This is not ideology

(From the archives of The Monthly)

With the conclusion of the Paris climate conference in December, global warming went from being the kind of problem politicians like to being the kind of problem they hate.

For at least the past year, the conversation about climate change centred on what kind of agreement Paris would produce. And so politicians got to posture, to say quotable things, to appear world-leaderish. As the talks were about to begin, for instance, Australia’s environment minister, Greg Hunt, said it was his “deepest hope and belief” that the world would reach a strong agreement, adding that it was “a deeply personal goal and commitment, as well as a national objective”. During the talks, he revealed that he, and Australia, was acting as a “broker” to make sure that the push by island nations to limit warming to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius would at least be “referenced” in the final accord. “Clearly [it] won’t end up as a formal goal of the text,” he said, since some nations would veto it, but he was “trying to be constructive by providing a pathway” so it could be mentioned.

Read Bill McKibben’s story on The Monthly - “This is not ideology.”

'Blown' our chance to curb climate change

We’ve had a chance to curb climate change. But we’ve blown it.

So say researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, who have looked more closely at the pledges made by individual countries at last December’s climate conference in Paris to reduce their carbon emissions. Those pledges, they say, are bound to lead to a global temperature rise of between 2.6°C and 3.1°C by the end of the century. “In fact,” they point out, based on the findings of a new study, “the entire carbon budget for limiting warming to below 2°C might have been emitted by 2030.”

Read the Clean Malaysia story - “We’ve missed the boat on Climate Change.”

Paris attacks makes Paris climate talks even more important

O

ne of the questions asked after the atrocious attacks on the people of Paris by Islamic State terrorists was whether the United Nations climate change conference scheduled to begin in Paris on November 30 should or could go ahead.

The attacks in fact make the climate conference even more essential. That's because an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the aim of limiting the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius would, if honoured, set in train a process that undermined the economics of Jihadi terrorism.

The claim that the western world's geopolitical filter for the Middle East is "all about oil" is a massive oversimplification.

Oil is a key element of the region's politics and an influence on the western world's response to them however, and will be until it is no longer needed.

It is the dominant source of Middle Eastern export income, and a western world's of the energy that the rest of the world expends.

Read Malcolm Maiden’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Paris is another reason for the world to kick its oil addiction.”