Addressing the South Australian Liberal Party annual meeting yesterday, Tony Abbott repeated…
June 27, 2015 | 7:05 am
VICE News is closely tracking global environmental change.Check out the Tipping Point blog here.
A court in Seattle has handed a legal victory to a group of young petitioners asking that the state of Washington do more to fight climate change.
Eight children, between the ages of 11 and 15, filed a petition last year to the state’s Department of Ecology, requesting that the agency initiate a process of rulemaking to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in Washington.
The petition specifically calls for a goal of getting the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere down from the current level of more than 400 to 350 parts per million by the year 2100. The document also references the personal experiences of the plaintiffs, asserting examples of the ways in which the young Washington residents are already seeing the effects of climate change.
“What we asked is that [the Department of Ecology] implement their existing statutory authority to promulgate a rule regulating carbon dioxide emissions,” Andrea Harris, of the Western Environmental Law Center, and the plaintiff’s attorney, told VICE News.
The Department of Ecology denied the petition last year. But the King County Superior Court ordered them on June 23 to consider it again, and that they must also consider a climate change report that the department had itself issued after they rejected the petition, as well as review other current climate science, Harris says. The Department of Ecology has until July 8th to decide what to do.
“The next two weeks are critical, becauseby July 8, they need to decide whether or not to grant our petition for rulemaking,” Harris said. Now is the time for the state’s governor, Jay Inslee, to act, she said. “Hopefully Governor Inslee will do the right thing, and tell his agency, and his staff, ‘Get to work and start regulating carbon dioxide emissions,’ instead of sitting around and hoping that somebody else will do something about it.”
A spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Ecology told VICE News that they didn’t have anything to say yet on the issue, but that they were happy that people were “engaged with climate change.”
“It’s a very nice win for the plaintiffs,” Michael Gerrard, who direct the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, told VICE News. However, he noted that what comes next is unclear. “We don’t know whether the state will change its standards after it reviews the evidence.”
The court decision in Washington came just a day before a much bigger ruling in the Netherlands, when a court said on June 24 that in order to ensure the health of its citizens, the Dutch government must cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent.
While Gerrard downplayed the legal significance of the decision in Washington state, he said the court case in the Netherlands has huge import.
“I wouldn’t call it legally pathbreaking,” Gerrard added. “Court orders that administrative agencies consider new data are not rare.” Nonetheless, he called the decision a “positive step.”
“The Dutch case, if it survives appeal,” Gerrard said, “will be one of the most important climate change decision ever rendered, and I would say it already is the most important climate change decision rendered outside of the United States.”
That’s because, he says, it’s the first time any court — in the United States or elsewhere — has ordered a government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The case in the Netherlands had, at its center, the idea that the Dutch government has a “duty of care” to protect its citizens from the adverse effects of climate change, Gerrard says.
A case like it in Belgium is currently underway, and Gerrard says that one is coming down the pike in Norway, too.
“There’s been discussion of this kind of [case] for several years, in a number of different countries,” he added. “Now that the somebody has actually won one, I think that that’s going to embolden lawyers in a number of other countries to try [to take a similar strategy].”
Gerrard added that it will be worth keeping on eye on the Netherlands to see how — and if — they are able to reduce the country’s emissions to the court-ordered levels. Ideally, he says, that won’t happen by the nation simply bringing in “dirty” electricity from outside its borders.
“If they can really pull it off,” he added, “that then does become a model for other developed countries.”
Cheers and cries of pure joy erupted as the judge handed down the ruling in the world’s first ever climate liability suit.
886 Dutch citizens, including teachers, entrepreneurs, grandparents and students united to sue their government for its inaction on climate change. In a decision likely to reverberate across the world, the court ordered the state to reduce emissions by 25% within 5 years to protect its citizens from climate change.
A HUGE congratulations to all involved, including Urgenda, the group that brought the suit on behalf of the citizens.
This Creative Commons-licensed piece originated with Climate News Network.
LONDON—Pope Francis has challenged climate change deniers by declaring that the destruction of the ecosystem is a moral issue that has to be tackled, or there will be grave consequences for us all.
Pointing to human activity as the main cause for the increasing concentrations of climate-warming greenhouse gases, he praises ecological movements—and, in exceptionally strong language, rounds on those who are obstructing progress in the fight against climate change.
“The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem to indifference, to convenient resignation or to blind faith in technical solutions,” the Pope says.
His message is contained in an encyclical, a document on Catholic teaching that is traditionally addressed to bishops. But, in this case, he says his words are aimed not only at an estimated 1.2 billion Catholics around the world—they are meant for everyone.
“Faced with the global deterioration of the environment, I want to address every person who inhabits the planet,” the Pope says.
The encyclical—entitled Laudato Si, or Be Praised, and nearly 200 pages long—is the first such document issued by the Vatican dealing specifically with the environment.
It was due to have been released tomorrow, but parts of a draft appeared early in the Italian magazine, L’Espresso—much to the annoyance of Vatican officials.
“Humanity is called to take note of the need
for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods
of production and consumption
to combat this warming”
Unlike many of his predecessors, Pope Francis has shown a desire, since he became pontiff in 2013, to enter into debate about economic and environmental matters, as well as spiritual issues.
“If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us – never forget that,” he told a gathering in St. Peter’s Square, Rome, earlier this year.
The Pope says in the draft of the encyclical that the poor are trapped by environmental and financial degradation, and that the world’s resources cannot continue to be looted by humankind.
“Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming, or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it,” he says.
The impact of the Pope’s message is likely to be considerable. Although the number of church-going Catholics has dropped in Europe and many other parts of the industrialised world, the influence of the church is growing in many areas, particularly in Africa.
The encyclical is also likely to give added momentum to the need for a climate agreement at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris at the end of the year.
John Grim, who lectures in world religions at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University in the US, says the Pope’s teachings give a significant moral voice to climate change issues.
He says: “What we have lacked in many settings is the moral voice of religious leadership informing congregations, denominations and different religions of the depth of the science and the impact on human communities of widespread climate change.”
The encyclical is likely to attract criticism from sceptics seeking to deny that there is any such thing as climate change, and who in the past have accused the Pope of straying into areas he knows little about.
Conservatives in the US have branded the Pope’s repeated warnings about growing inequality as the talk of a communist and a Marxist.
In September, Pope Francis is due to go to New York to address the United Nations, and will also speak to the US Congress in Washington.
Vatican officials say the pontiff will continue to speak out on issues linked to poverty and climate change.
By using money raised by the government to help fight global warming, the grid alternative project is aiming to get polluting companies to pay for putting solar panels on the roofs of homes that cannot afford to do it themselves. This effort will install home solar arrays in disadvantaged neighborhoods, using $14.7 million raised through California’s cap and trade system for reining greenhouse gas emissions.
The program was first introduced by California state senator Keven de Leon, who spoke at a recent solar panel even say, “I introduced SB 535 in 2011 to ensure that our disproportionately impacted communities benefit from investments in clean energy. These investments will bring energy savings, quality jobs, and environmental benefits where they are needed most.”
In order to qualify, homeowners must be located in a “disadvantaged” neighborhood, as defined by state guidelines. They must also be earning 80% or less than the area’s median income per household.
“These investments will bring energy savings, they’ll bring quality jobs, and they’ll also bring environmental benefits where they’re needed the most,” said state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, who wrote the 2012 law.
By using 10% of this money on solar panels it is like killing two birds with one stone; you save lower income families money, while also making big fossil fuel polluting companies help cut energy emissions in the state.
“We envision a world where families, regardless of income, can have access to clean power and bills they can afford,” Mackie said. “For us we are really about solutions and it’s about solving a problem one family at a time, one rooftop at a time.”
“It’s a well-kept secret, but 95% of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO₂ emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error. It’s not surprising.” – Maurice Newman, AC, Chair of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, writing in The Australian newspaper, May 8, 2015.
Mr Newman’s implication that discrepancies resulting from the recent climate fluctuation somehow invalidates climate models is incorrect.
Climate models have been thoroughly and critically tested against observations and are able to simulate with fair accuracy the component of climate change caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols as well as natural factors like solar variations and volcanic eruptions.
However, long-term climate simulations do not and likely never will reproduce the timing of shorter-term random fluctuations, like the recent slowdown in surface temperatures. In the long run, this fluctuation, like many before, will just be noise on a gradually increasing temperature signal.
That the discrepancy is a “well-kept secret” is demonstrably false given the large number of scientific papers discussing and trying to explain exactly this issue.
State government anger at the Abbott Government’s stalled Renewable Energy Target is likely to grow with a new report this week revealing nearly eight million people are now employed in the sector globally.
The report, released by the International Renewable Energy Agency on Tuesday, found that more than one million jobs were created in the last year alone, bringing the total figure world-wide to 7.7 million.
But back in Australia, the fledgling renewable energy sector is in turmoil.
When the federal RET was established in 2009, the Rudd government prevented states from implementing their own schemes, which would have forced electricity retailers to buy renewable energy from the states.
The trade off was that states would be able to compete within an open national market to each generate as much of the 41,000 Gigawatt hour (GWh) target as they could.
Negotiations between Labor and the Abbott government, though, appear to have finally settled on a reduced target of 33,000GWh, after more than a year of uncertainty.
That uncertainty – and the reduction – has left state governments angry. The revised RET requires electricity providers to buy less renewable energy, meaning that attracting investment into the renewable energy sector will be more difficult.
The Victorian government actually scrapped a state-based RET when the federal scheme was established, and it’s given the 33,000GWh target a particularly icy reception.
“The scaling back of the RET will reduce the number of major renewable energy projects built in Victoria, costing us jobs and growth,” a spokesperson for the Andrews government said.
“The clean energy industry in Victoria supports over 4,000 jobs, and many companies that currently supply the automotive industry are looking at renewable energy projects as a lifeline for their business.”
Investment in renewables tanked by 90 per cent last year as the Abbott government moved to slash the target, and in the two years to April 2015, the Australian Bureau of statistics revealed that 2,500 jobs had been lost.
The beleaguered Australian industry is a pariah in the global market, which the United Nations said grew by 17 per cent in 2014, attracting near-record investment of $270 billion.
That investment correlated to approximately 1.5 million new jobs, an overall increase of around 18 per cent, according to IRENA’s report.
“This increase is being driven in part by declining renewable energy technology costs, which creates more jobs in installation, operations and maintenance,” said Adnan Amin, Director-General at IRENA.
“We expect this upward trend to continue as the business case for renewable energy continues to strengthen.”
As the major parties at the federal level agree to cut the RET back to 33,000 GWh, states governments’ ability to share in that “upward trend” has become tenuous.
At a recent meeting attended by the top UN diplomat on climate change and a number of Labor state ministers, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and the ACT discussed what could be done to increase the uptake of renewables.
“We will examine all impediments to states and territories acting, including Commonwealth legislation which might prevent a State and Territory Renewable Energy Target,” a spokesperson for the South Australian government, which hosted the meeting, told New Matilda.
One way to boost renewables uptake is through a ‘reverse auction’ scheme like the one the ACT has developed, which it announced earlier this year would supply 33 per cent of Canberra’s electricity by 2017, through the wind component of the program alone.
The Queensland government has also proposed a ‘reverse auction’, which involves companies bidding to provide the most renewable energy for the lowest price to government.
The high targets states have set themselves, though, may be difficult and expensive to achieve through reverse auctions: South Australia, for example, aims to achieve 50 per cent renewables by 2025, while Queensland is gunning for the same target by 2030.
With the reduced Renewable Energy Target expected to amount to roughly 23 per cent of total electricity generation by 2020, it is increasingly likely that states’ ambitious targets will be difficult to meet through the federal scheme alone.
The federal Labor party has indicated it will seek to install a higher target for the post-2020 period after the current scheme expires, an ambition on which advocacy groups like Solar Citizens have seized.
“There is now no clear vision for the future of jobs in solar and renewable energy beyond 2020,” National Director Claire O’Rourke said when responding to the IRENA report.
“There is a real risk that without clear policy Australia will fall behind countries like China, India, Germany, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Colombia who have some of the highest employment rates in renewable energy.”
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.