Is it about trading emissions permits? Is it about technology policy? Surely it’s not about arguing over who can support polluters more! Is it even about reducing emissions, then?

While you can mount arguments for all of these, fundamentally, in my opinion, the goal is none of these.

Fundamentally, the goal must be to make sure we can pass on a safe climate to our children, and our children’s children. If our legislative action doesn’t play a key role  in delivering that safe climate outcome, then it’s not really climate action.

With that in mind, the Greens have spent the last many months putting together a legislative package entitled the Safe Climate Bill which, taken together, would see Australia play its responsible role in delivering a safe climate.

I’m very conscious of not simply using Rooted as an outlet for spruiking the Greens and our initiatives, but given that the mainstream media gave our Safe Climate Bill, which we launched yesterday, diddly squat coverage, it needs every opportunity to get an airing through other media. We need to find some way of holding the Government to account for their climate failure, if the MSM won’t do it (and the Opposition clearly won’t). We need to show Australians that there is an alternative if they want serious, meaningful climate action.

You can read all about the bill at www.safeclimatebill.org.au or via the text links in the post, but in summary it is a collection of 12 linked bills based on the pillars of a safe climate target, renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transport and protecting green carbon, supported by a real polluter pays emissions trading scheme.

The 12 bills are:

The Safe Climate (Emissions Trading Scheme) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Renewable Energy Electricity) Amendment Bill 2009 [Renewable Energy Target]

The Safe Climate (Renewable Electricity Feed-in Tariff) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Renewable Energy Infrastructure) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Energy Efficiency Access and Savings Initiative) Bill 2009 [The EASI household energy efficiency scheme]

The Safe Climate (Energy Efficiency in Non-Residential Buildings) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Energy Efficiency Opportunities) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Energy Efficiency Target) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Sustainable Transport Infrastructure) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Fringe Benefits and Fuel Credit Restrictions) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Native Forest Carbon and Biodiversity Protection) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Green Carbon) Bill 2009

You can download them from our website.

The Safe Climate Bill is intended, in its parts and its whole, to be an exposure draft and we strongly invite public comment and discussion. We’ll be developing it further over time and plan to campaign strongly around it as a counter to the Rudd Government’s claim that its CPRS is a reasonable response to the climate crisis. [By the way, did everyone hear Prof Garnaut refer to it last night as "has been one of the worst examples of policy-making we have seen on major issues in Australia"? Yet somehow he still reckons it's worth supporting.]

As I’ve written here recently, climate campaigning has been damn hard recently because it has had to be so negative, that being the only responsible way to react to policy failure that is the CPRS. We very much hope that the Safe Climate Bill can give us all a boost with something positive to rally around!

Please read the detailed briefings, download the bills and give us your feedback!

There’s a lot of burn-out in the climate movement right now. A lot of tired people, a lot of grumpy people. I know – I am one!

I can completely understand why – we’ve had a year of not only hard campaigning, but also a particularly distressing one. Dashed hopes aren’t easy to bear, a split movement is difficult to deal with, and too much of the year has been spent campaigning ‘against’ something instead of ‘for’ something else.

But, hard though it may be, Id argue that now is the time when we need to pull out all stops and start campaigning stronger, louder and better!

The CPRS has gone down once, but it’ll be back soon, followed swiftly by the Copenhagen Conference.

We all agree (even the Government) that the CPRS is not good enough to seriously deal with the climate crisis, but the voices saying that it is “better than nothing” are growing louder. And, disturbingly, there seems to be a feeling almost of resignation growing in parts of the rest of the movement – a feeling that this is going to happen and we might as well not try to stop it. But for all those who argue that it should (or might as well) be “passed now and improved later”, I have one critical question:

How?

We cannot sit back now and assume that, if the CPRS passes in its current form, we’ll simply be able to improve it further down the track. If we agree it is not good enough, we must lay the groundwork now to improve it later. We need a strategy, not just a vague hope.

As part of the effort to find a way forward – the best path for us, as a movement, to ensure that we get strong, ambitious, science-based climate policy – here are the options as I see them for what may conceivably happen in the Senate in the coming months:

• The CPRS fails again because all non-Labor Senators oppose it, leading to a possible early election;
• The CPRS becomes law with the Government working closely with the Greens to make it environmentally effective and economically efficient, securing Senate support through bringing to bear their moral authority with a bill that matches the scale of the challenge;
• The CPRS becomes law with the Government browning it down even further with the Liberal Party, and the Greens supporting it because it is better than nothing;
• The CPRS becomes law with the Government browning it down even further with the Liberal Party, but opposed by the Nationals and Greens for different reasons.

Let’s take these one by one, looking at the implications for any campaign to achieve ambitious action.

In the extremely unlikely event that we face an early election on climate change and the CPRS, the implication for us all is clear: we need to be ready to run a powerful campaign calling for the strongest possible action from the next Parliament. We need to make it abundantly clear that there is an appetite in the Australian community for meaningful government action on the climate crisis, and that the community will not accept the CPRS or anything worse. If we fail to deliver a mandate for strong action and a rebuke to the CPRS, we cannot believe that we will see anything stronger than the CPRS actually implemented.

On the second option, if you don’t believe that the Government has no intention of working with the Greens to green up the scheme (and I can tell you from personal experience that they don’t have any such intention), you will at least acknowledge that the Government has no political reason to do so in the absence of a strong public campaign calling for them to do so. It is just imaginable that, if such a campaign were to build this month and grow to a crescendo by November, the pressure on the Government would be such that they would at least consider their options in the Senate. With silence and division in the climate movement, it is absolutely guaranteed that they will not do so.

Taking the third and fourth options together, it seems pretty clear to me that, once the CPRS passes, the heat will very swiftly go out of climate debate in Australia. Mainstream opinion will be that something is being done. It will be incredibly difficult for us to bring the issue back to the boil in time to deliver a safe climate.

If the Greens, and the climate movement more broadly, fall silent now, or, worse, support the CPRS now as ‘better than nothing’, I believe that it will be simply impossible to rescue the situation and strengthen Australia’s climate response in the little time we have left. We will have allowed the Government to frame the CPRS as action on climate change, the best that can be achieved at this time, and we will have given away the only thing we have: the fact that we are right.

However, if we campaign hard against the CPRS now, highlight its flaws and promote a positive alternative, it may just be possible to continue and build on the frame that this is a polluters’ paradise that must be swiftly replaced with something meaningful. The stronger our opposition now, the more clearly articulated our alternative, the more likely it becomes that we can succeed down the track.

The clear lesson from this analysis is that we must strengthen our resolve and work now to build the strongest possible campaign for ambitious climate action. Now is the time to provide a counterweight to the continued and accelerating rent-seeking of the polluters. We need to throw everything we have at this – from details critiques and analyses to NDAs and other protests, from continuing letters to editors and calls to talkback to doorknocking campaigns.

We can debate for months (as we have already) whether the CPRS is better than nothing or worse than useless, but one thing is clear: if the CPRS passes and is not rapidly strengthened, it will legislatively ensure that Australia’s emissions cannot and will not start heading downwards until 2013.

I am convinced that, if we reject that bill to lock in failure, we will be able to achieve faster emissions cuts sooner than the CPRS could ever deliver.

But, within an hour, Minister Wong had thumbed her nose at the Senate and the planet, telling CE Daily that the Government “had already undertaken the largest economic modelling exercise in Australian history. Given that fact, the Government does not intend to undertake further modelling, and believes it is now time to get on with the huge job of reducing Australia’s emissions.”

What is with this Government’s studied ignorance? Why do they consistently refuse to even model 40% cuts, which the Greens have asked for repeatedly over many months? What are they afraid of?

We can be guaranteed that the Government will not consider moving to 40% cuts if they haven’t modelled the economic impact. So of course they will continue to refuse to do that modelling.

But how can the Government expect the Senate to be willing to pass their deeply flawed CPRS if they thumb their nose at the Senate’s request for this modelling?

But the mainstream Australian discussion of the Copenhagen Conference later this year has thus far focussed entirely on the need for a “successful agreement”, and not at all on how you might define such success.

It is incredibly important that we do not let ourselves believe that achieving any kind of diplomatic “success” at Copenhagen is enough. If Copenhagen does not deliver the kind of ambitious global agreement that will see our generation pass on a safe climate to our children, it will have failed. An agreement to do too little, or an agreement which countries can ignore, will be a failure.

This dichotomy was brought home firmly by statements in Australia yesterday by Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Climate Minister (see here, here, here and here), who is touring the world building momentum for the conference she is to host in just a few months’ time. Hedegaard is so keen for a diplomatic success that she has abandoned the goal of environmental success. Having been thoroughly briefed by the triumvirate of Penny Wong, the Climate Institute and the Business Council of Australia, Hedegaard backed the Rudd Government’s Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme as “crucial” to the success of Copenhagen, saying developed countries must sign up to at least the 25% cuts by 2020 that Australia has now put on the table as a maximum offer.

And that’s where the problem starts.

If the old parties close ranks with the old polluters to pass the scheme that is currently before the Parliament, Australia will go to Copenhagen having legislatively prevented itself from agreeing to a target stronger than the 25% minimum that the world requires from rich, high-polluting countries. The only impact this can possibly have on the negotiations is to lower the level of ambition from other developed countries, encouraging Canada, Japan and Russia to also refuse to take on science-based targets. This in turn makes it less likely that China, India and other very large developing nations will sign up to slow their increases in emissions. They have already made it clear that they expect rich countries to commit to targets in the order of 40% by 2020 and more before they agree to move.

And the chances of agreement all of a sudden look very grim indeed.

The Rudd Government’s conditional 25% offer is part of the problem, not the solution. If legislated, it would see Australia return to global negotiations demanding that the rest of the world goes very hard – other developed nations cutting emissions in the order of 40% and developing nations like China reducing emissions 20% below business as usual – while we once again get away with a weak target.

Of course the world needs to go hard! We need a global agreement that is, in fact, considerably stronger than the one that Australia’s conditions set out. But if such an agreement is reached, it will by necessity see Australia commit to far more than 25% cuts by 2020.

Chinese chief negotiator, Su Wei, told The Age just last weekend that Australia’s conditionality on the 25% was unacceptable. By demanding that China make commitments before we do, we breached the spirit of the UNFCCC’s 1992 agreement on common but differentiated targets. European nations have privately raised concerns with the Greens about Australia’s unacceptable attitude to burden-sharing amongst developed countries.

Now, Australia is not the be all and end all. If the US and China agree to start moving (as may now be about to happen), we will swiftly become irrelevant in the global game and be left behind as the world marches on. But, if the CPRS has any impact on the global negotiations, it will be a negative one, not a positive one. If Australia’s contribution to global climate negotiations is once again to lower the level of ambition, it will be a great tragedy.

In yesterday’s hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy, Philip Sutton, as part of a roundtable of environment groups, made the point that, just like Kyoto, a weak agreement at Copenhagen will hold back progress, not encourage it. On the other hand, if negotiations fall apart this year, it can only spur on stronger efforts in the months afterwards to reach a truly effective agreement.

If we are to have any real hope of preventing runaway climate change, the global community must agree to return the atmosphere to 350 ppm CO2 as soon as possible. That will mean developed nations getting onto a trajectory towards zero net emissions as fast as possible. Once developed nations take on that challenge, developing nations will swiftly come on board as that is where the markets in the coming decades will be.

Let’s not set our sights too low for Copenhagen in order to achieve some kind of agreement. That approach is doomed to failure – if it does not lead to the collapse of negotiations, it will, in the end, lead to climate catastrophe. Let’s aim for the truly ambitious agreement that we need and keep working until we achieve it!

In a speech to the Lowy Institute today (not yet on her website, but will be here), in which she bravely painted a picture of a fictional world quite unlike our own, Minister Wong set out for her audience the history of emissions trading plans in Australia. She raised the original proposal put to the Howard Government a decade ago, discussed Peter Shergold’s report in the Howard Government’s final year, and detailed her own Government’s Green Paper and White Paper process.

But she completely failed to mention the Garnaut Report.

Excised from history. Oh dear.

Here is what Christine Milne had to say about the speech.

The report concludes that the old scientific and environmental target of constraining warming to 2C is now well out of date and that we must do everything we can to bring warming back to no more than 1C if we are to pass on a safe climate to those who come after us. It makes it clear that those who think we can get away with stabilising CO2 equivalents at 550 parts per million are knowingly condemning the planet to catastrophe.

Bill Hare’s excellent chapter which goes through the science step by step includes an excellent metaphor for the situation we find ourselves in:

The jet plane metaphor is again helpful. Faced with a dire in-flight emergency, it would be safest to be on the ground immediately. In the real world, however, it takes time to prepare the aircraft, get into a safe configuration for descent and landing, and find a safe runway to land on. Otherwise the outcome would be an unmitigated disaster— the plane would crash.

In other words, the only safe level of emissions is zero (in fact, below zero, as he goes on to explain), therefore the only truly scientifically justifiable emissions target is to get to zero immediately. However, we know that that is technically impossible to achieve (forget political or economic constraints, it’s just not actually possible). So we need to set ourselves on the pathway that will get us there as fast and effectively as possible.

That is why the Australian Greens have adopted a policy that Australia should target net zero carbon emissions as soon as feasible, and no later than 2050.

Other chapters of the State of the World report look into how this can be achieved, with an emergency shift from coal to zero emissions renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, electrifying transport with renewable power, changing agricultural practices to increase soil carbon storage, protecting forests and much more. One of the most interesting sections is about how global society can actually get to negative emissions which, as Hare explains, will be needed in order to suck carbon out of the atmosphere to get carbon concentrations lower than they currently are.

This report makes a mockery of the Rudd/Wong white paper. The day after the white paper was released, Penny Wong to ABC AM’s Lyndal Curtis that:

the Greens want carbon neutrality, that is, no net emissions by 2050, at the latest. Which is, frankly, I’m not sure how they propose to get there – to be carbon neutral by 2050. So obviously if we’re going to have a discussion with them we’d need to understand how on earth Bob Brown proposes to get there.

Well, Minister, this report backs the Greens to the hilt. I strongly recommend that you, and everyone else interested in the future of the planet, read this report.

Nationals Senate leader, Barnaby Joyce, let fly in today’s press and radio with an attack not just on emissions trading but on climate change science, effectively calling it “just a load of rubbish”.

According to Godwin’s Law, Joyce immediately lost his argument by invoking Nazism, referring to “environmental goose-steppers” and coining a new term: “eco-totalitarianism”. He also made that classic climate-sceptic mistake of raising Y2K as an example of a doomsayer prediction that never came to pass, adding this time “population explosions, food shortages, fuel running out [and] communism taking over the world.” The population, food shortage and peak oil time bombs are still ticking, of course, as Joyce well knows in the case of food! But the others are arguments for strong action, not for an ostrich-like head-in-the-sand attitude. The reason Y2K didn’t cause chaos and totalitarian communism (and Nazism for that matter) didn’t spread far further and destroy far more lives than they did is because people actually stood up and did something about them!

But let’s leave those arguments aside for the time being and consider what these comments, from a man who considers himself a future leader and the great white hope of his party, mean for the future of the National Party.

There is certainly a long-term tendency in the bush towards climate scepticism, born, perhaps, in the old city greenie / bush farmer tensions of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Farmers who, quite reasonably, didn’t appreciate being told what they could and could not do developed a mistrust of environmentalists which still exists, with a stranglehold on the National Party itself. But that mistrust has long been waning in the broader rural constituency, as has the converse position amongst many environmentalists. For many years there has been an ongoing rapprochement, led by people such as Christine Milne, who grew up as a sixth-generation dairy farmer, has a positive vision for greener rural communities and who worked closely between the two ‘constituencies’ in her campaign against the Wesley Vale pulp mill and then her years in the Tasmanian Parliament.

Closely connected with the waning of anti-green feeling in the bush is the waning of climate scepticism. Christine’s Senate office is regularly in touch with farmers and rural communities across Australia who are concerned and expressing support for her work. Many farmers are now linking the drought with climate change, are deeply concerned about their future, and are beginning to do what they can. The issue of changing tillage practice to store carbon in soils is becoming quite hot. Ideas such a green tractor powered by farm waste are spreading. Support for renewable energy feed-in tariffs, to help farmers diversify their profit streams, insulate themselves against drought and reduce emissions at the same time, gain strong support across regional Australia as well as the city.

Given all this, it seems odd that Barnaby Joyce, who is supposedly looking to the future of his party, is leg-roping it to the past.

Surely the positive, future-focussed position would be to campaign hard for help to get the bush being part of the climate change solution and to secure all the benefits that will go with that – diversified income streams, more jobs, revitalised regional communities and the knowledge that what you are doing is giving your kids a better chance in the future.

That would be right, and it would be smart politics. Instead, Joyce is making a big mistake, jeopardising regional Australia’s future, leading the charge into the past and risking a serious voter bleed. This strikes me as yet another nail in the coffin of the National Party.

Here’s a video that expresses what a lot of us are starting to think – that all those who voted for Kevin Rudd thinking he’d be better than John Howard on climate change were sold a lump of coal.

If you’re angry, come along tomorrow and join us at the rallies listed here and below the fold.

Click here to view the embedded video.

NSW
11AM – Commonwealth Government Offices, 70 Phillip St, Sydney
Contact John Kaye (02) 9230 2668

Victoria
12PM – Cnr of Collins, Spring and MacArthur Sts, Melbourne
Contact Alison 0402 075 306 or pc@vic.greens.org.au Vic Facebook Event

ACT
12.30PM – Parliament House, Canberra
Contact Simon on 62476305 or office@act.greens.org.au

SA
11AM – SA Parliament House, North Terrace, Adelaide
Contact Tammy (08) 8212 4888 or tammy@sa.greens.org.au

TAS
12.30pm – Tasmanian Parliament House Lawns
Contact Karen 03 6236 9334 or 0417 555 309 or networker@tas.greens.org.au

WA
12PM – Wesley Church, cnr Hay & William Sts, Perth
Contact Rachel 08 9225 5799 or rachel.pemberton@aph.gov.au

Fresh from burying Christine Milne’s feed-in tariff Bill with a majority Senate Inquiry report saying it’s a “great idea, but let’s not do it”, the Rudd Government went on last night to push through a Bill which gives a huge benefit to those who seek to bury CO2 under the sea floor – letting them make profits without having to carry the liability. This is a recipe for a new sub-prime crisis, telling industry that they can make significant profits safe in the knowledge that they will not need to carry the can for more than 20 years.

The debate on this bill is worth reading in its entirety if you have time. It exposes quite how blinded by industry rhetoric the Government and Opposition both are. Perhaps the pinnacle of this is to be found in Senator McLucas’s statement that, as far as leaks from storage are concerned, “we do not predict that will happen”. Considering it is widely acknowledged by government, industry and bodies such as the IPCC around the world that leaks will happen, at the rate of at least 1% a year on average, this is a rather heroic prediction.

The Bill is largely about settling arguments between the petroleum exploration industry and the geosequestration industry, but the sting in its tail is how it deals with the planning approvals and long-term liability issues that arise from dumping massive quantities of a dangerous substance under the sea bed – what Christine has called a “21st century landfill strategy”. The original Bill left the issue open, as discussed in this media release. After a closure certificate was issued for a burial site, the liability was to be settled under common law – not an ideal solution due to the uncertainties, timelines and costs involved.

The Greens’ proposal was that, acknowledging that companies will not be around for the lengths of time the carbon needs to be stored for (ie perpetuity), we should take a leaf out of the book of mining regulation and require companies to post a bond to cover potential liability into the future. This, however, was not acceptable to the Opposition, who negotiated with the Government an amendment that keeps liability on the company for 20 years after a closure certificate has been issued, and then passes all liability onto the taxpayer.

Christine Milne moved an array of other amendments to try to make the legislation somewhat more environmentally responsible, only to be told by Liberal Senator David Johnston that the changes were unnecessary because “This whole act has the environment as its fundamental objective.” Only people who have no idea about environmental protection could say such a thing, as their efforts to be ‘green’ are frequently self-contradictory. It is not uncommonly their actions that purport to be about environmental protection that need the most scrutiny. The whole advocacy for geosequestration (let alone nuclear power) is testament to this fact.

Those who elected the Rudd Government on a platform of climate action need to know just how much they are bypassing renewable energy in favour of coal. But, when the Government deliberately tabled the feed-in report at 6pm and scheduled the debate on the geosequestration bill to conclude at 9.50pm, it is no surprise that there has been virtually no media coverage of either. We have to work hard to make surepeople understand what is happening.

Swift parrot and young

On Monday, Bob Brown launched a new report by Margaret Blakers and Isobel Crawford into the state of the Swift Parrot (pictured). This amazing parrot, named in honour of its ability to cross Bass Strait in 3 hours (the ferry takes all night!), is listed as endangered, but, as the paper argues, should be upgraded to critically endangered as its population has recently crashed below 1000 pairs thanks to the logging of its only breeding grounds – the forests of south-eastern Tasmania.

Last Friday, Forestry Tasmania proudly announced that they would halt logging in the Wielangta coupes where the birds are nesting this season. Once the birds are gone, of course, Forestry will continue the slash and burn, destroying forever one of the last remaining nurseries for this beautiful little bird.

Bob made the point to Fran Kelly on Radio National breakfast on Monday that, with a species on the brink of extinction and the State Government doing nothing to protect its long-term future, the Federal Government has the right and the responsibility to step in and terminate the Regional Forests Agreement that covers the area preventing the Federal Government from taking any action to save thebird.

When challenged on the issue by Fran Kelly on this morning’s breakfast, Peter Garrett ducked the issue, passing the buck to the Tasmanian Government:

“Under the RFA Act, it is the responsibility of the Tasmanian government to ensure that those management prescriptions that have been identified as necessary are undertaken and it’s our expectation that that would be the case… The EPBC [Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation] Act does not apply, and hasn’t for some time, to override or to provide … any necessary or additional actions over the RFA. Now that’s always been the case.”

A bold move by one of my former heroes.

Meanwhile, the Tasmanian Government, in whose trust Minister Garrett places the fate of the Swift Parrot, is led by a man crassly and wilfully ignorant of science. A recent study by the ANU has backed up what many of us have been arguing for years – that standing forests are far more valuable as carbon stores than they are as woodchips.

Premier Bartlett, on the other hand, told The Australian newspaper that “I don’t think the logging of old-growth forests is necessarily related to climate change” and called the clear global position that standing forests are more valuable than logged forests “bullshit”. You can read what Christine Milne has to say about that here.

But just to confirm one of the worst weeks for Tasmania’s forests in years, we were notified last night of a horrific attack on protesters in the Florentine Valley yesterday, brave people from Still Wild, Still Threatened, trying to protect forests on the eastern edge of the World Heritage Area. They had locked onto a car in the middle of a forestry access road, peacefully but effectively blocking the ability of loggers to gain access and chop down the trees. They were attacked in their car, with loggers bashing the vehicle with a sledgehammer, eventually dragging one protester out and kicking him in the head. One particularly brave protester caught it on a phone camera and the footage is now making its way around the globe.

A warning. This footage is not for the faint-hearted, or for those who dislike coarse language.

Click here to view the embedded video.