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      Climate advocates who backed Sinema exasperated by blocking of Biden bill

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      DemocratsClimate advocates who backed Sinema exasperated by blocking of Biden billArizona senator – who once led the state Green party – has refused to specify which parts of the $3.5tn budget bill she objects to Maanvi Singh@maanvissinghFri 22 Oct 2021 06.05 EDTLast modified on Fri 22 Oct 2021 06.06 EDTWildfires, deadly heat, drought and flooding show how climate change has “already arrived” in Arizona and action is desperately needed, according to climate and progressive advocates who helped elect Kyrsten Sinema to represent the state in the Senate.Many of them are wondering why their senator seems to have “turned her back” on her background in environmental politics and is now blocking Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar legislation to address climate change.“The climate crisis is here – it has already arrived in Arizona,” said Vianey Olivarria, a director of Chispa Arizona, the state branch of the League of Conservation Voters, which had endorsed Sinema for senator. “We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”Sinema is one of two centrist senators – with Joe Manchin of West Virginia – who have opposed the Biden administration’s $3.5tn budget bill that contains the bulk of the Democrats’ climate change agenda.This summer, the earth in parts of Arizona cracked – desiccated by decades of megadrought. But some communities also flooded. Ferocious wildfires have eaten through half a million acres this year. And a prolonged, record-breaking heatwave – supercharged by human-caused climate change – killed dozens in Phoenix and surrounding suburbs.This week Sinema was back at the White House for private talks with Joe Biden on the legislation, which would need the votes of all 50 Democratic senators to pass. It would enact dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, boost renewable energy programs and fund climate resiliency programs.Sinema’s office has emphatically contested New York Times reporting earlier this month that Sinema demanded $100bn in cuts specifically to climate programs. But she has said little in public on her position and her obstruction of the reconciliation package overall has confused, disappointed and angered progressive voters and climate activists in her home state.Indeed, Sinema began her political career leading the Arizona Green party. Over the years, her politics shifted – and she positioned herself as a moderate Democrat willing and able to work with Republicans that dominated state politics – but even then, she said she modeled herself after the late John McCain, the Republican senator of Arizona who pushed for bipartisan climate action throughout his career.“When Senator Sinema ran for office, she promised to fight for climate change and invest in our communities,” said Casey Clowes, an organizer with the Sunrise Movement in Tempe, Arizona. In 2018, Clowes said she voted for Sinema, and volunteered for more than 250 hours to help send Sinema – the first Arizona Democrat in 30 years – to the Senate. “Now she’s been unaccountable and inaccessible,” Clowes said. “I think a lot of us are fed up.”On Thursday, a group of veterans advising Sinema resigned, and accused her of hanging her constituents “out to dry”.Unlike Manchin, Sinema has not publicly voiced her concerns with the reconciliation bill – aside from rejecting its overall price tag.Manchin, a conservative Democrat who has received more in political donations from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, has made clear that he objects to provisions that would slash planet-heating emissions. But Sinema – who has become infamous for evading questions from constituents and journalists – recently told the Arizona Republic that she had “an interest in policies addressing climate change”, without offering much detail on which policies she was interested in. The senator has resisted raises to individual income and corporate tax rates to fund climate change and social safety net programs but hasn’t made clear what alternative funding schemes she would support.“Since she’s been in office, it’s been nearly impossible for community members to connect with her,” said Columba Sainz, a consultant with Moms Clean Air Force in Arizona. “We don’t know whether Sinema will protect us.”Sainz, whose youngest daughter has wheezing episodes and respiratory problems triggered by poor air quality, said: “In my family, heat is our enemy. It interacts with stagnant air to create and trap ozone pollution.” She works with other families who cannot afford air conditioning during punishing heatwaves. The state recorded more than 500 heat-related deaths in 2020, which public health experts say is probably an undercount. In Maricopa county alone, officials tallied at least 113 heat-related deaths this year so far.Who is Kyrsten Sinema? Friends and foes ponder an Arizona Senate enigmaRead more“We need funding for adapting to climate change,“ said Gregg Garfin, a climatologist at the University of Arizona. Several cities in Arizona, including Phoenix and Flagstaff, have already made climate change a priority, starting community programs to harvest rainwater amid drought or plant trees to shield poor, urban neighborhoods from the punishing summer heat. “But addressing the crisis has been an unfunded mandate,” he said. “They need more investment.”The budget bill endorsed by the majority of Democrats in Congress would finance a Green Bank to help communities install solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations, and create a Civilian Climate Corps of young Americans to build climate-resilient infrastructure.Clowes, who has a chronic illness that makes her especially vulnerable to heatstroke, said Sinema’s resistance to legislation that could help fund cooling centers and heat-defying infrastructure, and bring down the emissions fueling extreme heat in the region, has left her angry. Along with other members of the Sunrise Movement, Clowes camped outside Sinema’s office in Phoenix this week. “It’s really painful to watch my home become uninhabitable,” she said. “And see Senator Sinema turn her back.”TopicsDemocratsUS SenateUS politicsClimate crisisnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘No more time to waste,’ chair of House climate panel warns ahead of Cop26

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      Climate crisis‘No more time to waste,’ chair of House climate panel warns ahead of Cop26Democrat Kathy Castor warns that even Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better bill ‘doesn’t really get us to net zero by 2050’ Lauren Gambino in Washington@laurenegambinoThu 21 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 21 Oct 2021 03.01 EDTThe alarm bells are ringing. A code red has been declared. With no less than the future of the planet at stake, Kathy Castor, chair of the select committee on the climate crisis, has warned Democrats that there is precious little time left to enact the US president’s aggressive climate agenda and avert the most catastrophic impacts of global warming.“We just don’t have any more time to waste,” the Florida congresswoman said in an interview with the Guardian ahead of crucial UN climate talks in Scotland. “We have got to act now or else we’re condemning our children and future generations to a really horrendous time.”‘This is our last chance’: Biden urged to act as climate agenda hangs by a threadRead moreClimate scientists say the world must keep the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5C (2.7F) compared with the pre-industrial era, or risk catastrophically more dangerous effects of climate change. Upon rejoining the global effort to confront the climate crisis, Joe Biden vowed that the US would cut emissions by 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.Perhaps the best hope of achieving that goal is embedded in legislation pending before Congress that must overcome the objections of a coal-state senator and razor-thin Democratic majorities. If enacted, Castor said the plan to slash planet-heating emissions by accelerating America’s transition away from fossil fuels would be “the most important and far-reaching clean energy and climate bill ever passed by the US Congress”.But with days left before Biden is expected to depart for the summit, significant obstacles remain.Senator Joe Manchin, one of the party’s last remaining holdouts, made clear that he would not support a proposed clean electricity program, effectively gutting the most powerful piece of Democrats’ climate plan. The $150bn proposal, known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, used a carrot-and-stick approach to reward energy utilities that transitioned from coal and natural gas toward clean power sources like wind, solar and nuclear energy, and penalizing those that do not.Now White House officials and congressional negotiators are scrambling to salvage pieces of the plan while finding alternative policies that will keep the US on track to meet the president’s emissions targets, including, potentially, a tax on carbon dioxide pollution.“It’s clear that investing in clean electricity is one of the most effective ways to unlock emission reductions and create good-paying jobs across our economy, which is why we’ve fought to include a robust Clean Electricity Performance Program in the Build Back Better Act,” Castor said in a statement following news of Manchin’s objection to the program. “Every step we take now to clean up our electricity sector will make a world of difference in the decades to come – and we cannot afford to keep kicking the can down the road.”After the Democratic takeover of the House in 2018, Castor was tapped to lead the newly created House select committee on the climate crisis. Its task was to conduct research and hearings that would educate the public about the threat posed by climate change and pave the way for mitigation legislation.Last year, the panel’s Democratic members released a sprawling climate plan that aimed to put the nation on the path to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It also aimed to make environmental justice a priority by focusing on the communities that are the most vulnerable to climate change.A summer of devastating heatwaves, wildfires and hurricanes has made the risk of inaction painfully clear to Americans across the country, Castor said, speaking from Tampa, Florida, where rising sea levels are no longer a threat but a costly reality for many residents.“When you have farmers whose crops or livestock have been flooded out or dropping from an extreme heat, or wildfires are burning through your town, or your electric grid isn’t resilient and people die in Texas because of a cold snap, that’s a wake-up call,” Castor said. “And I think now people are really looking at policymakers and asking, ‘What are you going to do about it?’”Republicans remain a chief obstacle to Democrats’ climate goals.After years of denialism, there is a growing acceptance of climate science among rank-and-file Republicans, particularly those representing frontline districts battered by climate-fueled disasters. And yet, the party remains largely opposed to plans to stop burning fossil fuels, which climate scientists say is the most efficient and effective strategy to guard against an even hotter planet.Castor said Republicans are missing a once-in-a-generation economic opportunity. Democrats have touted the transition to clean energy as an economic boon, with the president repeatedly promising “jobs, jobs, jobs”.“As clean energy grows in districts across the country, you’ll see more Republicans finally understanding it creates jobs and is less costly for the folks they represent,” Castor predicted. “That’s kind of the only pathway out of the trap they’ve gotten themselves into – to talk about climate but not do anything about it.”Democrats face a difficult electoral map in 2022, with their control of both chambers at risk. Many activists and Democratic lawmakers believe they have one, perhaps fleeting, chance to aggressively confront climate change before possibly losing their majorities to Republicans, who are far less likely to act on the crisis.Castor believes that the Democrats’ spending bill cannot be the last legislative action taken by this Congress. But she is less concerned by the political deadline than the scientific one.Despite the difficulty of finding a consensus among Democrats on climate legislation, Castor believes there is more Congress can do this term. As an example, she pointed to a funding bill passed by the House that aims to minimize the carbon footprint of the Department of Defense, by making military bases more resilient and bolstering investments in research to better understand the security implications posed by climate change.At the same time, she expects the president will continue to use his executive authority and the rule-making powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to combat climate change.“We’ll have a lot more to do,” she said. “Even if we pass the Build Back Better Act as it is, that doesn’t really get us to net zero by 2050, which is the goal.”Democrats are increasingly optimistic that they will send Biden to Glasgow with an agreement that proves the US is capable of making good on its climate promises. How Democrats accomplish this – and whether they can do it by 31 October, when the summit is due to begin – is unclear.TopicsClimate crisisHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsBiden administrationCop26featuresReuse this content More

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      ‘Tired of broken promises’: climate activists launch hunger strike outside White House

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      Climate crisis‘Tired of broken promises’: climate activists launch hunger strike outside White HouseThe protest comes a day after Joe Biden appeared ready to settle for a smaller environmental proposal ahead of the COP26 summit David Smith in Washington@smithinamericaWed 20 Oct 2021 15.20 EDTLast modified on Wed 20 Oct 2021 16.59 EDTWith little more than sun hats, placards and folding chairs, five young activists have begun a hunger strike in front of the White House urging Joe Biden not to abandon his bold climate agenda.The protest came a day after the US president threatened to water down his $3.5tn social and environmental legislation and with Washington’s commitments about to face scrutiny at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.The five protesters said they will eat no food and drink only water. They intend to gather in Lafayette Park every day from 8am to 8pm until their demands – which include a civilian climate corps, clean energy performance program and funding for environmental justice – are satisfied.The climate disaster is here – this is what the future looks likeRead moreOn Wednesday, in bright autumn sunshine, the quintet stood in a row holding signs including “Hunger striking for my dreams” and “Hunger striking for my future children”. They then sat down in red folding chairs with the words “Hunger strike day one” written in giant letters on the pavement before them.“I’m nervous in that I know that I will go on hunger strike until the demands are met, until I’m absolutely physically unable to,” said Ema Govea, a high school student who turned 18 on Tuesday. “That’s scary and I know my parents are worried and my friends back home are worried.”Biden met privately on Tuesday with nearly 20 moderate and progressive Democrats in separate groups as he appeared ready to ditch an ambitious $3.5tn package in favour of a smaller proposal that can win passage in the closely divided Congress. A provision central to Biden’s climate strategy is among those that could be scaled back or eliminated.Joe Manchin, a conservative senator from coal-rich West Virginia, has made clear that his opposes the Clean Energy Performance Plan, which would see the government impose penalties on electric utilities that fail to meet clean energy benchmarks and provide financial rewards to those that do, in line with Biden’s goal of achieving 80% “clean electricity” by 2030.The hunger strikers, who have worked with the Sunrise Movement youth group, warned that such concessions would be disastrous for the planet.Govea, from Santa Rosa, California, said: “Joe Biden made these campaign promises and we worked really hard on his campaign and to get him elected so that he could stop the climate crisis on these promises that he made.”Abandoning Biden’s commitments would signal to Cop26 that America has failed, Govea added. “I won’t let Joe Biden send a message to the world that he’s willing to give up on climate because I know that the American people, and young people across the country and across the world, are terrified but they’re ready to fight.”The hunger strikers drew TV cameras and curious glances from tourists in an area close to the White House that has reopened after months of security restrictions. As they sat, they spoke to reporters, checked emails and contemplated the long haul ahead.Paul Campion, 24, had skipped his usual breakfast of a bagel with cheese and eggs. He said: “I’m nervous about losing my my body weight, my muscles, about what it will do to my energy, to my brain, but I’m putting my body on the line because I’m here to remind Joe Biden of the promises that he’s made and that the stakes are this high, that young people are out here not eating because it’s this urgent and it’s this important.”Campion, a community organizer from Chicago, and his fellow protesters are “sick and tired of broken promises” from Biden and the Democrats, he continued. “I’m hunger striking because I want to live a full, beautiful life without fear of the climate crisis and I want to have children, I want to play with them in the park and I want to have community dinners where I invite my friends and family over and we sing and we have a bonfire.“That’s the future that we can have if Joe Biden will side with the people and deliver on his own agenda and actually fight for it instead of siding with ExxonMobil executives who are trying to gut his climate agenda and trying to prevent any significant federal action on climate change.”TopicsClimate crisisActivismJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsUS SenateUS CongressnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘This is our last chance’: Biden urged to act as climate agenda hangs by a thread

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      Climate crisis‘This is our last chance’: Biden urged to act as climate agenda hangs by a threadFailure to pass legislation to cut emissions before the UN summit in Glasgow could be catastrophic for efforts to curb global heating Oliver Milman in New York and Lauren Gambino in WashingtonMon 18 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 18 Oct 2021 16.25 EDTWith furious environmental activists at the gates of the White House, and congressional Democrats fretting that a priceless opportunity to tackle catastrophic global heating may be slipping away, Joe Biden is facing mounting pressure over a climate agenda that appears to be hanging by a thread.Biden’s allies have warned that time is running perilously short, both politically and scientifically, for the US to enact sweeping measures to slash planet-heating emissions and spur other major countries to do the same. Failure to do so will escalate what scientists have said are “irreversible” climate impacts such as disastrous heatwaves, floods, wildfires and a mass upheaval of displaced people.The climate disaster is here – this is what the future looks likeRead moreThe administration’s multitrillion-dollar social spending package, widely considered the most comprehensive climate legislation ever put forward in the US, must survive razor-thin Democratic majorities in Congress and, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has vowed, pass in time for crucial UN climate talks in Scotland that begin in about two weeks.Embedded in the measure are plans to dramatically cut carbon emissions warming the planet and fueling climate disasters, a potentially historic set of policies that Pelosi has said would serve as “a model for the world”. But the 31 October deadline for passing the spending package and a smaller companion infrastructure bill appears increasingly ambitious as negotiations drag on between the White House, Democratic leaders and a pair of centrist holdouts in the Senate.The prospect of the world’s leading economic power arriving in Glasgow with no domestic policy to cut emissions will make it harder to convince other major emitters, primarily China, to do more at a time when governments are collectively failing to avert unlivable global heating.“They will look ridiculous if they show up with nothing,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, told Guardian. “It would be bad for US leadership, bad for the talks and disastrous for the climate. Just disastrous.“The vast majority of Senate Democrats understand this is our last chance to act,” Whitehouse continued. The bill includes a program of payments and penalties to ensure utilities phase out fossil fuels from America’s electricity supply, a huge expansion in tax credits for clean energy and new restrictions on methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is emitted from oil and gas drilling. The legislation would slash US emissions by about 1bn tons by 2030, bringing Biden within striking distance of his target of cutting America’s emissions in half by this point.Whitehouse also revealed that the president’s administration “will not oppose” a new price on carbon emissions being added to the bill, following negotiations with Senate Democrats. “We have a very good chance of getting that,” he said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the talks.The carbon fee, which would initially be set at $15 per ton of emissions before rising rapidly upwards over the course of several years, has long been a favored policy of economists and some moderate Republicans as a way to encourage polluters to switch to cleaner energy but has latterly been disregarded by activists and progressives.However, these measures will have to garner the vote of every Democrat in the Senate to pass, with Joe Manchin, a centrist from West Virginia, skeptical of the size and scope of the $3.5tn spending proposal. Manchin, a major recipient of donations from the coal industry, has said it “makes no sense” to pay utilities to phase in solar and wind power.Manchin is reportedly set to block the clean electricity program, which forms the main muscle of the climate package. This could prove a hugely consequential blow to the effort to constrain dangerous global heating. “This is high on the list of most consequential actions ever taken by an individual senator,” tweeted the climate campaigner Bill McKibben. “You’ll be able to see the impact of this vain man in the geologic record.”Whitehouse admitted it was unclear what Manchin will ultimately do but that he was confident that “there’s a window in which negotiations with Joe can produce a bill to reduce emissions enough so we are not in danger’s way.”Democrats are working feverishly to trim the $3.5tn proposal to about $2tn, in order to win the votes of centrists without losing the support of progressives. Among the many pressing questions Democrats must answer as they hurtle to meet their end-of-the-month deadline is how bold to go on climate.“There’s a lot of talk recently about what progressive lawmakers need to be willing to cut – what we have to be willing to negotiate on?” Senator Ed Markey, a lead proponent of the Green New Deal, said on a call with reporters this week. “Well, we can’t negotiate with deadly wildfires. They don’t negotiate. We cannot negotiate with massive hurricanes. They don’t negotiate. We can’t negotiate with floodwaters, sea level rise and drought and temperature rise. We can’t negotiate how much these climate-fueled disasters are costing us, tens of billions of dollars so far this year.“It’s time for us to stop talking about what is politically feasible, and start talking about what is scientifically necessary – we cannot compromise on science,” he said. Failure to pass the legislation would be disastrous for the US and the global community, the US climate envoy, John Kerry, said in an interview with the Associated Press.“It would be like President Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement, again,” he warned.The Build Back Better plan will put America on track to meet its goals, but it must not be the only action congress takes to combat the climate crisis, said congresswoman Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat and chair of the House select committee on the climate crisis. More federal action is needed to meet the scale of the emergency, she said.“Even if we pass the Build Back Better Act as it is, that doesn’t get us to net-zero by 2050, which is the goal,” she said in an interview. Pointing to the latest climate research and a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that declared a “code red” for humanity, she added: “We are going to have to do more.”While Biden can do little about the machinations of the Senate, the president has come under growing criticism that his own actions have not matched his rhetoric. Biden, who has said that the “nation and the world are in peril” from a “code red” climate emergency, has reincorporated the US to the Paris climate agreement and sought to restore some of the environmental rules axed by Donald Trump.But his administration has also approved a flurry of new oil and gas drilling permits on public lands, urged oil-producing countries to ramp up production to help lower gasoline prices and declined to stop major fossil fuel projects such as Line 3, an oil pipeline expansion in Minnesota that has sparked violent clashes between police and those protesting against its construction. “I think [the administration] has missed an enormous opportunity to join the battle against those behind the problem – the fossil fuel industry,” said Whitehouse. Simmering resentment at the president exploded outside the White House last week, with four consecutive days of protests resulting in nearly 300 climate activists being arrested and removed by police. On Thursday, a banner was unfurled reading “We need real solutions, not false promises”, with protesters calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency and halt a slew of proposed pipelines and drilling projects – a report released by Oil Change International has found that 21 major fossil fuel projects under review by the administration would cause the emissions equivalent of 316 new coal-fired power plants if they went ahead.“We felt we had someone who had our back and then he [Biden] wavered,” said Joye Braun, a campaigner at the Indigenous Environmental Network who traveled from South Dakota for the protests. “He made a lot of promises to us, as Indigenous people, that he’s not following through on. To allow something like Line 3 makes no damn sense.”Climate scientists have echoed the need for urgency. The world is on course for nearly 3C of heating by the end of the century, which would bring punishing impacts to people around the globe. Precipitously steep emissions cuts need to occur immediately to avoid this turmoil, scientists say.“Unless we have greater progress on CO2 cuts we are faced with a miserable outcome,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University. “A world above 2C is not a pretty one. This reconciliation bill isn’t enough and it’s discouraging to see the Biden administration still approving fossil fuel projects. That should be very much in our past.”In recent days, the White House and Democrats have sought to temper expectations that Democrats would reach a deal before the summit – and that a failure to meet their deadline would hurt Biden’s credibility as a global leader in the fight against climate change.“None of our objectives for the president’s climate agenda begins or ends on November 1 and 2, or the week after,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week. “Whether our agenda has passed or not is not going to be the defining factor.”The stars may not be aligned long to address climate breakdown. Democrats, having waited a decade for this opportunity, could lose control of Congress in midterm elections next year to a Republican party still unwilling to confront, or even acknowledge, the crisis. The prospect of not acting for another decade is almost unthinkable.“We can’t fail again,” said Whitehouse. “We just can’t.”TopicsClimate crisisJoe BidenBiden administrationUS SenateUS CongressUS politicsCop26newsReuse this content More

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      Malcolm Turnbull on Murdoch, lies and the climate crisis: ‘The same forces that enabled Trump are at work in Australia’

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      Australian politicsMalcolm Turnbull on Murdoch, lies and the climate crisis: ‘The same forces that enabled Trump are at work in Australia’ Systematic partisan lying and misinformation from the media, both mainstream and social, has done enormous damage to liberal democracies, the former PM writesMalcolm TurnbullSun 17 Oct 2021 16.41 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 17.09 EDTThe United States has suffered the largest number of Covid-19 deaths: about 600,000 at the time of writing. The same political and media players who deny the reality of global warming also denied and politicised the Covid-19 virus.To his credit, Donald Trump poured billions into Operation Warp Speed, which assisted the development of vaccines in a timeframe that matched the program’s ambitious title. But he also downplayed the gravity of Covid-19, then peddled quack therapies and mocked cities that mandated social distancing and mask wearing.Trump’s catastrophic management of the pandemic resulted in election defeat in November 2020. It says a lot about the insanity of America’s political discourse that the then presidential nominee Joe Biden had to say, again and again: “Mask wearing is not a political statement.”Australia’s ambition on climate change is held back by a toxic mix of rightwing politics, media and vested interests | Kevin Rudd and Malcolm TurnbullRead moreFrom our relative safety and sanity, Australians looked to America with increasing horror. If the Covid-19 disaster was not enough, the callous police murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 ignited a wave of outraged protest against racism in the US and around the world. And then events took another sinister turn.Anticipating defeat, Trump had been busy claiming the election would be rigged by the Democrats. He predicted widespread voter fraud, setting himself up for an “I wuz robbed” case if the result went against him. He had done the same in 2016.As it happened, Biden won convincingly. Trump and the Republican party launched more than 60 legal challenges to the result. Their failure did not stop the misinformation campaign.Relentlessly, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the rest of the rightwing media claque claimed Biden had stolen the election. A protest march was scheduled in Washington for 6 January 2021, the day Congress was scheduled to formally count the electoral college votes and confirm Biden’s win. The protest was expressly designed to pressure Congress, and especially the then vice-president, Mike Pence, to overthrow the decision of the people and declare Trump re-elected.They assembled in their thousands. Trump wound them up with a typically inflammatory address, culminating in a call to march on the Capitol. The mob proceeded to besiege and break into the home of US democracy. They surged through the corridors, threatening to hang Pence and the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Several security guards were killed, as was one of the insurgents. Luckily, none of the legislators were found by the mob, although several appeared to have encouraged them in the lead-up to the assault.It was nothing less than an attempted coup, promoted and encouraged by the president himself and his media allies like Murdoch who, through Fox News, has probably done more damage to US democracy than any other individual.Vladimir Putin’s disinformation campaigns have sought to exacerbate divisions in western democracies and undermine popular trust in their institutions. By creating and exploiting a market for crazy conspiracy theories untethered from the facts, let alone science, Murdoch has done Putin’s work – better than any Russian intelligence agency could ever imagine possible.That is why I supported the former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s call for a royal commission into the Murdoch media, which does not operate like a conventional news organisation but rather like a political party, pushing its own agendas, running vendettas against its critics and covering up for its friends.Murdoch empire’s global chief Robert Thomson to front questions at Australian Senate inquiryRead moreIn April I reinforced these points in an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter, as I had to the Australian Senate’s inquiry into media diversity. Of all the endorsements, none was more significant than that of James Clapper, the former US director of national intelligence, who said Fox News was “a megaphone for conspiracies and falsehoods”.We have to face the uncomfortable fact that the systematic partisan lying and misinformation from the media, both mainstream and social – what Clapper calls the “truth deficit” – has done enormous damage to liberal democracies, and none more so than the US itself. Thanks to this relentless diet of lies, a quarter of all Americans and 56% of Republicans believe Trump is the true president today.Biden is leading a more traditional and rational administration. The friends and allies Trump had outraged around the world are breathing a sigh of relief. The US has rejoined the Paris agreement on climate change and Biden is seeking to lead the world with deeper, faster cuts to emissions.But the same forces that amplified and enabled Trump are still at work in the US and here in Australia. In April the Murdoch press bullied the New South Wales government into reversing its decision to appoint me chairman of a committee to advise on the transition to a net zero emission economy. My “crime” was to not support the continued, unconstrained expansion of open-cut coalmining in the Hunter Valley. In the crazed, rightwing media echo chamber so influential with many Liberal and National party members, the primary qualification to advise on net zero emissions is, apparently, unqualified support for coalmining.As though we hadn’t had enough demonstration of the Murdochs’ vendetta tactics, right on cue on 2 May Sky News Australia broadcast a “documentary” designed to disparage me and Rudd as being, in effect, political twins separated at birth. As a job, I am told it gave hatchets a bad name. But the message was clear to anyone inclined to hold Murdoch to account: step out of line and you will be next.And while politicians are accountable, the Murdochs are not. Their abuse of power has been so shameful that James Murdoch has resigned from the company. His brother, Lachlan, however, is thoroughly in charge and apparently more rightwing than his father. Yet he has chosen to move back to Australia with his family, fleeing the hatreds and divisions of America that he and his father have done so much to exacerbate.As bushfires raged in the summer of 2019-20 I hoped that this red-raw reality of global warming would end the crazy, politicised climate wars in Australia. Well, it didn’t. The onset of the pandemic served to distract everyone, although the irony of following the virus science while ignoring the climate science seems to have been lost on too many members of the Australian government.Australia is more out of step with its friends and allies than it has ever been. All of our closest friends – the US, the UK, the EU, Japan and New Zealand – are now committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.On 18 May the International Energy Agency released a new report on how the world can, and must, reach net zero.For the first time this expert agency, always regarded as sympathetic to the oil and gas sectors, demanded that investment in new oil, gas and coal projects cease and that we make a rapid shift to renewables and storage. They described how this would enable us to have more, and cheaper, electricity.02:13To coincide with this report (of which the Australian government had full prior notice), Scott Morrison chose to announce that his government would invest $600m to build a new gas-fired power station in the Hunter Valley. The energy sector, the regulators, the NSW government and other experts were united in saying the power station was not needed – $600m wasted. To the rest of the world, increasingly puzzled by Australia’s fossil-fuel fetish, it must have looked like a calculated “fuck you” to the global consensus demanding climate action.More Australians than ever are worried about the climate crisis, annual survey suggestsRead moreTo those concerned about the lack of leadership on climate, Morrison says his five predecessors all lost their job, one way or another, because of climate policy. He is determined not to let the right wing of the Coalition do to him what it did to me. Before June he would point to the instability in the National party and warn how a shift on climate could trigger a party room revolt, led by Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and others, to overthrow Michael McCormack. That has now happened, and Joyce made his case for change on the basis of McCormack not doing more to oppose Morrison’s edging towards a net zero commitment.So Morrison is determined not to lead on climate; he wants business and other governments to take the lead and for events to take their course so that the transition to zero emissions happens without any discernible action from the Australian government at all. In the meantime he will continue to use support for coal as a totemic issue to rally working-class voters in mining areas.Scott is long on tactics and very short on strategy. With climate, he underlines my biggest concern about his government: that it will be successful at winning elections but do little in office. And with Barnaby back as deputy prime minister, he has another excuse to do nothing.
      This is an edited extract from the new foreword to A Bigger Picture by Malcolm Turnbull (Hardie Grant Books, available now in paperback)
      TopicsAustralian politicsMalcolm TurnbullAustralian mediaNews CorporationScott MorrisonUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpextractsReuse this content More

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      Buttigieg warns Manchin of resistance to Biden’s climate plan: ‘It will cost lives’

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      Pete ButtigiegButtigieg warns Manchin of resistance to Biden’s climate plan: ‘It will cost lives’White House has said clean energy provisions likely to be dropped from bill to secure support of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema Richard Luscombe@richluscSun 17 Oct 2021 11.43 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 11.44 EDTThe transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg delivered a blunt warning on Sunday to Joe Manchin and other Senate Democrats who are forcing Joe Biden to scale back his climate crisis agenda: your resistance is going to cost lives.Manchin, senator for the coal-dependent state of West Virginia, opposes elements of the president’s clean energy performance program (CEPP), a $150bn central plank of his Build Back Better plan and $3.5tn spending bill.White House officials have acknowledged that clean energy and clean electricity provisions are likely to be dropped from the bill to secure the support of Manchin and fellow sceptic Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both votes are critical in a divided 50-50 Senate.Buttigieg appeared to express his disappointment in Manchin’s stance on Sunday, telling CNN’s State of the Union that the holdout politicians’ stonewalling of Biden’s ambitious climate plan could be deadly.“The longer you take to do something about it, the more it’s going to cost in livelihoods as well as lives,” he said.“The administration and the president are committed to bold climate action, exactly what legislative form that takes is what’s being negotiated right now. But the bottom line is we have to act on climate for the good of our children and for the good of our economy. This is kind of like a planetary maintenance issue.”Biden is attempting to broker a deal with Manchin and Sinema that would allow the bill to pass, though the president has already conceded that cuts will be made. “I’m convinced we’re going to get it done. We’re not going to get $3.5tn. We’ll get less than that, but we’re going to get it,” Biden said on Friday.Buttigieg’s criticism was more veiled than that of the progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who lambasted Manchin last week in an opinion piece in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.“Poll after poll shows overwhelming support for this legislation. Yet… in a 50-50 Senate we need every Democratic senator to vote ‘yes.’ We now have only 48. Two Democratic senators remain in opposition, including Manchin.” he wrote.“This is a pivotal moment in modern American history. We have a historic opportunity to support the working families of West Virginia, Vermont and the entire country and create policy which works for all, not just the few.”His comments drew swift rebuke from Manchin, who in a tweet attempted to portray Sanders as a socialist out-of-stater trying to “tell West Virginians what is best for them”.“Millions of jobs are open, supply chains are strained and unavoidable inflation taxes are draining workers’ hard-earned wages as the price of gasoline and groceries continues to rise,” Manchin said.“I will not vote for a reckless expansion of government programs.”Buttigieg on Sunday responded to criticisms of the administration’s handling of the supply chain crisis, telling CNN that it was caused at least partly by the success of Biden’s economic policies.“If you think about those ships waiting at anchor on the west coast, every one is full of record amounts of goods that Americans are buying because demand is up, because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession,” he said.He praised Biden’s efforts last week to ease bottlenecks, which included ordering ports in California to operate 24 hours a day, but said in a separate interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to solve what he said was a “very complex problem”.“You got the terminals, the rail piece, you got the warehouses, the drivers, and we’re working on all of those angles,” he said. “But these are private-sector systems, this is a capitalist country. Nobody wants the federal government to own or operate the stores, the warehouses, the trucks, or the ships, or the ports. Our role is to try to make sure we’re supporting those businesses and those workers who do.”TopicsPete ButtigiegJoe BidenBiden administrationUS domestic policyClimate crisisUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him

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      Climate crimesClimate crisisA US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him The mayor of Imperial Beach, California, says big oil wants him to drop the lawsuit demanding the industry pay for the climate crisisSupported byAbout this contentChris McGreal in Imperial BeachSat 16 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTSerge Dedina is a surfer, environmentalist and mayor of Imperial Beach, a small working-class city on the California coast.He is also, if the fossil fuel industry is to be believed, at the heart of a conspiracy to shake down big oil for hundreds of millions of dollars.Imperial Beach, CaliforniaExxonMobil and its allies have accused Dedina of colluding with other public officials across California to extort money from the fossil-fuel industry. Lawyers even searched his phone and computer for evidence he plotted with officials from Santa Cruz, a city located nearly 500 miles north of Imperial Beach.The problem is, Dedina had never heard of a Santa Cruz conspiracy. Few people had.“The only thing from Santa Cruz on my phone was videos of my kids surfing there,” Dedina said. “I love the fact that some lawyer in a really expensive suit, sitting in some horrible office trying to find evidence that we were in some kind of conspiracy with Santa Cruz, had to look at videos of my kids surfing.”That’s where the laughter stopped.The lawyers found no evidence to back up their claim. But that did not stop the industry from continuing to use its legal muscle to try to intimidate Dedina, who leads one of the poorest small cities in the region.The mayor became a target after Imperial Beach filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and more than 30 other fossil-fuel companies demanding they pay the huge costs of defending the city from rising seas caused by the climate crisis.Imperial Beach’s lawsuit alleges the oil giants committed fraud by covering up research showing that burning fossil fuels destroys the environment. The industry then lied about the evidence for climate change for decades, deliberately delaying efforts to curb carbon emissions.The city’s lawsuit was among the first of a wave of litigation filed by two dozen municipalities and states across the US that could cost the fossil-fuel industry billions of dollars in compensation for the environmental devastation and the deception.Dedina says his minority majority community of about 27,000 cannot begin to afford the tens of millions of dollars it will cost to keep at bay the waters bordering three sides of his financially strapped city. The worst of recent storms have turned Imperial Beach into an island.One assessment calculated that, without expensive mitigation measures, rising sea levels will eventually swamp some of the city’s neighbourhoods, routinely flood its two schools and overwhelm its drainage system.Imperial Beach’s annual budget is $20m. Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, was paid more than $15m last year.“We don’t have a pot to piss in in this city. So why not go after the oil companies?” he said. “The lawsuit is a pragmatic approach to making the people that caused sea level rise pay for the impacts it has on our city.”InteractiveThat’s not how Exxon, the US’s largest oil company, saw it. Its lawyers noted that Imperial Beach filed its case in July 2017, at the same time as two California counties, Marin and San Mateo. The county and city of Santa Cruz followed six months later with similar suits seeking compensation to cope with increasing wildfires and drought caused by global heating.Exxon alleged that the sudden burst of litigation, and the fact that the municipalities shared a law firm specialising in environmental cases, Sher Edling, was evidence of collusion.Exxon filed lawsuits claiming the municipalities conspired to extort money from the company by following a strategy developed during an environmental conference at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, 25 miles north of Imperial Beach, nine years ago.The meeting, organised by the Climate Accountability Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists, produced a report outlining how legal strategies used by US states against the tobacco industry in the 1990s could be applied to cases against fossil fuel companies.Dedina was also targeted by one of the US’s biggest business groups at the forefront of industry resistance to increased regulation to reduce greenhouse gases, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a rightwing thinktank, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.The manufacturing trade group was behind the efforts to obtain data from Dedina’s phone and documents in 2018. In its public disclosure request to the mayor’s office, NAM called Imperial Beach’s lawsuit “litigation based on political or ideological objections more appropriately addressed through the political process”.Exxon is attempting to use a Texas law that allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence by questioning individuals under oath even before any legal action is filed against them. The company is trying to force Dedina, two other members of Imperial Beach’s government, and officials from other jurisdictions, to submit to questioning on the grounds they were joined in a conspiracy against the oil industry.“A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change,” the oil firm claimed. “ExxonMobil finds itself directly in that conspiracy’s crosshairs.”How cities and states could finally hold fossil fuel companies accountableRead moreA Texas district judge approved the request to depose Dedina, but then a court of appeals overturned the decision last year. The state supreme court is considering whether to take up the case.The target on Dedina is part of a wider pattern of retaliation against those suing Exxon and other oil companies.In an unusual move in 2016, Exxon persuaded a Texas judge to order the attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to travel to Dallas to be deposed about her motives for investigating the company for alleged fraud for suppressing evidence on climate change. The judge also ordered that New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, be “available” in Dallas on the same day in case Exxon wanted to question him about a similar investigation.Healey accused Exxon of trying to “squash the prerogative of state attorneys general to do their jobs”. The judge reversed the deposition order a month later and Healey filed a lawsuit against the company in 2019, which is still awaiting trial.But similar tactics persuaded the US Virgin Islands attorney general to shut down his investigation of the oil giant.Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, said the attempt to question Dedina and other officials is part of a broader strategy by the oil industry to counter lawsuits with its own litigation.“These cases are frivolous and vexatious. Intimidation is the goal. Just making it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon. They think that if they make the case painful enough, Imperial Beach will quit,” he said.If the intent is to kill off the litigation against the oil industry, it’s not working. Officials from other municipalities have called Exxon’s move “repugnant”, “a sham” and “outrageous”, and have vowed to press on with their lawsuits.Dedina described the action as a “bullying tactic” by the oil industry to avoid accountability.“The only conspiracy is [that] a bunch of suits and fossil-fuel companies decided to pollute the earth and make climate change worse, and then lie about it,” he said. “They make more money than our entire city has in a year.”The city’s lawsuit claims it faces a “significant and dangerous sea-level rise” through the rest of this century that threatens its existence. Imperial Beach commissioned an analysis of its vulnerability to rising sea levels which concluded that nearly 700 homes and businesses were threatened at a cost of more than $100m. It said that flooding will hit about 40% of the city’s roads, including some that will be under water for long periods. Two elementary schools will have to be moved. The city’s beach, regarded as one of the best sites for surfing on the California coast, is being eroded by about a foot a year.Imperial Beach sits at the southern end of San Diego bay. Under one worst-case scenario, the bay could merge with the Tijuana River estuary to the south and permanently submerge much of the city’s housing and roads.The city has received some help with creating natural climate barriers. The Fish and Wildlife Service restored 400 acres of wetland next to the city as a national wildlife refuge which also acts as a barrier to flooding, and is expected to restore other wetlands together with the Port of San Diego. A grant is paying for improved equipment to warn of floods.But that still leaves the huge costs of building new schools and drainage systems, and adapting other infrastructure. Dedina said that without the oil companies stumping up, it won’t happen.“People ask, how did you go against the world’s largest fossil fuel companies? Isn’t that scary? No. What’s scary is coastal flooding and the idea that whole cities would be under water,” said the mayor.“Honestly, bring it on. I can’t wait to make our case. I can’t wait to take the fight to them because we have nothing to lose.”This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate storyTopicsClimate crisisClimate crimesCaliforniaUS politicsExxonMobilOil and gas companiesFossil fuelsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      The climate disaster is here

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      The enormous, unprecedented pain and turmoil caused by the climate crisis is often discussed alongside what can seem like surprisingly small temperature increases – 1.5C or 2C hotter than it was in the era just before the car replaced the horse and cart. 
      These temperature thresholds will again be the focus of upcoming UN climate talks at the COP26 summit in Scotland as countries variously dawdle or scramble to avert climate catastrophe. But the single digit numbers obscure huge ramifications at stake. “We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, puts it.
      The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical boundaries. Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe this much within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary, with the oceans alone absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.

      When global temperatures are projected to hit key benchmarksthis century
      Average global surface temperature relative to a 1850-1900 baseline More