body established under the Climate Change Act 2008, has recommended just ‘zero by 2050’ for the UK’s emergency response. The CCC is similar to Australia’s Climate Council, which recommends the same target for Australia.

It shouldn’t be surprising that soft targets are defeatist. Soft targets set us up to fail.

What is the role of targets?

Governments usually set targets before the full suite of how they will be achieved is known. As such, they tend to set targets for complex work far into the future. But decades-out targets can be easily ignored because any one government can’t be easily held to account on them.

A target ideally works as a slogan of 3 to 5 words, and needs to communicate ‘what we need to do and how fast should it be done’. The target can also include more detail, such as interim targets, which can hold any single government to account.

Given the scope of work for a climate emergency response, once adopted, a climate emergency target should drive policy development, governance and performance measurement across all of government’s work. The target implicitly communicates the degree of priority the work will need, which in this case is maximum priority.

There are good arguments for not providing a target deadline in case it is too ambitious and stakeholders expect failure, but this is outweighed by the benefits of having a timeframe (or the cons of not having one). And with the right governance, more will be achieved with an ambitious target than with a less ambitious one.
A recent example of a target at work is Oxfordshire Council (UK). At the time of writing this, Oxfordshire Council is trying to weaken the target they set with their climate emergency declaration (zero by 2030). The council is worried they won’t meet the target. Perhaps not but having such an ambitious target means the council will have to go above and beyond to try to meet it.
When setting goals for safe climate restoration, it is implicit that these goals will require:

• Immediate implementation of current solutions and seeking other solutions via R&D
• A restructure of governance and the economy to achieve those goals.

Because we have to demand the action needed first then it’s important we get the targets right. Our governments will latch onto the easiest around and then may fall short of them anyway. Governments will look for a path requiring the least amount of effort, whereas we need a herculean effort.

A brief history of climate target setting
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We are currently grappling with a very climate-confused public not only due to years of misinformation from hard climate deniers, but also misinformation from the soft climate deniers, generally the large eNGOs, who are supposedly representing a safe climate but present weak targets for governments.

People trust in these eNGOs so they trust the targets of ‘zero by 2050’ that they promote. Hence the general confusion around what a safe target is. Ask a random person whether zero by 2050 is safe climate policy and they’ll probably say yes.

If we are too hot now, how can net zero by 2050 save us?

Why have eNGOs set weak targets?

ENGOs set weak goals because they wanted to be taken seriously be government, but in addition they have:

• lacked imagination in what can be achieved
• misread what the public is ready for.

The eNGOs should have been asking themselves, ‘how do we get the public on board to drive an effective campaign with government?’, not ‘what will government accept?’.

In private conversations, staff from these eNGOs confide that the goals they are setting ‘couldn’t save us’ but they ‘don’t want to frighten people away’. These eNGOs have effectively given up and have created havoc in their wake.

This eNGO campaigning logic was a bit like trying encourage locals to stay and fight an oncoming bushfire by lying that the fire is 200km away, when in fact the fire is already throwing embers and all roads out are closed. Which would you imagine to be more effective at motivating to stay and fight the fire? The eNGOs chose the 200km option. Jane Moreton’s booklet, ‘Don’t Mention the Emergency?’ examines this campaigning dissonance in detail.

If the eNGOs had been campaigning on safe climate goals for the past few decades, we would be in a very different place today with regard to public understanding and what they demanded from government. Yes, the hard deniers would still be around but we wouldn’t be dealing with such a high degree of public confusion on what we need to do.

What are the risks if we couple climate emergency with suicidal targets now?

Just in the past week, two large eNGOs finally woken up to the fact that ‘fear’ is in fact a necessary tool for climate campaigning and have declared a climate emergency. These same eNGOs had refused to use ‘fear’ in climate campaigning for years. ‘Climate emergency’ as a term was officially blacklisted by professionals campaigning for climate action.

As with the past so with the future. If the organisations with the biggest profiles and deepest pockets couple the ‘climate emergency’ headline with soft targets, nothing will have changed other than the word ‘emergency’ and the broader public will believe they are in good hands.

eNGOs’ inability to shift into emergency mode has just been confirmed by WWF. WWF has jumped on the ‘emergency’ bandwagon with their declaration last week but only moved their ‘net zero’ target forward five years from 2050 to 2045.

And these decades-out targets are what governments will adopt, regardless of what is actually possibly under a mobilisation response with technical breakthroughs that mobilising economies can drive ahead of the deadline.

Governments will do all they can to compromise emissions targets. Climate campaigners supposedly representing a safe climate don’t need to do it for them.

Reject suicidal targets from any group speaking on behalf of the planet and promote safe climate targets!

Climate-emergency target setting

We need to set targets based on what can be achieved under ideal circumstances (ie emergency action), not business as usual or or supposedly pragmatic view on what our current political landscape can deliver.

Don't pick up the IPCC report for directions on target setting. Depressing as IPCC's assessment is, it is overly optimistic. The models don’t incorporate major positive feedback loops so the IPCC findings ignore the loops. Also, the chances for success for courses of action proposed are not good enough. Would you take a plane with a 50% chance of crashing? A dense analysis of the IPCC shortcomings are available in Breakthrough’s  ‘What Lies Beneath’.

Beyond Zero Emissions have shown that 10 year transition to zero across most sectors is possible in their collection of sector ten-year transition plans but we can probably do much of it faster than 10 years if we really tried, and given how far the tech has moved since most of the reports were released.

High level targets for Central governments

What we need to capture in a high level target is three main components:

• Zero emissions by 2025-2030, or 5-10 years from announcement, plus
• Begin industrial scale drawdown of excess greenhouse gas emissions e.g. Drawdown of large scale emissions annually
• Investigate the best options to create an immediate cooling (a global not necessarily national issue).

But how to turn this 3-part target a slogan of 5 words or less? These could include:

• Zero and drawdown by 2025, or
• Negative emissions by 2025, or
• Zero and drawdown by 2030, zero by 2025

If implemented globally it could be ‘A cooler planet by 2025’ or ‘a safe climate by 2030’

‘Negative emissions yesterday’ is great as a slogan for communicating the urgency.

Targets for Councils
A council target is more complicated because many councils lack regulatory and economic levers to achieve net zero or net negative emissions.

Councils should acknowledge:

1. the central government target above (whether or not the central government has set it as a target or is working to achieve it), plus
2. a target that reflects the the council’s community wide goals across the council and community portfolio. This could still be ‘the largest possible negative emissions as soon as possible’. and set the anticipated reduction in community emissions.

In addition, the council can state what they will do or achieve across each sector that is within their control. In the declaration, these targets could be captured as, for example:

• Restoring healthy tree canopies and wetlands across all available green spaces within 10 years
• Zero or negative emissions in council waste management within 5 years
• 300% increase in the capacity of private solar PV across the community in four years.

(See the CACE website for ‘Cace goals and targets fact sheet’ (under development as at 5 May 2019) and Nuts and Bolts for a range of options across council portfolios.)

Last word

It is amazing what can be accomplished in emergency mode (Eg UK in WWII) when government realigns to achieve something ambitious, when the public is properly informed, when vested interests are forced to stand down.

If this is our last ditch effort at saving the planet, why would we comprise safe climate principles before we’ve even sat at the government negotiating table? Compromising on safe climate principles is how we got here in the first place.

There is a lot of rubbish being spun in the media around the new Senate reforms. In short the reforms are a reaction by the more established players (Lib/Nats., Labor, Greens and Xenophon) to the success of the micro parties in the Senate. Off course all these players stand to benefit from this change at the expense of the micro parties. The large parties stand to gain by limiting the number of players they have to deal with in the Senate when in Government. The small players (Greens and Xenophon) benefit from becoming the sole voices controlling the balance of power in the Senate. After initially supporting the changes Labor is reversing its bi-partisan stand to play politics in an election year and create an opportunity to differentiate itself from the Liberals and Greens.

So let's look at the actual changes.

1. There is no more group voting tickets.

You use to be able to simply vote 1 for the party of your choice above the line and your preferences would be allocated according to the whims of your party. Parties big and small used this control of their Senate preferences to make deals. Micro parties realised under the guidance of Glenn Druery that if they swapped their preferences with each other they could help each other get elected.

This practice will end under these proposed changes so micro parties and major parties will now have to get pieces of paper in people's hands to tell them how to vote. Major parties and the Greens will be the only parties who can staff most of the booths across the nation unless there is another big spending Clive Palmer-type character: bad for micro parties, more power to major parties and the Greens, and very bad for Glenn Druery who organised the micro parties to work together.

2. People are asked to vote for at least six candidates above the line.

This is a good change and means it is much more easy to give your preferences to the parties of your choice rather than having to number every box under the line and risk an informal vote. Also you don't have to stop at six, you can number more but it does mean you DON'T have to give your preferences to parties you don't want to and can stop your preference flow whenever you want to (more on this issue below).

3. A single 1 above the line is still a vote.

Even a single tick or cross is a valid vote. This means that people unfamiliar with our voting system or who might have difficulty reading or understanding the instructions properly can still have their votes counted even if they make mistakes. You can even cast a valid vote for less than 6 parties i.e. 1 and 2 or 1,2,3,4 for example and the vote will still be counted.

4. Limiting the number of parties a person can register.

This is a plan to stop the same people setting up and running dummy parties. It should be noted that each party registered has to have different members so in limiting the number of parties a single person can register will have really no effect as most dummy parties will simple find a different person willing to be the registered officer. Having multiple smaller parties under the other changes specifically “no group tickets” means you really have no or little advantage running multiple parties. An unnecessary change targeted at a specific senator.


5. Party Logos.

Great to have a logo. This will help people know who they are voting for.


Do these changes affect Save the Planet? No. Save the Planet doesn’t make preference deals and we were unlikely to benefit from preference flows. We might be the only party in Australia that doesn't do preference deals. Save the Planet simply gives our preferences to the parties and candidates with the strongest climate policy first, putting those with really bad policy last, while also holding sitting members to account for the action or lack of action on tackling global warming. We don’t deal but will happily explain to parties how to improve their climate policy.

Do I support the changes? Yes I do, but my problem is with the framing of the reasons for the change. Instead of being honest and saying “we are changing the system because it no longer provides us with the power it use to and we want to remove almost any chance a micro party has of getting into the Senate so we can control the Senate more easily”, people such as The Greens' leader Richard De Natalie and Senator Nick Xenophon have been harping on about some miscarriage of justice claiming that voters who support micro parties end up with micro parties on the other side of the political spectrum. Yes, this can happen sometimes but voters of micro parties know this and realise that the ONLY hope of getting their representatives elected in an undemocratic system dominated by a handful of major parties is swapping votes with other micro parties. Micro parties are also not stupid. They first seek to support like-minded micro parties' chances of getting elected before giving their preferences to non-like-minded parties. Those people who vote for micro parties but don't support this style of preference swapping can and do simply vote below the line and have full control of their own preferences.


However, it's not just micro party preferences that can end up on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Major political parties such as the Greens and Labor also make preference deals that go against their stated political ideology in an effort to win an extra seat or two or keep perceived threats out.


These deals have produced results such as the election of Family First Victorian Senator Steven Fielding in 2004 who got a primary vote of 1.76% compared to the Greens David Risstrom's 7.76%. After the major parties took the first 5 Senate seats Family First and Greens got preferences from smaller parties as they got knocked out. Before the final distribution, Family First had 309,117 votes and the Greens 305,083 votes. The resulted was decided by over 230,000 preferences transferring from Labor to Family First. If Labor had given their preferences to the Greens ahead of Family First on their group ticket, the Greens would have won instead. This was a really bad decision by Labor as it resulted in all sorts of outcomes that were against Labor policy and prevented an excellent Green candidate from getting elected.


The Greens have also made some strange preference decisions choosing to “put coal miner Clive Palmer’s party (PUP) and Bob Katter’s party ahead of Nick’s [Xenophon] running mate Stirling Griff” in 2013 (http://www.nickxenophon.com.au/media/releases/show/parties-preference-deals-show-strange-bedfellows/).


Another misconception is that people got elected on tiny votes, for example Virginia Trioli on ABC24 speaking to Glenn Lazarus today (7.38am 23/2/16). However the fact is every Senator elected is there because they got a full quota of either 1st preference votes and / or preferences from other parties. Some Labor and Liberal senators also get elected by a very small number of primary votes AND the preferences from other parties. Do we hear calls to stop this happening? No, only in relation to the micro parties.


Will the voting reforms stop major parties doing these dodgy deals? Yes and No. With abolishment of “group voting tickets” where parties submit a list of preferences that is used by the AEC to determine the preference flow for every voter who voted “1” above the line for that party it has now become very difficult for parties to control the Senate preferences of their voters unless they can adequately staff the vast majority of voting booths across Australia and afford to print out 100,000's of how to vote cards. Not surprisingly the only parties who can do this are the major parties, Lib/Nats, Labor and the Greens and perhaps ultra rich individuals such as Clive Palmer.


Micro parties will have no chance of doing this and even if they could, the likelihood of for example a Family First voter wanting their preferences to go to the Sex Party prior to the Liberals or Nationals would be very low and the voter would most likely not follow their party card if they read and understood it. Likewise it will probably mean Labor won't be able to get away with preferencing Family First ahead of the Greens as this would annoy many of their voters and probably get the Greens an extra 1% on first preferences as voters leave Labor in disgust.


Has it made our system more democratic. Yes and no. Firstly a yes and most importantly we are now encouraged to control our own preferences flow by numbering at least six boxes. We are likely to see a jump in the number of people controlling their preference now you can do this without voting below the line. However most people don't understand the voting systems and the vast majority will simply vote accord to the cards they are given.


A second 'yes' is we can stop the flow of our preferences at any time. I personally find systems that force you to vote for all candidates on a ballot very undemocratic, it's sort of like voting for a one-party system where you can vote but there is no point. Here we have effectively two parties Lib/Nats and Labor in our lower house unless you live in a seat with a strong independent or strong Green. I personally don't want to vote for either Nat/Libs or Labor as they are both corrupt and accelerating global warming by approving coal and gas developments around Australia and refuse to take the issue seriously.


If being able to stop preference flows is good for the Senate why can't we stop our preference flows in the lower house? We use to be able to stop our preference flows in lower house by simply repeating a number on the ballot such as numbering the ballot 1,2,3, 4, 4. In this example only the first three preferences would be counted. This type of voting got the nickname a “Langer Vote” after a person who spent a lot of effort promoting it.


As more people became disillusioned with major parties and more and more people stopped voting for them, the major parties faced the real problem, which was that some seats had a chance of the leading candidate getting less than 50% of the preferences once it was down to the final two candidates, as well as a growing message that the major parties were not worth a vote. Of course the major parties combined in 1998 to make this system of voting invalid so your vote didn't count. It is interesting to note how the major parties are happy to allow two types of preference voting in the different houses if it helps them retain power, an example of how corrupt our system is.


So why has it made our system less democratic? Well minor and micro parties combined do get quite a large vote but they are under-represented in parliament in terms of the number of seats they hold compared to the proportion of their vote. The old Senate voting system was one way that the minor parties did get people elected and hence in away made our parliament more representative of people's actual votes for the parties they wanted. To me it's much more concerning that we have an unrepresentative lower house, than a Senate with some micro parties swapping votes to make sure they get a seat, but we don't hear people talking about this issue.


Could we solve this undemocratic problem in the lower house? Yes. We simply double the size of the Federal electorates allowing 75 seats that are no longer linked to a specific location to be distributed to parties who are under represented in parliament once the results for the 75 area based seats are calculated. The threshold for a seat in this system is only 0.66% of the national vote. Some countries such as New Zealand use this type of system.


It would also mean that both side of politics would most likely have to form coalitions to form Government, and not just the Liberals and Nationals, so in future we might see Labor / Green coalitions and other combinations if this system was adopted.


This table shows the number of lower house seats the different parties should have got in the 2013 Federal parliament if we had a democratic system based on proportional representation. It shows major parties would be much less represented while many more minor and micro parties would have more representation.

TABLE 1. 2013 Federal Election results: Actual vs Proportional (rounded)
​

by Adrian Whitehead, National Campaign Manager. 

This has been a strange couple of weeks in politics. We have heard Abbot speaking honestly on his opinion of wind farms, describing them as "visually awful” and wishing the Howard Government had never supported the renewable energy target. Now Tony Abbott wants to destroy native forests and is proposing reinstating biomass from native forests as a source of renewable energy as part of the renewable energy target RET.

Logging native forests certainly is not renewable. It takes 1500-2000 years for an old growth forest to recover post a logging event and 100's of tonnes of carbon are released per hectare logged.

So much carbon is released (roughly 400 tones per ha in a wet forest down to 100-150 tones per ha in drier woodlands) that some scientists have estimated the emission from burning native forests will be higher than burning coal.

Why burn native forests?
Native forest destruction is driven economically by pulp logs used for making wood chips which are in turn used to make toilet paper and paper such as Reflex. These pulp logs are branded “waste” by the logging industry. The second economic driver is logs used to make timber. The third is the massive subsidies provided by state forestry organisations that enable these industries to continue.

Back in the 90's when I was campaigning to save the Otway Forests with Otway Ranges Environmental Network, OREN discovered that as much as 60% of the logging coupes were economically not viable without the pulp logs being removed and sold.

Around the world many countries started planting blue glue plantations 20 plus years ago to supply the need for wood chips. Plantations are more economical to plant, manage, harvest and produce a more consistent cleaner product which is cheaper to process, hence the market for native forest wood chips has collapsed.

To save their industry from total collapse the only other market that the native forest destroyers and their political supporters have found for lower quality wood chips is to burn them.

What about Labor?
Labor has always been a native forest destroyer backing the destruction at both State and Federal levels.

Their opposition to allowing native forests to be burnt as part of the Renewable Energy Target is weak.

A quote from the Tristan Edis's article “New RET set to pass - 'helping our enemies destroy a great nation” in the Climate Spectator from June 17th (see link below) shows Labor's current position on burning native forests.

“When Labor’s shadow minister for climate change, Mark Butler, was asked a few days ago whether Labor would block the passage of the government’s bill if they were unsuccessful in making amendments to exclude native forest wood-waste, he explained:

We are focused on the main game here and the main game is to restore investor confidence to the renewable energy sector… So we’re not going to get distracted by this red herring that the Government introduced at the last minute about native wood waste”

Why would Labor support the introduction of a non renewal energy into the RET? Labor has already supported a massive 20% reduction in the amount of large scaler renewable energy being produced at 2020. A criminal act given every addition of Greenhouse gases to our atmosphere pushes us closer to destruction from global warming.

Given this already weak position it is unlikely we should expect them to stop the revised RET to save native forests given their support for native forest destruction in the past.

The bottom line is there are a number of marginal seats in play that can be won or lost by the votes of people aligned to the timber industry. So at any given time time a number of sitting members from the ALP owe their seats to support from the timber industry, the forestry Union, and big businesses associated with native forest destruction.

In away Labor is on a “win win”, they get to support a continuation of the Renewable Energy Target which helps their mates in the wind industry and gives them some Green cred while also being able to support the destruction of native forests while shifting most of the blame onto the Liberals.

Can it be stopped?
The Senate is scheduled to debate whether to include native forest biomass as a renewable energy some time this week. We will need Senate cross bench support to stop the legislation going through so I have listed the cross benches you might want to contact below and a visual meme you can post to your social media sites.

Nick Xenophon (02) 6277 3552 senator.xenophon@aph.gov.au

Glenn Lazarus (02) 6277 3204 senator.lazarus@aph.gov.au

Dio Wang (02) 6277 3843 senator.wang@aph.gov.au

Ricky Muir (02) 6277 3040 senator.muir@aph.gov.au

John Madigan (02) 6277 3471 senator.madigan@aph.gov.au

Bob Day (02) 6277 3373 senator.day@aph.gov.au

David Leyonhelm (02) 6277 3054 senator.leyonhjelm@aph.gov.au

However given Labor's support and the lack of cross bench support it looks like the legislation will go through.


What next?
If this legislation goes through we will need to wait for a change of government from Liberal to Labor. If Labor gets in power it could revisit the RET legislation and remove native forests from the RET as has been done before or it could be simply re-instate a carbon tax and include the emissions of native forestry.

A simple $10 per tone tax on the carbon emissions from native forestry for destroy the economic viability of the industry over night.

We can also boycott any company that chooses to retail or purchase RECs from native forest burning.

Why have we never won the forests?

There are a few of key reasons:

1. The politics on native forests have be won by the forces supporting native forest destruction. Large sums of money from corporate and union sources have gone to the major parties, and timber unions will move their supporter's votes around to ensure support of native forest destruction by both major parties.

The environment movement has failed to create an effective political leverage to provide incentive to for any significant change by either major parties, largely as a result of almost always backing Labor ahead of Liberal.

New Greens-Labor marginals will make things more difficult for Labor but require the environment moment to focus its campaigns in these marginal seats and the Greens to be willing to take a hard line on forest issues if they have the opportunity to support Labor in a minority government.

2. The environment movements has never really ask for native forest logging to be finished. Instead for decades there has been a confused messages around needed to stop industrial scale clear felling while calling for sustainable logging or the protection of specific areas, with a minority of voices calling for the end of native forest logging.

The timber industry has simply counter with “We do grow the trees sustainably” and shown hectares of young regrowing trees in glossy add and this has been enough for most of the public.

3. We haven't been able to split the industry. Plantation owners and farm foresters would benefit strongly for marketing their products aggressively against native forest timbers assocaited with destructive forestry, however many of the big players have a foot in both camps, many of the people involved in the industry have been educated together, worked together and can not even understand the issues surrounding native forest logging. The occasional group breaking away has been induced to return.

Links
Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment Bill 2015 - Explanatory Memorandum
http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fems%2Fr5463_ems_41890747-6423-4f07-97b8-fadaba3c046a%22

Abbott on wind
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-11/abbott-wants-to-reduce-wind-farms-wishes-ret-never-implemented/6539164

Article by Tristan Edis on the new RET - New RET set to pass - 'helping our enemies destroy a great nation – June 17 2015
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/6/17/policy-politics/new-ret-set-pass-helping-our-enemies-destroy-great-nation

Globally recognised climate writer George Monbiot, addressing the Australian 2013 Climate Summit, has decided to throw his weight behind leaving all fossil fuels in the ground.

In his address, Monbiot supported the 350.0rg Fossil Fuel Divestment campaign.  He repeated Bill McKibben’s line that 80% of the world’s fossil fuel reserves need to be left in the ground (implying that 20% could still be burned emitting a further 565 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – 60% more than the emissions to date).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cny3qHnpABY

In question time, Philip Sutton (Save the Planet Candidate for Batman) asked Monbiot why we should endorse the burning any further fossil fuel given the massive impacts of extreme weather events over the last 15 years and massive melting of Arctic ice driven by what’s been burned already.

“I was amazed by his response” Philip said.  “Most celebrities defend their position, but George took the question totally seriously.  He thought for a few seconds and then recounted an experience he’d had recently.  The international sustainability manager of IKEA had told him that the company got a much better response when suppliers were given unambiguous goals for environmental performance.  If there was any wiggle room each supplier wanted to be the one that didn’t have to tighten its standards.  But if they are told there is no option but to go fully sustainable, they complain a bit initially and then get on with it.  George said that, on reflection, that’s how we should go with the burning of fossil fuels.  Fossil free doesn’t mean burning another 20%, it means zero.”

Climate Summit delegates picked up on this in the final Summit communiqué:

“The Summit heard reports confirming climate science warnings that urgent action needs to be taken now, that the earth is already too hot, and our carbon budget for a safe climate is zero. Attendees heard that the Earth has been warming by the equivalent of 4 Hiroshima bombs per second for several decades. We need 100% renewable energy and all fossil fuels to stay in the ground. If all levels of government along with governments of other leading polluting nations do not move with emergency speed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, billions of people’s lives are at risk.”
http://climatesummit.org.au/

The George Monbiot video but doesn’t include the Q&A session.