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	Keep fossil fuels in the ground to stop climate change by George Monbiot, Richard Denniss Guardian News, Australia Institute   Keep fossil fuels in the ground to stop climate change, by George Monbiot.   If you visit the website of the UN body that oversees the world’s climate negotiations, you will find dozens of pictures, taken across 20 years, of people clapping. These photos should be of interest to anthropologists and psychologists. For they show hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives.   The celebratory nature of the images testifies to the world of make-believe these people inhabit. They are surrounded by objectives, principles, commitments, instruments and protocols, which create a reassuring phantasm of progress while the ship on which they travel slowly founders. Leafing through these photos, I imagine I can almost hear what the delegates are saying through their expensive dentistry. “Darling you’ve re-arranged the deckchairs beautifully. It’s a breakthrough! We’ll have to invent a mechanism for holding them in place, as the deck has developed a bit of a tilt, but we’ll do that at the next conference.”   This process is futile because they have addressed the problem only from one end, and it happens to be the wrong end. They have sought to prevent climate breakdown by limiting the amount of greenhouse gases that are released; in other words, by constraining the consumption of fossil fuels. But, throughout the 23 years since the world’s governments decided to begin this process, the delegates have uttered not one coherent word about constraining production.   Compare this to any other treaty-making process. Imagine, for example, that the Biological Weapons Convention made no attempt to restrain the production or possession of weaponised smallpox and anthrax, but only to prohibit their use. How effective do you reckon it would be? (You don’t have to guess: look at the US gun laws, which prohibit the lethal use of guns but not their sale and carriage. You can see the results on the news every week.) Imagine trying to protect elephants and rhinos only by banning the purchase of their tusks and horns, without limiting killing, export or sale. Imagine trying to bring slavery to an end not by stopping the transatlantic trade, but by seeking only to discourage people from buying slaves once they had arrived in the Americas. If you want to discourage a harmful trade, you must address it at both ends: production and consumption. Of the two, production is the most important.   The extraction of fossil fuels is a hard fact. The rules governments have developed to prevent their use are weak, inconsistent and negotiable. In other words, when coal, oil and gas are produced, they will be used. Continued production will overwhelm attempts to restrict consumption. Even if efforts to restrict consumption temporarily succeed, they are likely to be self-defeating. A reduction in demand when supply is unconstrained lowers the price, favouring carbon-intensive industry.   You can search through the UN’s website for any recognition of this issue, but you would be wasting your time. In its gushing catalogue of self-congratulation, at Kyoto, Doha, Bali, Copenhagen, Cancún, Durban, Lima and all stops en route, the phrase “fossil fuel” does not occur once. Nor do the words coal or oil. But gas: oh yes, there are plenty of mentions of gas. Not natural gas, of course, but of greenhouse gases, the sole topic of official interest.   The closest any of the 20 international conferences convened so far have come to acknowledging the problem is in the resolution adopted in Lima in December last year. It pledged “cooperation” in “the phasing down of high-carbon investments and fossil fuel subsidies”, but proposed no budget, timetable or any instrument or mechanism required to make it happen. It’s progress of a sort, I suppose, and perhaps, after just 23 years, we should be grateful.   There is nothing random about the pattern of silence that surrounds our lives. Silences occur where powerful interests are at risk of exposure. They protect these interests from democratic scrutiny. I’m not suggesting that the negotiators decided not to talk about fossil fuels, or signed a common accord to waste their lives. Far from it: they have gone to great lengths to invest their efforts with the appearance of meaning and purpose. Creating a silence requires only an instinct for avoiding conflict. It is a conditioned and unconscious reflex; part of the package of social skills that secures our survival. Don’t name the Devil for fear that you’ll summon him.   Breaking such silences requires a conscious and painful effort. I remember as if it were yesterday how I felt when I first raised this issue in the media. I had been working with a group of young activists in Wales, campaigning against opencast coal mines. Talking it over with them, it seemed so obvious, so overwhelming, that I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t on everyone’s lips. Before writing about it, I circled the topic like a dog investigating a suspicious carcass. Why, I wondered, is no one touching this? Is it toxic?   You cannot solve a problem without naming it. The absence of official recognition of the role of fossil fuel production in causing climate change – blitheringly obvious as it is – permits governments to pursue directly contradictory policies. While almost all governments claim to support the aim of preventing more than 2C of global warming, they also seek to “maximise economic recovery” of their fossil fuel reserves. (Then they cross their fingers, walk three times widdershins around the office and pray that no one burns it.) But few governments go as far as the UK has gone.   In the Infrastructure Act that received royal assent last month, maximising the economic recovery of petroleum from the UK’s continental shelf became a statutory duty. Future governments are now legally bound to squeeze every possible drop out of the ground.   The idea came from a government review conducted by Sir Ian Wood, the billionaire owner of an inherited company – the Wood Group – that provides services to the oil and gas industry. While Sir Ian says his recommendations “received overwhelming industry support”, his team interviewed no one outside either the oil business or government. It contains no sign that I can detect of any feedback from environment groups or scientists.   His review demanded government powers to enhance both the exploration of new reserves and the exploitation of existing ones. This, it insisted, “will help take us closer to the 24bn [barrel] prize potentially still to come”. The government promised to implement his recommendations in full and without delay. In fact it went some way beyond them. It is prepared to be ruthlessly interventionist when promoting climate change, but not when restraining it.   During December’s climate talks in Lima, the UK’s energy secretary, Ed Davey, did something unwise. He broke the silence. He warned that if climate change policies meant that fossil fuel reserves could no longer be exploited, pension funds could be investing in “the sub-prime assets of the future”. Echoing the Bank of England and financial analysts such as the Carbon Tracker Initiative, Davey suggested that if governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, fossil fuel could become a stranded asset.   This provoked a furious response from the industry. The head of Oil and Gas UK Malcolm Webb wrote to express his confusion, pointing out that Davey’s statements came “at a time when you, your Department and the Treasury are putting great effort into [making] the UK North Sea more attractive to investors in oil and gas, not less. I’m intrigued to understand how such opposing viewpoints can be reconciled.” He’s not the only one. Ed Davey quickly explained that his comments were not to be taken seriously, as “I did not offer any suggestions on what investors should choose to do.”   Barack Obama has the same problem. During a television interview last year, he confessed that “We’re not going to be able to burn it all.” So why, he was asked, has his government been encouraging ever more exploration and extraction of fossil fuels? His administration has opened up marine oil exploration from Florida to Delaware – in waters that were formally off-limits. It has increased the number of leases sold for drilling on federal lands and, most incongruously, rushed through the process that might, by the end of this month, enable Shell to prospect in the highly vulnerable Arctic waters of the Chukchi Sea.   Similar contradictions beset most governments with environmental pretensions. Norway, for example, intends to be “carbon neutral” by 2030. Perhaps it hopes to export its entire oil and gas output, while relying on wind farms at home. A motion put to the Norwegian parliament last year to halt new drilling because it is incompatible with Norway’s climate change policies was defeated by 95 votes to three.   Obama explained that “I don’t always lead with the climate change issue because if you, right now, are worried about whether you’ve got a job or if you can pay the bills, the first thing you want to hear is how do I meet the immediate problem?”   Money is certainly a problem, but not necessarily for the reasons Obama suggested. The bigger issue is the bankrolling of politics by big oil and big coal, and the tremendous lobbying power they purchase. These companies have, in the past, financed wars to protect their position; they will not surrender the bulk of their reserves without a monumental fight. This fight would test the very limits of state power; I wonder whether our nominal democracies would survive it. Fossil fuel companies have become glutted on silence: their power has grown as a result of numberless failures to challenge and expose them. It’s no wonder that the manicured negotiators at the UN conferences, so careful never to break a nail, have spent so long avoiding the issue.   I believe there are ways of resolving this problem, ways that might recruit other powerful interests against these corporations. For example, a global auction in pollution permits would mean that governments had to regulate just a few thousand oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser factories, rather than the activities of seven billion people. It would create a fund from the sale of permits that’s likely to run into trillions: money that could be used for anything from renewable energy to healthcare. By reducing fluctuations in the supply of energy, it would deliver more predictable prices, that many businesses would welcome. Most importantly, unlike the current framework for negotiations, it could work, producing a real possibility of averting climate breakdown.   Left to themselves, the negotiators will continue to avoid this issue until they have wasted everyone else’s lives as well as their own. They keep telling us that the conference in Paris in December is the make or break meeting (presumably they intend to unveil a radical new deckchair design). We should take them at their word, and demand that they start confronting the real problem.   http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/10/keep-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground-to-stop-climate-change http://climateactiontracker.org/   No New Coal Mines, by Richard Denniss. (The Australia Institute)   Despite the fact that it is impossible to drastically reduce climate change while burning more coal, the Australian government insists that Australia"s contribution to tackling climate change includes expediting the construction of enormous new coal mines in the Galilee Basin and the Hunter Valley.   The stated purpose of the Paris talks is stop global warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius. Australia says it will stand by its promise to do its fair share. It’s hard to see anyone taking us seriously.   In just two years, the Abbott government have, repealed a world leading carbon price policy, allowing coal use and emissions to rebound. Set up a taxpayer funded ‘Direct Action’ scheme, which no credible economists believe can drive large-scale abatement.   Appointed a self-described climate skeptic to review the Renewable Energy Target (RET); cut the RET and then complained about not being able to cut it further.   Tried to repeal the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), and the Climate Change Authority (CCA); when the Senate blocked the repeal, cut ARENA funding, undermined the CEFC mandate, and ignored CCA advice.   Refused international climate financing to developing countries, and then under pressure shuffled a small amount out of existing aid budgets.   The Australian government has announced post-2020 emissions targets among the lowest in the developed world, despite Australia being among the dirtiest economies per capita.   And to try to scare people into thinking stronger action will have disastrous consequences, they are now running an almighty scare campaign based on misrepresented modelling.   Before becoming Prime Minister, Tony Abbott described the argument around climate change as “absolute crap”. Now his government wants the world to believe them when they say they are serious about tackling climate change. We can think of a description for that.   Yet Australia’s biggest impact on global warming is not our emissions at home. It"s the emissions we send abroad through our coal exports.   It was The Australia Institute"s research in 1994 that showed Australia was the largest greenhouse gas emitter on a per capita basis.   That’s why The Australia Institute supports calls for a global moratorium on new coal mines. Our research shows that stopping new coal mines is the best way to tackle climate change and will impose the least harm in the broader economy.   A world that tackles global warming needs less coal, not more. A world moving towards 100% renewable energy needs to stop building more coal mines. More mines means less renewable energy and more climate disruption.   A global moratorium would be the strongest signal that the reign of coal is over. It would provide investment certainty and drive investment in cleaner sources of energy.   Coal barons say any mines Australia doesn’t build are mines the global market will ensure other countries build; to get around this dilemma, we need a global moratorium.   The science is clear: we can"t burn most fossil fuels and have any reasonable chance of staying under 2 degrees warming. This is now acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, International Energy Agency, Bank of England, US President Obama, French President Hollande.   To meet stop warming from going past the 2 degree limit, we would have to leave 95% of Australia"s coal in the ground. Yet Tony Abbott says he can see "few things more damaging" than the idea that coal "should be left in the ground and not sold."   Australia has a larger share of the seaborne coal market than Saudi Arabia has of the world oil market. Over the next 10 years our government and the coal industry plan to sell even more.   If it goes ahead, the Adani/ Carmichael mine in Queensland"s Galilee Basin would gouge a scar 60km long into the earth, becoming Australia"s biggest coal mine. The 2 billion tonnes of coal from Carmichael would make a road of coal a metre deep, ten metres wide, and 200,000 kilometres long. That road of coal could stretch around the world. Five times.   And that"s just one mine. Australia has 3 such mega mines on the drawing board for the Galilee Basin. And the Galilee Basin is just one part of Australia’s coal boom.   While the world prepares for a Paris deal to bring down global emissions, our government is trying to increase them, by selling more coal. Any deal reached at the Paris climate talks will be undermined by our planned thermal coal projects.   Everyone will be affected by the impacts of more coal mines, but Pacific Island states will be among the most vulnerable.   President Tong of Kiribati is acutely aware of this. He has seen it in his own lifetime. That is why President Tong is writing to all world leaders, asking for their support in negotiating a moratorium.   If our government was truly concerned about taking climate action, they would help President Tong. We wish we believed this were possible. But calling on this government to help that would be a fool’s errand.   Our political establishment is locked in behind building more coal mines to sell more coal. They will never consider a global moratorium -- not without international pressure. So we need to call on those who can build that pressure.   As hosts of UN climate talks, France has considerable authority over what is discussed. France has put considerable diplomatic capital into building momentum for success. President Hollande knows success means leaving 80% of fossil fuel reserves in the ground.   So The Australia Institute is launching a petition to President Hollande. We are asking him to put a global moratorium on new coal mines on the agenda for the Paris talks in December.   While two decades of climate talks have focused on emissions targets, they have largely ignored the growing extraction and trade of fossil fuels. Any international agreement must ensure most coal stays in the ground. Negotiating a moratorium on new coal mines would be a simple but hugely significant step towards securing a safe climate.   http://www.tai.org.au/ http://bit.ly/2fGEH6L   November 2013   Most of the world"s coal reserves should be left in the ground to avoid catastrophic global warming, the UN"s climate chief says.   In a speech to a gathering of industry executives, Christina Figueres challenged the industry to urgently transform itself, diversify into renewable energy and "radically change, rapidly and dramatically for everyone"s sake".   "By now it should be abundantly clear that further capital expenditures on coal can go ahead only if they are compatible with the 2C limit", she said at the international coal and climate summit in Warsaw.   Figueres said they had "the opportunity to be part of the worldwide climate solution" by switching off old coal power plants and leaving most of the world"s coal reserves in the ground.   "I urge every coal company to honestly assess the financial risks of business as usual; anticipate increasing regulation, growing finance restrictions and diminishing public acceptance," she said.   Figures said the industry needed a "deep, deep transformation" and should reinvent itself as a developer of renewable energy. "They really need to do a major, major rethink and a major shift in the deployment of their capital [towards renewable energy] … there is no doubt they are the energies of the future," she said.   A group of 27 international scientists meeting in Warsaw agreed with Figueres, saying that nearly 75% of the world"s coal reserves had to be left in the ground if global warming was to be limited to a 2C rise.   In a joint statement, the scientists – from the US, Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil and South Africa – rebutted claims that high-efficiency coal can be a low-emissions technology.   Using International Energy Agency estimates of world coal reserves, the group said that burning just 26% of the reserves would break the global "carbon budget", lifting temperatures above the 2C threshold which has been adopted as a goal for the UN climate talks.   Professor PR Shukla of the Indian Institute of Management said, "unabated coal combustion is not compatible with staying below the 2C limit."   Martin Kaiser, Greenpeace"s international climate director, welcomed the speech. "She gave the right warning to investors that any new investment into coal-fired power plants is a financial risk as there will be increasing regulation, growing finance restrictions and diminishing public acceptance." Visit the related web page
	Australia does not have a welfare problem. We have a poverty problem by John Falzon CEO, St Vincent de Paul Society Australia   Waiting for the wealth to trickle down   Wealth does not trickle down. It''s the job of the tax system to make sure it gets shared around. That is why we need governments to do what markets cannot, namely to ensure a fair go for all rather than a sumptuous banquet for some.   Tax cuts to large corporations do not help the wealth to trickle down. Current policy settings for negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts and superannuation tax concessions do not help the wealth to trickle down. They help keep it at the top by rewarding people and corporations who have already benefited from the prosperity generated by economic growth.   Australia, which is the sixth lowest taxing country in the OECD, goes without more revenue through tax expenditure than all other advanced economies.   A progressive society would tax those who have much rather than taking away from those who have little. But today we have a society and an economy more closely aligned to the principle that to those who have much, more will be given and from those who have little, even the little they have will be taken away. As things stand people who need services and income supports are being punished in the name of deficit reduction.   Taxation is an important means of redistributing wealth and opportunities. We should be using it to make Australia more equal; something we should actually strive for rather than fear. Treasury''s own modelling shows that the trickle-down economics used to justify corporate tax cuts are illusory.   Tax cuts for larger companies might be good for profits but, at the cost of $48 billion over the next 10 years, they will do nothing to create jobs or to secure the revenue for social housing, education, health or social security. Superannuation tax breaks are estimated by Treasury to cost $32 billion annually; by comparison, $20.3 billion a year is spent on Medicare. Negative gearing and the discount on capital gains tax cost over $11 billion each year, and the benefits are overwhelmingly skewed towards higher income earners.   Housing is a human right. But negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts have turned it into a speculative sport. We''re subsidising the wealthy while leaving people homeless. Maintaining these tax concessions and giving big business a company tax cut ultimately comes at the expense of the education, health and social services that ordinary people rely on.   Those who are left out are usually blamed and punished for their own exclusion. The message they receive is that if only they tried a little harder all would be well, whether it''s breaking into the housing market or into the labour market. But when we talk about the unfairness of cuts to social expenditure, we''re not just talking about the effects on people who currently experience poverty or homelessness; we''re talking about the majority.   And we''re talking about a continuum where financial stress and housing stress are only a few steps away from homelessness; where underemployment and insecure employment are only a few steps away from unemployment.   It''s a deeply offensive to suggest that it''s only the recalcitrant few who can''t look after themselves and that if we taxed less and spent less, then most of us would be able to just purchase the goods and services we need, as we need them, putting the premium, of course, on choice rather than equal access.   The truth is that it is only a few who benefit from this formulation; those who have no need, and perhaps even no desire, for universal healthcare or public education; those who believe they will never need income support as a carer, or due to a disability, or age, or unemployment; those who feel there is little, if any, value in anything being held in common for the common enjoyment of all, perhaps with the exception of the odd public park or beach.   Universal healthcare is a precious thing – we need to protect and extend it. We need to make sure that nobody says they cannot take care of their health because they need to put food on the table. If you want build a strong economy, it doesn''t make sense to deny your population access to high quality healthcare.   Likewise, investing in Gonski, in TAFE, in apprenticeships, in universities and in social and community services should not be seen as charity or welfare; they should be seen as a common good that belongs to everybody, from Australia''s First Peoples through to our most recent arrivals. None of these goods should be dependent on the depth of your pockets. And none of these goods should be denied to ordinary people on the basis of the fervent but misguided dogma that if they are patient, the day will come when the wealth will trickle down.   Australia does not have a welfare problem. We have a poverty problem   You don’t build communities up by putting people down. Structural changes to the economy have resulted in entire communities being left without work and often without adequate social and economic infrastructure.   We see manufacturing jobs disappearing, the loss of jobs in some sectors due to privatisation, and the global quest for ever greater profits by using ever cheaper labour.   We have seen a worrying trend towards casualisation and insecure employment and, on the latest ABS labour force figures, a decline in the total number of monthly hours worked in all jobs. Trends change rapidly and, as the prime minister is fond of reminding us, it is useful to be agile and innovative in a period of everlasting uncertainty and flux.   Which is why it really is time we actually invested in people and communities instead of putting people down and blaming them for their own exclusion. Living in poverty is not a sickness. Nor is it a crime. Yet we continue to fall into the ideological trap of either pathologising or criminalising people who sin against the dominant moral code by not being “self-reliant” in the marketplace.   This is not new. The earlier McClure Report, tabled by Jocelyn Newman in 2000, began from the same premise; that we urgently needed to address the problem of “welfare dependency” because it, and people’s lives, are seemingly spiralling out of control.   It’s time we stopped disguising market failure as a personal failure to participate in the market. For this is where we are starting again, with the current offerings of “revolutionary” vision and “radical” change by social services minister, Christian Porter. By focusing on the supposed failings of the individual, we are missing the bleeding obvious: that there are not enough jobs (and more specifically, not enough hours!) for those who can work as well as a seriously inadequate level of income support for those who cannot.   In the same way, the persistence of homelessness is not a failure of individuals to “do the right thing” and buy a house (or get their parents to pitch in), but rather a failure of the housing market, which is structured in such a way as to be brilliant at providing choice for those at the top, and dazzling as a speculative sport, but lousy at ensuring access to affordable and appropriate accommodation for all.   The other trick that is used to mask the failures of the market is to blame social services. In this discursive sleight of hand, the persistence of unemployment and poverty is proof that the services are not working, and that their funding is a waste of public money because they have failed to end homelessness or unemployment or poverty.   So, the endgame is not even the modest alleviation of poverty, let alone the arresting of inequality. It is the running down of what actually does work or would work as an investment in people and communities, like Gonski, a highly targeted investment in children’s education, focusing on student need rather than sector. Or like Tafe, a national treasure, that on the watch of governments of both sides of politics, has been systematically undermined and gutted.   Likewise, community health programmes, community legal aid programmes, social services and justice reinvestment programmes have been either deliberately cut, like the highly successful Youth Connections, or decidedly ignored.   Australia does not have a welfare problem. We have a poverty problem and an inequality problem, but you know that these problems are going to be ignored when the dominant discourse focuses our attention on the “welfare problem.”   It is true that providing someone with income support and forgetting about them is not the solution to unemployment. But neither is it the cause of unemployment. In short, it is neither the solution nor the problem. And the problem of unemployment and underemployment, which is a structural rather than a behavioural problem, is not going to be addressed by forcing people to live below the poverty line, which is what we appear to be comfortable with allowing to remain as the status quo, even after the welfare revolution. And in the meantime, we are still eagerly being told that corporations need welfare assistance via tax cuts and concessions.   Poverty is not a personal choice. Being a full-time carer, or living with a disability or mental illness, or leaving a violent partner, or being residualised by the labour market, should not result in poverty in a prosperous and progressive country. We should certainly not begrudge the money we spend to make sure that no one is left out or pushed out; that no one is excluded from having a place to call home, a place to work for those who can work (and appropriate income support for those who cannot), a place to learn, and a place to heal. We should not be comfortable with the retrograde notion that charity should be the default mode of providing social security.   If we take as our starting point the supposed need to reduce social expenditure, we will not arrive at the goal of reducing poverty and inequality. If our efforts as a society are predicated on the alleged need to “get people off welfare” we will certainly go some way to cutting the welfare budget and getting people off the government ledger.   But we will find that, even though, as in New Zealand, there will hopefully be some good news stories, there will also be entire cohorts of people who are thrown into the arms of loan sharks and predatory payday lenders and condemned to count on charity when all they long for is justice.   It is time we actually invested in people and communities. It is time we invested in a jobs plan instead of fantasising about a putting-the-boot-into-the-unemployed plan (for example by forcing young people to live on fresh air and sunshine for a month of every year) or a cutting-penalty-rates-and-undermining-the-minimum-wage-plan (exemplified in the PaTH internship proposal).   Unless we see a comprehensive investment in people and communities, in jobs, education, social and affordable housing, public and community health, community legal centres, and social services, and unless we see the billions in cuts to these areas restored, and appropriately indexed and expanded, then instead of an investment in a more socially just Australia, we’ll be staring down the barrel of divestment and the divisiveness that follows.   And in the end, we’ll be going down the US path of building profitable prisons instead of investing in the common good, for being locked up follows hot on the heels of locked out. http://bit.ly/2eqwwKl Visit the related web page
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