Hague climate change judgement could inspire a global civil movement

You have been negotiating all my life”, cried out 21-year-old Anjali Appadurai from the lectern of a UN climate change conference four years ago. The activist, speaking on behalf of her nation’s youth, could have been speaking for anyone who has taken a mild interest in more than two decades of international negotiations on climate change and stood aghast as world leaders have failed to protect the most basic of human rights – to exist.

Urgenda’s legal team celebrate on Wednesday after court ruling
 in the Hague that ordered the Dutch government to cut
emissions by 25% within five years.

But today, thanks to 886 Dutch citizens who decided to sue their government, all of that may change. We may not have to wait for the politicians to save us – the lawyers may step in instead. In the first successful case of its kind, a judge in the Hague has ruled that the Dutch government’s stance on climate change is illegal and has ordered them to take action to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a hefty 25% within five years.

Read the story from The Guardian by Emma Howard - “Hague climate change judgement could inspire a global civil movement .”

Labor promises a comprehensive overhaul of federal environmental framework

Australia will get the biggest overhaul of its federal environment laws in two decades if a Labor government is elected next year.

As environmental laws were foreshadowed at the Labor national
 conference, outside a climate change rally was in full swing.

Labor would establish a new Australian Environment Act and create a federal Environmental Protection Agency in its first term.

The commitments were flagged by Bill Shorten and approved by delegates at the ALP national conference, which is meeting in Adelaide.

The new legislation would replace the present Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act which was passed under the Howard government’s environment minister Robert Hill in 1999.

The new agency would oversee and enforce the revised act, conduct inquiries and advise the minister on environmental approval decisions.

Read the story by Michelle Gratton from The Conversation - “Labor promises a comprehensive overhaul of federal environmental framework.”

Losing the wilderness: a 10th has gone since 1992 – and gone for good

The world’s last great wildernesses are shrinking at an alarming rate. In the past two decades, 10% of the earth’s wilderness has been lost due to human pressure, a mapping study by the University of Queensland has found.

University of Queensland study shows since 1992, 3m sq km of wilderness have been lost.

Over the course of human history, there has been a major degradation of 52% of the earth’s ecosystems, while the remaining 48% is being increasingly eroded. Since 1992, when the United Nations signed up to the Rio convention on biological diversity, three million square kilometres of wilderness have been lost.

Read The Guardian story by Susan Cherney - “Losing the wilderness: a 10th has gone since 1992 – and gone for good.”

Why we don’t have the luxury of saying no to low-carbon energy, in one chart

I’ve long maintained that the climate crisis is so acute that humanity simply does not have the luxury of picking and choosing which low-carbon energy sources we’d use. That option was foreclosed perhaps two decades ago, but the idea that we’ll lick the climate change with only our favorite technology dies hard.

Two recent studies highlight an important yet almost totally ignored problem with current climate plans and show why energy cultism must end. In short, these studies (and others like them) show just how much our plans depend on magical CO2-sucking technology conveniently appearing, and suggest that the Earth’s ability to sequester carbon on its own will decrease if we’re able to decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, causing a need for more active measures.

However, for the short term the more important of the two, and therefore the one I’m going to focus on in this post, is this paper from the hallowed pages of Science (one of the two “gold-plated” scientific publications in the world). In it, Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters dissect the assumptions that have gone into climate models and scenarios the world’s leaders believe might deliver us from excesses of runaway warming. What they find is alarming, to say the least: with few outlier exceptions, these models will not work without so-called negative emission technologies that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Without, the Paris target of 1.5°C (necessary to save small island states and many low-lying, poor countries from drowning) is right out, and even the more conservative 2°C is looking very unlikely.

Read the story on The unpublished notebooks of J. M. Korhonen  - “Why we don’t have the luxury of saying no to low-carbon energy, in one chart.”

New, strange denial emerges from shadows of historic Paris decision

Naomi Klein - now there's a new,
strange form of denial.

After the signing of a historic climate pact in Paris, we might now hope that the merchants of doubt – who for two decades have denied the science and dismissed the threat – are officially irrelevant.

But not so fast. There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

Read the opinion piece by Naomi Klein on The Guardian - “There is a new form of climate denialism to look out for – so don't celebrate yet.”