3 November 2016, Australia has not disclosed details of its carbon emissions accounting despite repeated requests, the chief scientist of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Thursday. Speaking at the launch of UNEP’s Emissions Gap report in London, Jacqueline McGlade said she had been unable to draw any conclusion about whether Australia is on track to meet its pledges under the Cancun and Paris climate deals. In a repeat of last year, the Australian government continued to claim that it had cancelled licenses for coal power stations but failed to declare the details publicly. That means proposed projects like the Kingston power station in South Australia officially remain part of Australia’s future energy plans. “There’s a process which takes a long time before it comes out into the open that these 15 plants are not going forward. Until we know they aren’t going forward they are in the calculation,” said McGlade. Out of the G20, the only other nations that could not be assessed because of inadequate information were Indonesia and South Africa. McGlade’s travails with the Australians are not new. In fact, she said, there had been some improvement on last year’s impasse. She said that she could now say the government would definitely meet its targets under the Kyoto Protocol. The government also claims it will meet the pledge it agreed in Cancun in 2010 to be emitting 5% less than it was in 2000 by 2020. It has previously been highlighted that this will only be achieved through some creative accounting. But McGlade said that the lack of information from the government meant that no conclusion could be drawn. “Right now Australia is neutral as far as if it is making progress or not,” she said. “When we talk about if it’s going to meet the 2020 trajectory… it’s very difficult to evaluate progress.” “It is a very open dialogue and we continue to press the government that insofar as it is possible to publish the retraction of certain licenses, that will help your case. But until we see that, we can’t document it.” Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
2 November 2016, Renew Economy, Australia failing climate targets as Paris deal comes into force. A new assessment of the Coalition government’s climate change policies says Australia will fall well short of its “inadequate” Paris climate targets, and will likely increase emissions by nearly as much as it has promised to cut them. The assessment from Climate Action Tracker says that Australia’s target falls well short of the effort needed to limit warming to below 2°C, let alone the stronger aspirational target of 1.5°C that was included in the Paris Agreement. “If most other countries followed the Australia approach, global warming would exceed 3°C to 4°C,” the report says. The Climate Action Tracker report is not the first to highlight Australia’s pathetically inadequate climate policies, nor will it be the last. A slew of reports is expected in coming days and weeks as the Paris Agreement comes into force from Friday and new climate talks begin in Marrakesh in Morocco on Monday. Australia is likely to be questioned intensely by many countries, including its major trading partners, over its climate policies, particularly the effectiveness of its Direct Action policy, which prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has embraced despite ridiculing it before replacing Tony Abbott as leader just over a year ago. Fairfax Media reported last month that China, the US and other countries have put more than 30 questions to the Turnbull government, asking for detail about how Australia will meet its 2030 emissions target and raising concerns about a lack of transparency over how the government calculates and reports emissions. The Australian government has admitted it has not even modelled the impact of its own policies and whether they would reach their target, and it is unclear whether a promised 2017 review will lead to new policies or simply be a “situation report” on the current trajectory. Read More here
1 November 2016, Bloomberg, Geoengineering to Alter Climate Moves Closer to Reality. A United Nations body is investigating controversial methods to avert runaway climate change by giving humans the go-ahead to re-engineer the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. So-called geoengineering is seen as necessary to achieve the COP21 Paris agreement clinched in December, when 197 countries pledged to keep global temperatures rises below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to researchers who produced a report for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. “Within the Paris agreement there’s an implicit assumption that there will need to be greenhouse gases removed,” said Phil Williamson, a scientist at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, who worked on the report. “Climate geoengineering is what countries have agreed to do, although they haven’t really realized that they’ve agreed to do it.” Large-scale geoengineering may include pouring nutrients into oceans to save coral habitats or spraying tiny particles into the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect sun rays back into space. Geoengineering proposals have been shunned because of their unpredictable consequences on global ecosystems. Read more here
1 November 2016, The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef: why are government and business perpetuating the big lie? At the core of the Australian government’s failure to protect our Great Barrier Reef is the big lie. Through its actions and inaction, rhetoric, funding priorities and policy decisions, the Australian government has implicitly pursued the line that it is possible to turn things around for the reef without tackling global warming. This is the big lie. Last year, when the federal and Queensland governments released the Reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan, experts were emphatic about the deceit. Eminent coral reef scientist Prof Terry Hughes commented that the “biggest omission in the plan is that it virtually ignores climate change, which is clearly the major ongoing threat to the reef”. Great Barrier Reef historian Iain McCalman wrote that the new measures “deliberately ignore the dire long-term threats to the reef that are contained in the now unutterable words ‘climate change’”. “They are akin to investing in cures for a patient’s skin diseases while ignoring their cancer symptoms,” he wrote. As the experts make plain, any attempt to decouple the future of the Great Barrier Reef from the quest to contain global warming is simply dishonest. As another expert, Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland, has said, we either “re-examine the current plans for unrestricted coal exports, taking proper account and responsibility for the resulting greenhouse emissions, or watch the reef die”. Read More here