What is the best way to talk about those who are devoting their efforts to spread disinformation on climate science and/or climate legislation?  Recent speeches by President Obama and Australian Prime Minister Rudd, who represent the two biggest industrialized countries that have so far refused to take action, offer some suggestions.

Certainly, if you want to hear the best progressive messaging on energy and climate — if you want to know the best phrases and framing — listen to the President.  In two recent speeches Obama has gone out of his way to criticize the disinformers and delayers.

In Florida late last month, Obama said “The closer we get to this new energy future, the harder the opposition is going to fight, the more we’re going to hear from special interests and lobbyists in Washington whose interests are contrary to the interests of the American people.  Now, there are those who are also going to suggest that moving towards a clean energy future is going to somehow harm the economy or lead to fewer jobs.  And they’re going to argue that we should do nothing, stand pat, do less, or delay action yet again.”

A few days earlier, at M.I.T. he said:

The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized. But I think it’s important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we’re engaged in. There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy — when it’s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs. There are going to be those who cynically claim — make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.

Obama understands that our current economic system is dangerously unsustainable, and that the opposition is driven to a large extent by those who act out of narrow self-interest or ideology.  He doesn’t use the term “denier,” instead accusing those who spread anti-scientific disinformation of cynicism.  He does use the word “delay” in both speeches, focusing on the primary goal of the opposition.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what words the President uses — those who oppose his policies will misquote and misrepresent them.  One of the leading disinformers, Pat Michaels, made this absurd assertion on National Review Online:

He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

This surely isn’t the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree.

No, he didn’t say “any scientific debate” is unscrupulous.  He was just talking about those who “contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence.”  And no, he didn’t talk tough.  If you check the transcript as delivered (here), he said:

So we’re going to have to work on those folks.

Not really so threatening, even for a Chicagoan.  If anyone has a video of that segment of the speech, post a link in the comments.

The point is that it doesn’t matter what you say, the delayers (and deniers) will misrepresent you (and the science) and then attack the misrepresentation.  That’s what they do.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a much tougher speech on November 6, which I’m going to excerpt at length at the end because it is so astonishing.  Australia is the canary-in-the-coal-mine koala-in-the-bushfire for climate change, since it is the most arid habited continent (see “Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040” and “Global Boiling: Australia’s hellish black Saturday of extreme fire“ and “Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in”).  Rudd also faces a conservative opposition to climate action (see here) and an aggressive disinformation campaign, as he explained:

The opponents of action on climate change fall into one of three categories.

Together, these groups, alive in every major country including Australia, constitute a powerful global force for inaction, and they are particularly entrenched in a range of conservative parties around the world.

I have never been a huge fan of the word “deniers,” as I explained in a March 2008 post:  Media enable denier spin 3: PLEASE stop calling them “skeptics.” But, as I wrote, I suspect future generations will call them “climate destroyers” or worse.  I noted that, “delayer” is a “far more accurate term,” since “They all want delay and delay is fatal.”  Delayers clearly encompasses all three of Rudd’s categories.  As the NYT’s Revkin explained about a 2008  skeptic denier delayer conference in New York, “The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases.”

But while I may be The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger,” I couldn’t get my preferred term — or its variants, like “delayer-1000,” widely accepted.  If you google, “Global warming delayer” [in quotes], you get some 2000 hits.  If you google, “Global warming delayer” [in quotes], you get over 430,000.  Climate science denial has actually flourished even as the evidence refuting it grows, which may not surprise some, but I confess I didn’t think so many seemingly serious people would double down on disinformation.

You can’t fight Google — and you can’t miss the in-your-face anti-scientific nature of the disinformers — so I ultimately ended up going back to the occasional use of the word “deniers” as I explained in this June post, Anti-science conservatives are stuck in denial but for climate science activists, the reverse is true:

And so, for better or worse, the word “deniers” stays with us.  As I’ve said, I will try to reserve that term for the professional disinformers and their work.  And I’ll try to remember to use the term delayers for those who have been misled.

I will still use “delayers,” sometimes in combination with “deniers,” and link back to this post for explanation.  I will also keep using the term “anti-scientific” and “disinformers” since I think they are also accurate.

Prime Minister Rudd makes the strongest case to date for using the strongest possible language to describe those who knowingly spread disinformation.  You can read Get Energy Smart Now on his speech, and I’m going to excerpt it at length below:

When you strip away all the political rhetoric, all the political excuses, there are two stark choices – action or inaction. The resolve of the Australian Government is clear – we choose action, and we do so because Australia’s fundamental economic and environmental interests lie in action.

Action now. Not action delayed.

As one of the hottest and driest continents on earth, Australia’s environment and economy will be among the hardest and fastest hit by climate change if we do not act now. The scientific evidence from the CSIRO and other expert bodies have outlined the implications for Australia, in the absence of national and global action on climate change:

The Government took a plan to tackle climate change to the last election, to tackle the risks climate change poses to our planet, and especially to the health, lifestyle and livelihoods of our children.

That plan included two fundamental parts:

This was the platform we took to the Australian people at the election. This is the program of action we have been prosecuting over the past two years. Yet the cornerstone of this program of action, the CPRS, still lies stymied in the Senate.

Australia has certainly not been alone in our endeavours to tackle global climate change. At the same time, around the world we have seen nations of every political stripe take concrete action to work towards legislation in this critical area – actions which have been slowly building towards coordinated international action to tackle climate change. And most nations have been engaged in the multilateral process – through the Bali Roadmap two years ago, through the 14th Conference of the Parties in Poznan, Poland last year, and the intensifying global negotiations leading up to the 15th Conference of Parties in Copenhagen this year.

Today, the culmination of this domestic and global action is in sight. Much progress has been made, but, the truth is that there is still a long way to go. In fact, the hardest part of our journey is ahead of us over the next 31 days.

This is a profoundly important time for our nation, for our world and for our planet.

In Australia, we must pass our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – to deliver certainty for business at home and to play our part abroad in any global agreement to bring greenhouse gases down.

President Obama in the United States is also working hard so that he can take strong commitments to Copenhagen. And let us never forget that in the US, as in Australia, under both our respective previous governments, zero action was taken on bringing in cap and trade schemes meaning that the governments that replaced them began with a zero start.

Other countries are striving to build domestic political momentum in their own countries to take strong commitments into the global deal.

The challenge we face, and others around the world face, is to build momentum and overcome domestic political constraints.

The truth is this is hard, because the climate change skeptics, the climate change deniers, the opponents of climate change action are active in every country.

They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests.

Powerful enough to so far block domestic legislation in Australia, powerful enough to so far slow down the passage of legislation through the US Congress. And ultimately – by limiting the ambition of national climate change commitments – they are powerful enough to threaten a deal on global climate change both in Copenhagen and beyond.

The opponents of action on climate change fall into one of three categories.

Together, these groups, alive in every major country including Australia, constitute a powerful global force for inaction, and they are particularly entrenched in a range of conservative parties around the world.

As we approach Copenhagen, these three groups of climate skeptics are quite literally holding the world to ransom, provoking fear campaigns in every country they can, blocking or delaying domestic legislation in every country they can, with the objective of slowing and if possible destroying the momentum towards a global deal on climate change.

As we approach the Copenhagen conference these groups of climate change deniers face a moment of truth, and the truth is this: we will need to work much harder to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because these advocates of inaction are holding back domestic commitments, and are in turn holding back global commitments on climate change.

It is time to be totally blunt about the agenda of the climate change skeptics in all their colours – some more sophisticated than others.

It is to destroy the CPRS at home, and it is to destroy agreed global action on climate change abroad, and our children’s fate – and our grandchildren’s fate – will lie entirely with them.

It’s time to remove any polite veneer from this debate. The stakes are that high.

The first category of those opposed to action is the vocal group of conservatives who do not accept the scientific consensus. This group believes the science is inconclusive and does not provide an evidentiary basis for anthropogenic climate change.

In Australia, before the 2007 election, this group was thought to be relatively small. There appeared – for a time – to be bipartisan consensus on the need for action on climate change. In recent times, this bipartisan support has frayed.

As one Liberal Member of Parliament said to Phil Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald last year:
“[at the last election we supported an ETS because] we were staring at an electoral abyss. We had to pretend we cared.”
(SMH, 28 JULY 2008)

More recently that pretence has been increasingly cast aside. Would-be Liberal leader Tony Abbott said in July this year that “the science … is contentious to say the least”. (27 July 2009)

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi said:
“I remain unconvinced about the need for an ETS given that carbon dioxide is vital for life on earth”.

Liberal Senator Alan Eggleston said:
“Levels of carbon dioxide have risen in the world, but whether or not this is the sole cause or just a contributor to climate change is, I think, unanswered.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)

Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin said this year:
“CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant… This whole extraordinary scheme is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)

Alternative Liberal leader Joe Hockey – who knows better – has been drawn into the same sort of doublespeak, remarking on the Today Show in August:
“Look, climate change is real Karl, you know whether it is made by human beings or not that is open to dispute.”
(12 AUGUST 2009)

Even the leader of the Opposition, once Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, has flirted with this doublespeak, telling Alan Jones on 2GB:
“I think most people have at least some doubts about the science.”
(19 JUNE 2009)

The tentacles of the climate change skeptics reach deep into the ranks of the Liberal Party, and once you add the National Party it’s plan the skeptics and the deniers are a major force.

Climate sceptics are also a powerful political lobby in the United States.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steel said on 6 March 2009:
“We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner said on April 19 2009:
“The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide.”

Republican Congressman John Shimkus said on 25 March 2009:
“If we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?”

The legion of climate change skeptics are active across the world, and they happily play with our children’s future.

The clock is ticking for the planet, but the climate change skeptics simply do not care. The vested interests at work are simply too great.

It’s been more than 30 years since the first World Climate Conference called on governments to guard against potential climate hazards.

It’s been 20 years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed and produced its first report.

17 years ago, in 1992, the international community acknowledged the importance of tackling climate change at the Rio Earth Summit and created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

And the most recent IPCC scientific conclusion in 2007 was that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and the “increase in global average temperatures since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

This is the conclusion of 4,000 scientists appointed by governments from virtually every country in the world, and the term “very likely” is defined in the scientific conclusion of this report as being 90 per cent probable.

Attempts by politicians in this country and others to present what is an overwhelming global scientific consensus as little more than an unfolding debate, with two sides evenly represented in a legitimate scientific argument, are nothing short of intellectually dishonest. They are a political attempt to subvert what is now a longstanding scientific consensus, an attempt to twist the agreed science in the direction of a predetermined political agenda to kill climate change action.

It reminds me of the efforts of the smoking lobby decades ago as they tried for years to politically subvert by so-called scientific means that there was any link between smoking and lung cancer.

Put more simply: these climate change sceptics around the world would be laughable if they were not so politically powerful – particularly in the ranks of conservative parties.

The second group of do-nothing climate change skeptics are those who purport to accept the scientific consensus, but in the next breath are unwilling to support any of the practicable plans of action that would actually do something about climate change. This group plays lip service to the climate change science but when push comes to shove refuse to support climate change action. In Australia, these naysayers have successfully blocked the development of an emissions trading scheme for more than a decade.

After 12 years of inaction under the previous government, this government has worked to build a national consensus around our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. We took the concept to the people at the 2007 election, and since then we have methodically, clearly and comprehensively worked towards passage of our scheme.

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper was released on 16 June 2008.

The Garnaut Climate Change Review was released on 30 September 2008.

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme White Paper was released on 15 December 2008.

The Draft Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation was released in March.

There have been numerous Senate Inquiries.

There have also been numerous industry consultations.

As of May 2009, the Government had built wide support for action on climate through a carbon pollution reduction scheme.

There was broad business, environmental and community support from:

Today, after so many reports, reviews, consultations, not to mention the small matter of an election – the overwhelming need for Australia to tackle the great challenge of our generation is being frustrated by the do-nothing climate change skeptics.

As recently as last year, the Leader of the Opposition was emphatic in his support for an emissions trading scheme. He said it was the “central mechanism” in the fight against climate change.

Speaking at the National Press Club in May last year, he stated:
“The Emissions Trading Scheme is the central mechanism to decarbonise our economy.”
(21 May 2008)

A few days later, he said:
“The biggest element in the fight against climate change has to be the emissions-trading scheme.”
(HANSARD – 26 MAY 2008)

But still today, after so many reports and consultations, the Liberal Party, the National Party and other opponents of action raise objections to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Their objections fall into three categories:

Let us take each of these in turn.

First is the cost to our economy and jobs.

This has been a constant theme of the Liberal and National Parties’ attacks on the CPRS. Mr Turnbull said the CPRS “is guaranteed to slow our economic recovery, cost us jobs.”

And the de facto leader of the National Party, Barnaby Joyce, refers to the emissions trading scheme as the “employment termination scheme” – whereas I thought any self-respecting National Party leader would be out there standing up for farmers facing 40 to 80 per cent more drought in the future, rather than betraying them.

The facts about the impact of unmitigated climate change on the one hand and the CPRS on the other tell a very different story, but that eternal motto of the Liberal and National Parties is never let the facts stand in the road of a good fear campaign – whether it’s debt, border security or climate change.

Here are the facts.

Treasury modelling done in 2008 demonstrates Australia can continue to achieve strong trend economic growth while making significant cuts in emissions through the CPRS. Treasury modelling also demonstrates that all major employment sectors grow over the years to 2020 – substantially increasing employment from today’s levels. Treasury modelling also projects that clean industries will create sustainable jobs of the future – in fact by 2050 the renewable electricity sector will be 30 times larger than it is today.

Another element of the Liberal and National fear campaign about the design of the CPRS is that it will impose unmanageable cost on households.

Again, Senator Joyce – fearmonger in chief on climate change, he who therefore betrays the real interests of Australian farmers – puts the position of the Liberal and National parties as follows:
“If you live in a cave with a candle you would probably be OK, but if your house is wired up for power then every electrical appliance will be attached to a power generator which in all likelihood will pay a tax and that tax will be passed on to you, the consumer.”
(Joyce – 27 JULY 2009)

Again, the facts on the true household costs and impacts of the CPRS tell a different story. Treasury modelling again demonstrates that the price impact of the CPRS is modest. The CPRS is expected to raise household prices by 0.4 per cent in 2011-12 and 0.8 per cent in 2012-13, and the government has provided household compensation to help assist with these modest cost rises.

Pensioners, seniors, carers and people with disability and low-income households will receive additional support to fully meet the expected overall increase in the cost of living flowing from the scheme. Middle-income households will also receive additional support to help meet the expected overall increase in the cost of living flowing from the scheme.

A third argument from those who quibble with the design of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is that the international design aspects of the scheme are flawed.

Lord Christopher Monckton – a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher – was quoted this week in the Australian press by Janet Albrechtsen. Lord Monckton describes the potential Copenhagen agreement as a plan to set up a transnational “government” on a scale the world has never before seen. Enter the “world government” conspiracy theorists.

Lord Monckton also publicly warned Americans that “in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever.”

Janet Albrechtsen, in her understated neo-conservative way, refers to the potential Copenhagen agreement as a UN “power grab”. This gaggle of world government conspiracy theorists are so far out there on the far right, that they rub up next to the global anarchists of the far left.

Those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil.

Those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure.

Those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem.

And that uncoordinated national actions will fix the problem.

Without answering the basic logical question of how can we deal with an existential challenge for the whole planet which lies beyond the capacity of any individual national action to address.

The climate change deniers now form the comfortable bedfellows of the global conspiracy theorists – in total bald-faced denial of global scientific, economic and environmental reality. These arguments – thinly veiled attempts to create a new climate change global conspiracy theory – are now being used in Australia.

Like the arguments from climate change deniers, these arguments have zero basis in evidence.

Where is their equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government of the industry and employment impacts of climate change?

Where is their equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government on the cost impacts for households from the CPRS – and on the adequacy of the compensation arrangements put in place by the Government in our White Paper?

The answer once again is there is none.

Where is the evidence basis offered by the new league of world government conspiracy theorists that climate change can be effectively dealt with by market means or by uncoordinated national means?

Answer – there is none.

The truth is that the do-nothing climate change skeptics offer no alternative official body of evidence from any credible government in the world.

Absolutely none. The truth is they offer zero evidence.

Instead they offer maximum fear, the universal conservative stock in trade.

And by doing so, these do-nothing climate change skeptics are prepared to destroy our children’s future.

The third group of climate deniers are those who pretend to accept the science but then urge delay because they don’t want their country to be the first to act.

In Australia there was once a political consensus resisting this parochial view.

The Shergold Report commissioned by John Howard and written by the head of the Prime Minister’s department recommended that Australia should not wait for the rest of the world to act:

“… waiting until a truly global response emerges before imposing an emissions cap will place costs on Australia by increasing business uncertainty and delaying or losing investment.”
(Report of the Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading, June 2007, p.6)

The current Leader of the Opposition also stated that a domestic ETS would help in international negotiations too:
“… our first hand experience in implementing … an emissions trading system would be of considerable assistance in our international discussions and negotiation aimed at achieving an effective global agreement.”
(Turnbull – SMH Opinion Piece – 9 July 2008)

Then the Leader of the Opposition stated he no longer supported domestic action before Copenhagen:
“I would not find, I would not support finalising the design this year. Even the best designed scheme in theory needs to have the input of the knowledge of what happens at Copenhagen and what the Americans will do.”
(AM – 16 MARCH 2009)

Seven times the Liberals and Nationals have promised to make a decision on their policy on climate change – and seven times they have delayed.

It is an endless cycle of delay – and I am sure that with December almost upon us, the eighth excuse cannot be far away – which will be to wait until the next year or the year after until all the rest of the world has acted at which time Australia will act.

What absolute political cowardice.

What an absolute failure of leadership.

What an absolute failure of logic.

The inescapable logic of this approach is that if every nation makes the decision not to act until others have done so, then no nation will ever act.

The immediate and inevitable consequence of this logic – if echoed in other countries – is that there will be no global deal as each nation says to its domestic constituencies that they cannot act because others have not acted.

The result is a negotiating stalemate. A permanent standoff.

And this of course is the consistent ambition of all three groups of do-nothing climate change deniers.

As we approach Copenhagen, it becomes clearer that the domestic political pressure produced by the climate change skeptics now has profound global consequences by reducing the momentum towards an ambitious global deal. The argument that we must not act until others do is an argument that has been used by political cowards since time immemorial – both of the left and the right.

To take just one example, it has been used as an argument to retain protectionism, stifling economic growth and global competition, and preventing the spread of global prosperity.

As many have noted, it is the international political version of the prisoner’s dilemma. If we allow our actions to be dictated by what we falsely conclude to be in our narrow self-interest, then we harm not just others but ourselves as well because climate change inaction harms us as well.

Climate change deniers are small in number, but they are too dangerous to be ignored. They are well resourced and well represented by political conservatives in many, many countries.

And the danger they pose is this – by collapsing political momentum towards national and global action on climate change, they collapse global political will to act at all. They are the stick that gets stuck in the wheel, that despite its size may yet bring the train to a complete stop.

And that is what they want, because they are driven by a narrowly defined self interest of the present and are utterly contemptuous towards our children’s interest in the future.

This brigade of do-nothing climate change skeptics are dangerous because if they succeed, then it is all of us who will suffer.

Our children.

And our grandchildren.

If we fail, then it will be a failure that will echo through future generations.

The consequences for Australia of failing to act domestically and internationally on climate change are severe. We know from formal global and national economic modelling that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting. Treasury modelling from October 2008 shows that economies that defer action on climate change face long-term costs around 15 per cent higher than those that take action now.

The sooner we act, the better placed our companies will be to benefit from new emerging global markets, and to benefit from the economic gains from improved efficiency. Moving to a low pollution economy will require significant investment in renewable energy, carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency and other low emissions technologies.

We need to start giving the signal to investors that they need to factor the price of carbon into their decisions to make the investments we need. Importantly, business needs certainty to make these investments.

As Greig Gailey, former President of the Business Council of Australia said:
“Only business can make the many investments needed to transition Australia to a low carbon economy. To do this business needs certainty.”

Without passage of the CPRS there will be no certainty for business. That is why business groups like the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group want to see the major parties come together and vote on the CPRS this year.

Heather Ridout, Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group said:
“… many of our members are telling us that they are holding off making investments until there is a greater degree of clarity around domestic climate change legislation.”
(ADECCO Group Australia Breakfast – 15 October 2009)

Russell Caplan, Chairman of Shell Australia, said:
“… we believe a far greater risk is that Australia misses the opportunity to put a policy framework in place to deal with this issue. This would create a climate of continuing uncertainty for industry and potentially delay the massive investments required.”
(BRW – 6 August 2009)

These are the implications for Australia. These are the political challenges we now face both at home and abroad.

But my unequivocal message to the nation today is that this nation Australia will not be deterred.

Our course is clear.

That is why this government will press forward with our plan to tackle climate change domestically and globally.

Domestically we will press forward with the passage of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

It will be voted on in the House in the week beginning Monday November 16.

It will be introduced into the Senate immediately after the vote in the House.

It will then be voted on in the Senate in the week beginning 23 November.

We welcome the Opposition’s recent cooperation and I’m pleased to hear from Minister Wong that negotiations are proceeding in good faith. I’d like to personally commend the Member for Groome for his genuine efforts to engage with the Government in good faith to reach a reasonable outcome with the Government that will finally deliver action on Climate Change.

We are of course concerned by the comments of the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate that “even if the government accepts all our amendments, we may well still vote against the bill.”
(NICK MINCHIN- 2UE- 30 OCTOBER 2009)

The do-nothing climate change skeptics are still alive and well in the Coalition. After 12 years of inaction, and after two years of preparation, the nation demands a genuine timetable and good faith negotiations to give business the certainty they need with climate change.

The Australian Government is also committed to intensively engaging to support an ambitious agreement in Copenhagen.

At Copenhagen we need an ambitious agreement on mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday, the formal UN negotiations are moving slowly.

The UN Secretary-General has said we must maximise the agreement we can reach in Copenhagen. They can resolve some issues, but not others.

Now is time for strenuous efforts by all leaders and ministers.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Rasmussen is engaging a growing number of leaders – in the Copenhagen Commitment Circle – to accelerate engagement by leaders.

Australia is committed to playing a leadership role and has joined Mexico and the UN Secretary-General in the initial group of ‘friends of the Chair’ to help build consensus and draw out concrete commitments from across the world.

In July this year at the G8 meetings in L’Aquila, Australia helped form a 2 degree Celsius 450 ppm ambition for global action on climate change, and it was at this meeting that Australia launched the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, a concrete initiative to make CCS technology a reality.

Australia is currently chair of the Pacific Island Forum which this year delivered the Pacific Leaders’ Climate Change Call to Action demanding urgent action on a real threat to the viability of some Pacific communities.

In September, Australia at the request of the UN Secretary-General co-chaired a roundtable at the UN Special Session on Climate Change – with a view to driving a sense of political urgency with other leaders, and representing the views of the Pacific.

Australia has launched the Forest Carbon Partnerships with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea – an initiative providing policy and technical support to protect the great forests in our neighbourhood.

And Australia has established a $150 million Climate Change Adaptation Fund – supporting vulnerable nations dealing with the real impact of climate change, with a strong focus on the Pacific.

For years – and then, with increasing intensity, in recent months – do-nothing climate change skeptics have been mounting a systematic campaign against action on climate change.

Their aim is not to convince every person on earth of the follies of acting on climate change. Their aim is to erode just enough of the political will that action becomes impossible.

By slowing the actions of each individual country, they aim to slowly drag global negotiations on climate change to a standstill. By hampering decisive action at a national level, they aim to make it impossible at an international level.

If Copenhagen does not deliver the outcome we so urgently need, no individual climate change skeptic will be responsible, but each of them will have played their part.

The corrosive effect of climate skeptics eroding the political will to act may be the disintegration of any possibility of meaningful action on climate change.

In this debate the climate change skeptics have erected an intellectual house of cards based on one simple premise: that the cost of not acting is nothing.

When you boil down their arguments, their world government conspiracy theories and their back of the envelope calculations – that in its starkest simplicity and entirety is what is left: that the cost of not acting is nothing.

That is the simplest premise upon which the scepticism of Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Alan, Janet and even Lord Monckton is based. They cling to that single premise like a polar bear clings to a melting iceberg.

Without that premise, their scepticism is sunk. Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet and the Thatcherite Lord Monckton are betting the house on that simple premise that the cost of not acting is nothing.

For people who claim to hold the conservative torch, their scepticism is in fact radical in its riskiness and recklessness. By deliberately undermining and eroding the capacity to achieve both domestic and international action on climate change the skeptics are attempting to force the world to take the single most reckless bet in our long history.

They are betting our future, the future of our children and our grandchildren, and they are doing so based on their own personal intuitions, their personal prejudices and their deeply ingrained political prejudices.

And they are doing so in the total absence of any genuine body of evidence.

Climate change skeptics in all their guises and disguises are not conservatives. They are radicals.

They are reckless gamblers who are betting all our futures on their arrogant assumption that their intuitions should triumph over the evidence.

The logic of these skeptics belongs in a casino, not a science lab, and not in the ranks of any responsible government.

Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet, even Lord Monckton shouldn’t even bother with the pretence of science and just admit the currency of their prescription for inaction has all the legitimacy of a roulette wheel.

Basically, let’s just sit back, do nothing and see what happens.

The alternative – our alternative – is to base policy on the evidence.

No responsible government confronted with the evidence delivered by the 4,000 scientists associated with the international panel could then in conscience choose not to act. In any public company, it would represent a gross contempt of the most basic fiduciary duty.

Malcolm and Barnaby might like to bet the future of Australia on the off chance of winning an election, but this Government will not.

A fairly well-known bloke once said that when gambling:

You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.
Know when to walk away, know when to run.

My message to the climate change skeptics, to the big betters and the big risk takers is this:

You are betting our children’s future and the future of our grandchildren.

You are betting our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reefs, our economy and our future on an intuition – on a gut feeling; on a political prejudice you have about science.

That is too big a risk, too radical a departure from the basic conservative principles of public policy.

Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet – stop gambling with our future.

You’ve got to know when to fold ‘em – and for the skeptics, that time has come.

The Government I lead will act.

As always, comments welcome.

Related Links:

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Science historian Weart on global warming

Michael Mann updates the world on the latest climate science

A version of this post was originally published on the website of the Center for Public Integrity and is reposted on Grist with CPI's kind permission.

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It is said that borders don't matter to the atmosphere -- all nations have to work together to tackle the problem of climate change.

But the forces that seek to block that effort likewise know no national boundaries. They're rallying coal miners in Appalachia, stirring up aluminum workers in Australia, and slowing renewable energy in China. They're using their exalted position in Indian society to discourage the government from making international commitments. In Brazil, they're not giving up free rein over rainforest land without a fight.

Their handiwork will be evident as negotiators from 192 nations gather in Copenhagen this December to forge the most important environmental treaty ever. There is no question negotiators face a daunting task: to reduce the pollution from the burning of oil, coal, and gas that has fueled economic development since the Industrial Revolution. But their difficult job has been made overwhelming by the tactics wielded the world over by powers rooted in the economy of the past.

In the United States, there has been the well-orchestrated rallying of "grassroots" opposition to climate legislation. Coal millionaire Don Blankenship, chief executive of Massey Energy, is an outlier in the public debate as a vigorous global warming denier.  But his message at a West Virginia rally he organized, that "environmental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your jobs," is a real factor on Capitol Hill. ­­The Senate bill now in play has no hope of passage without winning votes in the economically struggling coal states and coal-dependent industrial Midwestern states.

The message is strikingly similar in an Australian port town known both as a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and a smokestack industry haven. Russian aluminum billionaire Oleg Deripaska, with a big stake in a refinery there, has lobbyists battling that nation's climate change plan as "destructive for jobs, destructive for new and existing investment." Such arguments helped defeat climate legislation in the Australia in August.  The business lobby has to be strong to slow climate policy in the hottest and driest inhabited continent, amid a years-long drought that contributed to deadly wildfires while it watches its climate-stressed tourism jewel, the Great Barrier Reef, on course to be "functionally extinct."

Pressure from old-line business interests may be more transparent in the United States and Australia, but forces also are determined to put on the brakes in the developing world. In China, for instance, wind turbines rising against Xinjian Province mountains have become an iconic image of a growing clean energy commitment. The government's goal is to achieve 20 percent renewable power by 2020, on the road to which it has doubled its installed wind power in each of the past four years. But China is also building coal plants so fast that it still gets just 1 percent of electricity from wind. Only one of the top 10 power companies-all state-owned enterprises-will meet the government's interim goal of 3 percent renewables by 2010. The power company executives, all quasi-governmental officials, have resisted proposals to help renewables by raising the price of coal. "There don't need to be ‘lobbyists' when discussions can happen directly through the Party," says Beijing-based political commentator Zhao Jing.

The approach is less subtle elsewhere. For example, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva recently offered to reduce the pace of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest -- one of the world's most important natural absorbers of carbon dioxide -- by 80 percent by 2020.  But Carlos Minc, Lula's environment minister, has faced an onslaught from the agriculture industry and its allies in elected office who balk at curbs on land use. One governor even threatened him with rape. "Many of those industries talk about zero deforestation, but when we press them they want to kill us," he says. "They call me to speak in the Senate or the House and I stay for five hours under a massacre. They're favorable to zero deforestation, provided it doesn't affect ... their own land."

The 1997 Kyoto treaty on climate change was marked by the decision that developing countries, where millions of people still lived without electricity, would not have binding obligations to reduce emissions. The burden of making cuts would fall first, instead, on the countries that grew wealthy in fossil-fueled economies. But the way Kyoto dealt with the rich-poor divide remains a political stumbling block in the United States. And since the International Energy Agency projects that 97 percent of the increase in global emissions between now and 2030 will come from developing countries, hopes have been high that negotiators of the successor treaty at Copenhagen would find a new way to bridge the gap between past and future engines of the climate problem.

But the principle that developing countries shouldn't have binding treaty obligations is dearly held by businesses that have the ear of government in those nations. In Delhi, India, Bharat Wakhlu, resident director of the powerful Tata Group -- that nation's largest business conglomerate with nearly 100 companies from power generation to autos -- says the company recognizes it has a role in addressing global warming. But, he added, "We believe in a ‘common but differentiated' approach, as we have to retain our competitiveness as well as ensure the planet is safe." In United Nations climate change lingo, "common but differentiated" is a shorthand reference to just one key differentiation -- only wealthy nations have obligations.

Juan C. Mata Sandoval, Mexico's top climate official and a negotiator for Copenhagen, is frank that one of the business lobby's chief concerns has been that his nation remain a "non-Annex 1" country-one without required emissions cuts. "We need to communicate with them constantly," he said. "The private sector also wants a voice and an opinion on how much is Mexico going to put on the table."

But in its own way, Mexico-like China, India, and Brazil -- is addressing climate change. Mexico has a national climate change plan with 86 specific goals it says will slow the growth of its carbon emissions. In absolute terms, Mexico's carbon output would still rise in the short term, but the country also has mapped out a long-term pathway to reduce its emissions-if it receives technical and financial support from developed countries.

Many see these types of developments as cause for optimism, even while conventional wisdom says the Copenhagen talks are on a path toward stalemate. "All the major economies are prepared to lay down significant low-carbon development plans," U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern said at a recent U.S.-India energy forum in Washington. "This is big news. It's never happened before. It's important stuff."

But that headline hasn't registered. Instead, the prevailing view is much more likely to be that of Brian Flannery, climate guru for energy giant ExxonMobil. "The only way to get to these low [emissions] levels is for the whole world to act together with common targets and a common carbon price," he said in an interview at run-up negotiations in Bangkok in October, where he was a registered observer for the International Chamber of Commerce. "We're not going to have everyone with the same target, the same price on carbon ... It does raise fundamental questions about whether the negotiating process should aspire to unachievable targets and work in an area of confrontation and dismay, or try to work towards achievable targets."

It's hard to tell how much lower the targets need to go for fossil-fuel stalwarts. No developed country has set an unconditional goal of reducing emissions 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 -- the short-term target the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said would be necessary to achieve stabilization.

Given the power of industry lobbying, advocates for climate progress see their best hope as the growing number of businesses that support action. Dan Reicher, director of energy initiatives at Google, who was a member of President Barack Obama's transition team, is confident a plan can gain support in the U.S. Congress, if it has plenty of business flexibility and opportunity. But he is under no illusions it will be easy. At a recent conference in Washington on energy efficiency -- a pursuit Google aims to advance by providing people real-time home electricity information -- Reicher summed up the climate change politics succinctly: "This is going to be an epic, epic struggle."

This story is part of The Global Climate Change Lobby, a project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ correspondents Christina Larson in Beijing, Fernando Rodrigues and Marcelo Soares in Sao Paulo, Marian Wilkinson in Sydney, and Kate Willson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Related Links:

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

EU pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

SYDNEY -- Climate activists from around the world will launch a hunger strike here on Friday, describing their protest as a "moral reaction to an immoral situation" in the face of environmental catastrophe.

Strike leader Paul Connor and seven other people in Australia, the United States, and Europe intend to refuse all food until the end of a meeting of world governments on climate change in Copenhagen, which runs from Dec. 7 to 18.

"It's a global emergency," Connor told AFP.

"We believe that making a moral, principled stand for what's right, what's just, can have a huge impact."

The hunger strikers want world leaders at the Copenhagen meeting to commit to stabilzing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million (ppm).

In its benchmark 2007 report, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the key for preventing dangerous global warming was to keep CO2 concentrations below 450 ppm.

More than 70 other activists will join the core group in beginning a fast on Friday, although they intend to go on the hunger strike for shorter amounts of time.

The fast will begin in Australia at 11:00 pm (1200 GMT), kicking off similar action in the United States, Britain, India, France, Germany, Canada, South Africa, Belgium, Honduras, Bhutan, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

Connor, a 29-year-old psychology and philosophy student, said he would hold his hunger strike protest outside Parliament House in Canberra unless it was not physically possible.

"We may get to the point where we just can't move around," said Connor, who founded the Climate Justice Fast group that is organizing the strike.

Related Links:

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

EU pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

It may be tempting to view the Australian Senate's defeat Wednesday of climate change legislation as a portent of things to come as the U.S. Senate prepares to take up a cap-and-trade bill.

Queensland is Australia's coal country. Its mines power the country and feed China's demand for energy.Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsBut the rejection of the Australian legislation reflects the peculiarities of Aussie politics rather than the viability of cap-and-trade. More importantly, it could trigger what might be the world's first national election fought over climate change -- an election that could give the ruling center-left Australian Labor Party a renewed mandate and perhaps the cojones to strengthen what is widely viewed as a weak emissions-trading scheme packed with perks for Big Coal and other carbon polluters.

But first, a short primer on politics Down Under.

After a decade in the wilderness, Labor returned to power in 2007 under the leadership of Kevin Rudd, a technocrat from Queensland who falls on the charisma scale somewhere between Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. Ousted Prime Minister John Howard, a once-popular politician despite having the demeanor of a constipated koala, lost his own seat in Parliament and the Liberals (as the conservatives are called) replaced him as party leader with Malcolm Turnbull.

Rudd promptly signed the Kyoto Accord (something Howard refused to do) and Turnbull, a former Sydney merchant banker who served as environment minister in the last Howard government, reversed the Liberals' opposition to cap-and-trade. But here's the catch: The Liberals, whose power base is among urban conservatives, depend on an alliance with the rural National Party (a partnership called, what else, the Coalition), whose stronghold is Queensland's coal-and-cattle country. The two parties vote together as a block.

The Nationals resolutely oppose any climate change legislation, which threatens to rend the Coalition asunder. (Think Obama and the Blue Dogs.)

The Labor plan already gives away carbon allowances to the industries that would be the most hard-hit by the legislation, which would only require a 5 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions below 2000 levels by 2020. Turnbull wants to cut industry even more slack, and thus the Liberals' vote Wednesday (Thursday in Australia) against Labor's cap-and-trade bill. The Greens also voted against the legislation, albeit because they deemed it a giveaway to corporate polluters.

(Under Australia's hybrid Westminster-American system, the majority party in the House of Representatives controls the government and legislation is passed on strict party-line votes. But Labor does not have a majority in the Senate and needs votes from the Coalition or minor parties like the Greens to pass bills.)

Labor looks set to reintroduce the climate change legislation within three months. If the Coalition scuttles the bill again in the Senate, Rudd can ask that Parliament be dissolved and early elections called. Australian commentators expect Turnbull to try to negotiate a further watered-down bill rather than face the voters. But if Rudd is feeling particularly confident, he could go to the polls and seek a renewed mandate -- and control of the Senate -- to enact an even stronger cap-and-trade system.

But don't hold your breath, mate. If coal is viewed in some quarters of the United States as an industrial atavism, it remains king in Australia. Coal-fired power plants supply about 86 percent of the country's electricity, and mining the black stuff for export is a huge domestic industry. It's one reason why Australia's 20 million people have the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world.

Coal's throne sits in Queensland, the "Deep North" of Australia. I've spent quite a bit of time in central Queensland's coal belt in recent years, and though the global recession has dampened things a bit, the coal economy continues to boom. Mountains of coal are piled alongside railroad tracks and coal trains seem to run 24/7 between central Queensland strip mines and the coast, where ships are stacked offshore waiting to transport Australia's black gold to China.

In sun-blasted Rockhampton -- "the cattle capital of Australia" -- miners pulling in six-figure salaries tool around in new Land Cruisers and pony up half a million dollars for suburban tract homes that might have been worth a tenth the price not too many years ago. On my way into town from the airport recently, the taxi driver lamented that she and her husband passed up the opportunity to buy for $10,000 a house in one of the company mining towns where they used to work; today those homes sell for $300,000. (When I visited a cattle station a couple hundred kilometers out of Rockhampton, a mining company was present to do exploratory drilling for gold under the property. "If they find coal, that would be even better," the ranch owner told me.)

Australia's commodity-dependent economy will limit how far the Rudd government will push on climate change. So far, his environmental policies have generally been a disappointment to enviros.

Exhibit A has been the spectacle of Environment Minister Peter Garrett -- the ardent environmentalist and former frontman for agit-prop rockers Midnight Oil -- biting his tongue and approving environmentally destructive projects and policies ordered up by the party. As I was driving through Queensland last month, Garrett -- a longtime anti-nuclear activist who ran for Parliament in 1984 on the Nuclear Disarmament Party ticket -- appeared on the radio to announce the approval of yet another uranium mine for Australia.

There is one particularly apt lesson to be learned as Australia's grapples with reforming its economy for a carbon-constrained world. After watching politicians spend a decade debating what, if anything, to do about climate change and renewable energy, some of Australia's green-tech entrepreneurs have decamped for greener pastures, mainly Silicon Valley, where they've been welcomed by venture capitalists eager to fund their startups.

On one flight alone from Sydney to San Francisco, you could have found David Mills, co-founder of solar power plant developer Ausra, and Danny Kennedy, a veteran Greenpeace activist heading to Berkeley to start Sungevity, an innovative solar company. (Disclosure: Kennedy's and my kids attend the same elementary school.)

While the Obama administration has moved to energize green technology with government funds and loans, some of the best and brightest here may start looking further afield unless Washington adopts legislation that will create certainty and a dynamic market for renewable energy. In other words, to countries like China.

Related Links:

Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Prologue to Copenhagen

Vinod Khosla Nonesense

Australia is the canary-in-the-coal-mine koala-in-the-bushfire for climate change, since it is the most arid habited continent (see "Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040" and "Global Boiling: Australia's hellish black Saturday of extreme fire").  Prime Minister Rudd has been "moving forward with an imperfect but positive climate policy agenda that includes a cap-and-trade program" as explained in this reprinted post by Erwin Jackson, Director of Policy and Research at the Climate Institute (Australia's leading independent policy think tank on climate change), and Andrew Light Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress where he coordinates CAP's work on international climate change policy.

Are our closest allies -- namely, Australia -- who are ahead of us on addressing global warming in fact reversing their course and having second thoughts?  That's the impression conveyed last week in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal by Kimberly Strassel. This argument is as false as the claim that China is doing nothing.

Strassel claims that Australia's legislation on climate change, now making its way through their Senate, "is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for winter," and she compiles a hodgepodge of half truths to make the case that this turn is at the front of a rising tide against the veracity of climate science. Her advice to American lawmakers is to reengage with the science because "you won't be alone."

Stassel, who also wrote last weekend on the supposed censorship of EPA economist Alan Carlin's discredited report debunking climate science, is fixated on reviving climate skepticism. She has many admirers, such as U.S. Senator John Barasso (R-WY), who used her column in today's hearings on climate legislation in the Senate as the basis of a demand to investigate the matter. James Inhofe (R-OK) then had her column inserted in the official record for the hearings. But at best there is a wisp of smoke here being called a wildfire.

She claims that a "growing number of Australian politicians, scientists, and citizens" are doubting "the science of human-caused global warming." Such reports are largely based, however, on the views of one Australian senator, Steve Fielding, and one Australian geologist, Ian Pilmer. Pilmer does receive generous coverage in some sections of Australia's media, but such contrarians do not represent the views of the majority, who remain concerned about climate change and are frustrated at political wrangling that is delaying further action.

So what is really going on in Australia? For the nearly 20-year history of the climate debate, Australia's domestic and international policy has been monopolized by unfounded fears that concerted domestic action to reduce emissions would have devastating impacts on the country's export coal and energy-intensive industries. Sound familiar?

Recently this has slowly but surely begun to change.

The last federal Australian election in late 2007 attracted international attention as one of the world's first climate change elections. Exit polls showed climate change was a top-tier issue, seen as second only to industrial economic policy as a key difference among critical swing voters who embraced Kevin Rudd's Labor government in response to his championing of the issues.

What's more, climate change's effects weren't framed only as hypothetical models of problems that may occur in the future but more as immediate observable impacts at home. Australians overwhelming endorsed climate action, driven by ongoing drought across much of the country and a future-looking electorate intent on addressing this problem. In response the new prime minister ratified the Kyoto Protocol in his first official act after taking office. When Rudd journeyed to the annual U.N. meeting on climate change in Bali, Indonesia, shortly thereafter he was greeted by the assembled delegate with thunderous applause. By moving so quickly to carry out his campaign promise Rudd had not only responded to the Australian people's will but announced in one swift move that his country was back among the ranks of those determined to do be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Recent polls show climate concern remains strong among over 70 percent of Australians despite rainfall in northern Australia and the global financial crisis. And numerous polls show large Australian majorities back the passage of the cap-and-trade bill and Australian action ahead of other countries, including the United States and China.

Within Australian policy circles a new definition of national interest has also recently emerged. The current government has accepted a review commissioned by all of Australia's state and territorial governments in 2007 by Professor Ross Garnaut, "to examine the impacts of climate change on Australia and to recommend policy frameworks to improve the prospects of sustainable prosperity." In particular the government has embraced Garnaut's principle conclusion that it would be in Australia's interests to stabilize global greenhouse gas concentrations and equivalents at 450 ppm or lower. This acceptance was driven by a recognition that Australia is the advanced economy most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Australian national security agencies have also been considering the implications of major climate change events and impacts on Australia's close neighbors. The government's recent Defense White Paper identified climate change as a new security threat and suggested that the best defense against such developments will "need to be undertaken through coordinated international climate change mitigation and economic assistance strategies." The paper goes on to suggest that should these policies fail "the government would possibly have to use the [Australia Defense Force] as an instrument to deal with any threats inimical to our interests."

The new government, driven by these considerations and its election mandate, has been moving forward with an imperfect but positive policy agenda that includes a cap-and-trade program, called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, or CPRS; a more constructive multilateral climate diplomacy strategy; an expanded Renewable Energy Target to ensure 20 percent electricity comes from clean-energy sources by 2020; a national energy efficiency strategy and the investment of around AUD14 billion (U.S. $11.5 billion) over eight years in programs aimed at energy efficiency; and research, development, and deployment in large-scale solar and carbon capture and storage with a major international CCS research facility in development in Canberra. This legislation is not without its problems, but it includes a national target to reduce emissions by up to 25 percent from 2000 levels by 2020-conditional on comparable global efforts. As with ACESA, the CPRS passed the Australian House of Representatives in June.

There are critical differences, however, between the shape of the Australian and U.S. legislative debate from here on as both country's bills hit their respective senates. Importantly, the emission targets in CPRS, if not the legislation, are supported by the conservative opposition party. And because the Labor government does not control the Australian senate, it will need robust bipartisan support from the conservative Liberal party or members of the Greens party plus two additional independent senators to get the cap and trade legislation through.

One of these additional votes would come from Senator Fielding, featured in Strassel's WSJ editorial, who is the lone representative of the Family First Party in either Australian legislative house. Fielding does not vote with the larger party blocks, so calling his newfound worries about climate change science a turning of the tide in the Australian senate is a stretch, to put it mildly-unless he is a tide of one vote. His climate skepticism is not shared by the main body politic of the Australian Parliament.

So what are the actual prospects for the Australian legislation once we strip away such exaggerated descriptions? Admittedly its fate is still uncertain though prospects are very good. While the Rudd government has not ruled out negotiating the bill through with the Greens and independents it is more likely to do so with the conservative Liberal party.

As the Liberals support the government's emission targets the main focus of the debate in the senate will be how to treat trade-exposed industries, electricity generators, and the agricultural sector within the cap-and-trade scheme. Or, to put it another way, exactly the same issues that will dominate the debate in the U.S. Senate. Contra Strassel the question of climate science's veracity will not influence the outcome of the Senate deliberations.

But at the end of the day it is highly likely that Australian mainstream business groups will exert significant pressure on the Liberals to pass the legislation. Media reports suggest that the CEOs of Australia's largest companies are telling the Liberals to eventually pass the bill. This will be driven by real concerns that investment in Australia will be damaged if uncertainty over climate policy continues. This same argument in the United States has successfully driven many CEOs to push for passage of ACESA.

So the political shoals of the Australian senate will still require some negotiation. But it is more likely than not that come December and the U.N. climate change talks in Copenhagen, Australia will have legislated a cap-and-trade system and be ready to play its full and fair part in global action to avoid dangerous climate change. When the United States follows suit, we will join our ally in taking up both the most important problem of our time and moving forward down the most viable economic path before us.

Related Links:

A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving

This article was co-written with Erwin Jackson, Director of Policy and Research at the Climate Institute, Australia’s leading independent policy think tank on climate change.

The U.S. House of Representatives has joined the Obama administration in its resolve to finally move forward and address the problem of global warming by recently passing the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACESA. With this legislation the United States will begin the process of achieving energy independence and transforming to a clean-energy economy. Just as important, however, passage of ACESA signals that the United States has rejoined the community of nations on addressing the critical issue of global climate change.

As this legislation moves to the U.S. Senate, we can expect to see a series of arguments emerge aimed at international cooperation on this issue. Worries about China are always at the top. We can’t do something about climate change, the opposition opines, because China will do nothing. But we’ve recently seen a new twist on this mantra going in the opposite direction. Our closest allies—namely, Australia—who are ahead of us on addressing global warming are in fact reversing their course and having second thoughts. Or at least that’s the impression conveyed last week in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal by Kimberly Strassel. This argument is as false as the claim that China is doing nothing.

Strassel claims that Australia’s legislation on climate change, now making its way through their Senate, “is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for winter,” and she compiles a hodgepodge of half truths to make the case that this turn is at the front of a rising tide against the veracity of climate science. Her advice to American lawmakers is to reengage with the science because “you won’t be alone.”

Stassel, who also wrote last weekend on the supposed censorship of EPA economist Alan Carlin’s discredited report debunking climate science, is fixated on reviving climate skepticism. She has many admirers, such as U.S. Senator John Barasso (R-WY), who used her column in today’s hearings on climate legislation in the Senate as the basis of a demand to investigate the matter. James Inhofe (R-OK) then had her column inserted in the official record for the hearings. But at best there is a wisp of smoke here being called a wildfire.

She claims that a “growing number of Australian politicians, scientists, and citizens” are doubting “the science of human-caused global warming.” Such reports are largely based, however, on the views of one Australian senator, Steve Fielding, and one Australian geologist, Ian Pilmer. Pilmer does receive generous coverage in some sections of Australia’s media, but such contrarians do not represent the views of the majority, who remain concerned about climate change and are frustrated at political wrangling that is delaying further action.

So what is really going on in Australia? For the nearly 20-year history of the climate debate, Australia’s domestic and international policy has been monopolized by unfounded fears that concerted domestic action to reduce emissions would have devastating impacts on the country’s export coal and energy-intensive industries. Sound familiar?

Recently this has slowly but surely begun to change.

The last federal Australian election in late 2007 attracted international attention as one of the world’s first climate change elections. Exit polls showed climate change was a top-tier issue, seen as second only to industrial economic policy as a key difference among critical swing voters who embraced Kevin Rudd’s Labor government in response to his championing of the issues.

What’s more, climate change’s effects weren’t framed only as hypothetical models of problems that may occur in the future but more as immediate observable impacts at home. Australians overwhelming endorsed climate action, driven by ongoing drought across much of the country and a future-looking electorate intent on addressing this problem. In response the new prime minister ratified the Kyoto Protocol in his first official act after taking office. When Rudd journeyed to the annual U.N. meeting on climate change in Bali, Indonesia, shortly thereafter he was greeted by the assembled delegate with thunderous applause. By moving so quickly to carry out his campaign promise Rudd had not only responded to the Australian people’s will but announced in one swift move that his country was back among the ranks of those determined to do be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Recent polls show climate concern remains strong among over 70 percent of Australians despite rainfall in northern Australia and the global financial crisis. And numerous polls show large Australian majorities back the passage of the cap-and-trade bill and Australian action ahead of other countries, including the United States and China.

Within Australian policy circles a new definition of national interest has also recently emerged. The current government has accepted a review commissioned by all of Australia’s state and territorial governments in 2007 by Professor Ross Garnaut, “to examine the impacts of climate change on Australia and to recommend policy frameworks to improve the prospects of sustainable prosperity.” In particular the government has embraced Garnaut’s principle conclusion that it would be in Australia’s interests to stabilize global greenhouse gas concentrations and equivalents at 450 ppm or lower. This acceptance was driven by a recognition that Australia is the advanced economy most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Australian national security agencies have also been considering the implications of major climate change events and impacts on Australia’s close neighbors. The government’s recent Defense White Paper identified climate change as a new security threat and suggested that the best defense against such developments will “need to be undertaken through coordinated international climate change mitigation and economic assistance strategies.” The paper goes on to suggest that should these policies fail “the government would possibly have to use the [Australia Defense Force] as an instrument to deal with any threats inimical to our interests.”

The new government, driven by these considerations and its election mandate, has been moving forward with an imperfect but positive policy agenda that includes a cap-and-trade program, called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, or CPRS; a more constructive multilateral climate diplomacy strategy; an expanded Renewable Energy Target to ensure 20 percent electricity comes from clean-energy sources by 2020; a national energy efficiency strategy and the investment of around AUD14 billion (U.S. $11.5 billion) over eight years in programs aimed at energy efficiency; and research, development, and deployment in large-scale solar and carbon capture and storage with a major international CCS research facility in development in Canberra. This legislation is not without its problems, but it includes a national target to reduce emissions by up to 25 percent from 2000 levels by 2020—conditional on comparable global efforts. As with ACESA, the CPRS passed the Australian House of Representatives in June.

There are critical differences, however, between the shape of the Australian and U.S. legislative debate from here on as both country’s bills hit their respective senates. Importantly, the emission targets in CPRS, if not the legislation, are supported by the conservative opposition party. And because the Labor government does not control the Australian senate, it will need robust bipartisan support from the conservative Liberal party or members of the Greens party plus two additional independent senators to get the cap and trade legislation through.

One of these additional votes would come from Senator Fielding, featured in Strassel’s WSJ editorial, who is the lone representative of the Family First Party in either Australian legislative house. Fielding does not vote with the larger party blocks, so calling his newfound worries about climate change science a turning of the tide in the Australian senate is a stretch, to put it mildly—unless he is a tide of one vote. His climate skepticism is not shared by the main body politic of the Australian Parliament.

So what are the actual prospects for the Australian legislation once we strip away such exaggerated descriptions? Admittedly its fate is still uncertain though prospects are very good. While the Rudd government has not ruled out negotiating the bill through with the Greens and independents it is more likely to do so with the conservative Liberal party.

As the Liberals support the government’s emission targets the main focus of the debate in the senate will be how to treat trade-exposed industries, electricity generators, and the agricultural sector within the cap-and-trade scheme. Or, to put it another way, exactly the same issues that will dominate the debate in the U.S. Senate. Contra Strassel the question of climate science’s veracity will not influence the outcome of the Senate deliberations.

But at the end of the day it is highly likely that Australian mainstream business groups will exert significant pressure on the Liberals to pass the legislation. Media reports suggest that the CEOs of Australia’s largest companies are telling the Liberals to eventually pass the bill. This will be driven by real concerns that investment in Australia will be damaged if uncertainty over climate policy continues. This same argument in the United States has successfully driven many CEOs to push for passage of ACESA.

So the political shoals of the Australian senate will still require some negotiation. But it is more likely than not that come December and the U.N. climate change talks in Copenhagen, Australia will have legislated a cap-and-trade system and be ready to play its full and fair part in global action to avoid dangerous climate change. When the United States follows suit, we will join our ally in taking up both the most important problem of our time and moving forward down the most viable economic path before us.

Related Links:

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

EU pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

Related Links:

State of the Climate Movement: Can fasting and asceticism save the world?

Learning how to count to 350

Kids just say no—to fossil fuels

The Climate Post is a weekly roundup of climate news, produced by the The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

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This week’s climate headlines are reminiscent of an old joke that touted “newspaper headlines the day after nuclear war.”

The New York Times: “Nuclear War, Third World Hit Hardest.”

The Wall Street Journal: “Nuclear War, Effect on Markets Uncertain.”

The Boston Globe: “Tip O’Neill Safe After Nuclear Blast.”

USA Today: “We’re Dead! Full AFC-NFC Box Scores, p. 11.”

You can tell it’s an old joke because concern about “newspapers” and “nuclear war” is very 20th century. Yet when you track this week’s headlines as climate legislation makes its way through the U.S. House, it’s clear not much has changed.

This morning’s Times and yesterday’s Washington Post headlines about the situation emphasize a near-deal among previously sparring Democrats. The Journal eyes new potential breaks for the auto industry and utilities in the bill. The Globe stays local, and writes that a national plan would supplant Massachusetts’ participation in a Northeast climate program.

The USA Today ran an Associated Press story on its Web site, and last week printed an article with the headline, “Celebs use star power to spotlight pet causes; Environmental issues rate high on activist actors’ list.” (The paper reports that Prince Charles, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams and Pele teamed for a MySpace.com video about rainforests.)

Here’s our snapshot, this week: Waxman and his co-sponsor, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), are pressing the House Energy and Commerce Committee to pass their American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The bill would set a nationwide “cap” on greenhouse gas emissions – a limit – that would decline over time, as well as set a Renewable Electricity Standard. After two weeks of hearings in April and intense back-door negotiations with Committee members and their constituents back home, signs of a deal have begun to leak out. We should see a revised version of the bill, called the Manager’s Amendment, within the next few days.

Meanwhile, down Pennsylvania Avenue, the administration in recent weeks has issued new guidelines for biofuels (enflaming parts of industry), set in motion potential EPA regulations of carbon emissions from tailpipes, and backed a Bush administration decision on the inadequacy of the Endangered Species Act to address climate change indirectly, through the declining habitat for polar bears. [See this for biofuels and this for polar bears.]

These headlines have dominated in the Washington environmental world – but just as Americans are not the only people fighting information overload and time-poverty, Washington is not the only capital struggling with climate issues this week:

Citing the recession, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd put off plans to create a national market for industrial firms seeking to buy or sell credits to emit greenhouse gases. His government’s proposal had failed to garner support among environmentalists, who saw the targets as too thin, and industry, which hopes for more concessions.

This conversation plays out against a background of increasing concern about the effects of climate change already being witnessed down-under. The Economist reported this week that the volume of water reaching the Murray River in South Australia is lower than any other time in 117 years. The article is bluntly titled, “In need of a miracle.”

Local capitals are getting in on the action, too. Voters in British Columbia went to the polls and re-elected the Liberal party, giving a vote of confidence in the province’s carbon tax – the first law of its kind in North America. In the U.S., Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, has supported measures that would encourage the development of clean technology. Observers partially credit (or blame) her influence and new laws on Mid-Michigan Energy’s recent scuttling of a coal-fired power plant in Midland. But job-starved regions of the state welcome the work that would come from plant construction – and several remain in the pipeline. An energy company in Washington state pulled plans for a $1.5 billion coal-fired power plant, because it has no way of capturing the emissions.

A paper local to former President George W. Bush’s ranch, the Waco Tribune-Herald, editorialized today, “Dismiss talk of global warming and environmentalism if you must. But these times are changing fast and, along with them, the very way we heat and cool our homes and businesses.” That’s just one take in a state simultaneously encouraging its potential for solar energy while elected representatives to Washington fight the Waxman-Markey bill. When the Bushes visit family in Maine, they’ll encounter a new law in Kennebunkport that prevents cars and trucks from idling at banks, fast food restaurants, and at the beach (The Secret Service probably has pull).

Legislation and rules, scientific predictions and industry product lines are shaping the international response to global warming on a daily basis. We’ll bring you highlights weekly. A thousand words now and then can provide a pretty good picture. See you next week.

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Despite its economic woes, The Los Angeles Times still employs some of the best environmental reporters in the business, including a personal favorite, Julie Cart, who always brings compassion (and great quotes) to her work. Her story about how climate change is devastating Australia ran this week on the front page and it's absolutely first rate.

"What Will Global Warming Look Like? Scientists Point to Australia" is the headline in the online edition, but although the story references the science, it hits home with quotes from ordinary folk -- farmers, suburbanites, shocked patriarchs -- talking about non-climactic matters such as depression, despair, and suicide. One stout farmer named Frank Eddy told her:

"Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It's devastation," he said, shaking his head. "I've got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men -- big, strong grown men. We're holding on by the skin of our teeth. It's desperate times."

A result of climate change?

"You'd have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise," Eddy said.

Without being heavy-handed about it, the story also brings up an irony about global warming still unknown to most Americans, and quite beyond the mental capacity of deniers. As Kevin Trenberth, a leading scientist for the National Center for Atmospheric Research puts it: "The wets will get wetter, and the dries will get drier." The story also mentions that Australia, a big coal user and exporter, and the highest per capita producer of greenhouse gases in the world, happens to be one of the first industrialized nations to be devastated by climate change.

But the U.S. has no right to be complacent. Although it has not reduced its coal consumption or exports, Australia is making changes ... as Keith Schneider pointed out recently for Yale's Environment 360 site.

Concerned that steadily rising temperatures in south Australia and the recent drought signal a permanent climate shift, a majority of the country’s states have taken the unprecedented step of agreeing to let the central government play the dominant role in managing local water resources. Growing fears of a lasting change in climate patterns has helped generate support for major public works projects to deal with water scarcity. Australia’s 2007 national election, which saw the Progressive Party come to power, was the first national election in the country’s history in which a scientific issue — climate change — played a decisive role.

“It’s testing our people,” said John Williams, the former chief of Land and Water for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the country’s premier scientific agency. “These new conditions are forcing people to move out of industries. There are many people making decisions to change radically the nature of their business. There are some industries — rice growing, cotton production — that are just failing and falling away.”

The American Southwest has yet to face these same climatic facts.

In California, for example, no substantial changes have been made in state-wide water distribution in recent years. An excellent report at the end of 2008 put out by a blue ribbon task force commissioned by the Governor has been ignored, even though nearly everyone agrees the system is in crisis, and even though the state is facing a third year of drought.

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SYDNEY—Australia’s outback Aborigines will be among the worst affected by climate change as soaring temperatures likely cause more disease and spur distress about the changing landscape, a new report shows.

The expert report, published in the latest edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, argues that the country’s remote indigenous communities are the most vulnerable to changing environmental conditions.

“Their vulnerability to climate change is intensified by the social and economic disadvantage they already experience—the result of factors that include decades of inadequate housing and public services, and culturally inappropriate medical services,” the journal said in an editorial.

“In addition, specific cultural ties between indigenous people’s well being and the ‘health’ of their ‘country’ create significant indirect impacts of climate change.”

Donna Green, co-author of the journal report and a climate change researcher at the University of New South Wales, said rising temperatures could increase the incidence of diseases such as dengue fever and harm the health of elderly and chronically sick people living in remote areas.

“They will just have very low resources to be able to cope with change and to be able to get access to health (services),” she told AFP.

But Aboriginal communities, already the most disadvantaged in the country, would also suffer from seeing the ancestral lands to which they have a spiritual connection harmed by the impact of climate change, she said.

“Many communities, if they are seeing their ecosystems change, plants and animals doing things at different times—flowering at different times or particular totemic animals breeding or appearing at different times—then that can cause a lot of social unease,” Green said.

“Because people just don’t feel like they are looking after their country properly; that they aren’t managing their country for their ancestors.”

Green said the researchers wanted to draw attention to the fact that climate change would not affect all Australians equally.

“We are aware that these problems are going to get bigger unless we do something about it now,” she said.

Australia’s original inhabitants were marginalized after the first British settlers arrived in 1788 and now number just 470,000 out of a population of 21 million.

They have much higher rates of infant mortality, health problems and suicide than other Australians, with many living in squalid camps where unemployment, alcoholism and lawlessness are rife.

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In just a few years, Aussies will be driving to and fro in electric vehicles, plugging in to a grid powered entirely by renewable energy. At least, that's the goal of California-based startup Better Place, which is heading Down Under to put its ambitious vision for an electric-car future into action. Some $671 million, raised with the help of Macquarie Capital Group, will put in place hundreds of thousands of charging and battery-swap stations by 2012; utility AGL Energy has pledged to expand capacity to power the electric-car grid with 100 percent renewable energy. Better Place founder Shai Agassi, who is already testing his infrastructure model in Israel and Denmark, says he can easily see the scheme to hook up Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney replicated for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Declares Agassi, "[W]e believe that Australia could be a demonstration project and proof-point for the U.S., as well as the U.K. and the rest of the developed world."

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Industrialized countries have promised to put more than $6.1 billion in the World Bank's Climate Investment Funds, which aim to boost clean technologies and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries. On Friday, the United States pledged $2 billion over three years; Britain will chip in $1.47 billion and Japan $1.2 billion, with contributions from Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland making up the rest. Two trust funds will be created under the Climate Investment Fund umbrella: The Clean Technology Fund will invest in projects that "contribute to the demonstration, deployment, and transfer of low-carbon technologies" and "have a significant potential for long-term greenhouse-gas savings"; the Strategic Climate Fund will "serve as an overarching fund for various programs to test innovative approaches to climate change." The World Bank will announce the first beneficiaries of the funds in early 2009.

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Longstanding drought has wreaked havoc across Australia, drying up lakes into shallow, acidic puddles and threatening drinking-water supplies. Unable to coax rain from the sky, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has fast-tracked a plan to buy back water entitlements from the heaviest irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin, an agricultural stronghold which produces all of the country's rice, nearly all of its oranges, most of its pigs, half of its wheat and apples, and much of its cotton. The region covers 14 percent of the Australian continent but consumes 52 percent of its water. Environmentalists applaud Rudd's plan on paper, though point out that there is, in fact, little water to buy back. "I don't want to say that there's some magic solution here," admits Rudd. "I am trying to turn around a situation which has evolved over many years ... and we are dealing with the real consequences of climate change."

sources:

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