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      in Elections

      Humanity has eight years to get climate crisis under control – and Trump's plan won't fix it

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      In Donald Trump’s world – laid bare during Thursday night’s final presidential debate with his Democratic rival Joe Biden in Nashville – fossil fuels are “very clean”, the US has the best air and water despite his administration’s extensive regulatory rollbacks, and the country can fix climate change by planting trees.
      But according to the harsh realities being laid out by climate scientists, Trump’s world does not exist.
      Humanity has just eight years to figure out how to get climate change under control before the future starts to look drastically worse – multiple-degree temperature increases, global sea-level rise, and increasingly disastrous wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts. Doing so will mean that unless there is a technological miracle, humans will at some point have to stop burning oil, gas and coal.
      “We’re told by all the leading scientists in the world we don’t have much time,” Biden said. “We’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to 10 years. Four more years of this man … will put us in a position where we’ll be in real trouble,” the former vice-president said.
      Much of the media coverage of the exchange – which as usual didn’t come until the end of the debate as time was running out – will probably focus on Trump’s attacks on Biden. He called his plan job-killing, argued it would cost $100tn and not $6tn, and accused Biden of flip-flopping on fracking. The drilling method has fueled a natural gas boom in swing states such as Pennsylvania, which both candidates see as critically important to winning the election. At one point, Biden dared Trump to publish evidence of him ever saying he would end fracking, and Trump promised he would.
      Stories might quote Trump, who has denied the human-made climate crisis in a variety of strange ways, telling Biden “I know more about wind than you,” despite previously wrongly claiming wind power causes cancer. “They want to take buildings down because they want to make bigger windows into smaller windows. As far as they’re concerned if you had no window it would be a lovely thing,” Trump accused in another tangent. “This is the craziest plan that anyone has ever seen. It wasn’t done by smart people. Frankly, I don’t know how it could be good politically.”
      But perhaps the most interesting point was when the candidates were asked what they would do for people – often people of color – who are living next to polluting gasoline refineries and petrochemical plants.
      Trump pressed Biden: “Would you close down the oil industry?”
      And Biden, who might typically steer clear of such a politically controversial question, said he would.
      “I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” Biden said.
      “The oil industry pollutes significantly,” he added. “It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”
      Trump shot back that Biden “is saying is he would destroy the oil industry”.
      “Would you remember that Texas? Would you remember that Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Ohio?”

      The moment was notable, including because it was the opposite of what he said about natural gas. He would not commit to any kind of end to the second half of the industry which has a fast-growing role in causing climate change.
      “We need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero-emissions,” Biden said. “What I will do with fracking over time is to make sure we will capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that by investing money.”
      Speaking to reporters after the debate, Biden insisted the fossil fuel industry wouldn’t “be gone” until 2050.
      “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels, but we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time,” Biden said.
      Those kinds of statements illuminate why American environmental advocates have quietly worried whether Biden will do enough on climate, even as they have endorsed him and backed his plan.
      While Biden is pitching large-scale spending to both help the economy recover and put people to work in green jobs, some fear climate could get lost among his priorities or that the political roadblocks to working with Congress and getting climate efforts past a conservative supreme court would prove too difficult.
      A Trump win could be devastating to both US and global climate action, but a Biden win is not assured to significantly address the challenge either. More

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      in US Politics

      The animal species imperiled by Trump's war on the environment

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      Climate countdown

      The animal species imperiled by Trump’s war on the environment

      A humpback whale breaches in the Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration has withdrawn regulations aimed at preventing humpbacks and other creatures from being entangled in nets off the west coast.
      Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

      Despite a grim outlook for American biodiversity, Trump has lifted protections for at-risk animals as part of his aggressive rollback of environmental rules
      75 ways Trump made America dirtier and the planet warmer
      by Paola Rosa-Aquino

      Main image:
      A humpback whale breaches in the Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration has withdrawn regulations aimed at preventing humpbacks and other creatures from being entangled in nets off the west coast.
      Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

      The prognosis for biodiversity on Earth is grim. According to a sobering report released by the United Nations last year, 1 million land and marine species across the globe are threatened with extinction – more than at any other period in human history.
      According to a recent study, about 20% of the countries in the world risk ecosystem collapse due to the destruction of wildlife and their habitats, a result of human activity in tandem with a warming climate. The United States is the ninth most at risk.
      Despite this desperate outlook, the Trump administration, as part of its aggressive rollback of regulations designed to protect the environment, has lifted protections for America’s animals. It has shrunk several national monuments and opened up a huge amount of federal land for oil and gas drilling, coalmining and other industrial activities – actions that conservationists warn could imperil species whose numbers are already dwindling and that are core to the health of our ecosystems.
      Here we look at some of the animals most at risk from Trump’s rollbacks.
      Wolverines More

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      in US Politics

      'We don't have any choice': the young activists naming and shaming US politicians

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      It was a Saturday night in September when 160 or so middle and high school students logged on to a Zoom call about how to confront American politicians using tactics inspired by young civil rights activists fighting for the abolition of slavery.The teenagers were online with the Sunrise Movement, a nationwide youth-led climate justice collective, to learn about organizing Wide Awake actions – noisy night-time protests – to force lawmakers accused of ignoring the climate emergency and racial injustice to listen to their demands.It’s a civil disobedience tactic devised by the Wide Awakes – a radical youth abolitionist organization who confronted anti-abolitionists at night by banging pots and pans outside their homes in the run-up to the civil war.Now, in the run-up to one of the most momentous elections in modern history, a new generation of young Americans who say they are tired of asking nicely and being ignored, are naming and shaming US politicians in an effort to get their concerns about the planet, police brutality, inequalities and immigration heard.The first one targeted the Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell after details emerged about the police killing of Breonna Taylor. In the days following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sunrise activists woke up key Republican senators including McConnell and Lindsey Graham, demanding that they delay the vote on Trump’s supreme court nominee until a new president is sworn in.“Even though we can’t vote, we can show up on the streets and wake up politicians. It’s our future on the line not theirs,” said 17-year-old Abby DiNardo, a senior from Delaware county. The high school senior recently coordinated a Wide Awake action outside the home of the Republican senator Pat Toomey, a former Wall Street banker who has repeatedly voted against climate action measures.The Sunrise Movement was founded by a small group of disparate young activists in 2017 and initially focussed on helping elect proponents of clean energy in the 2018 midterms. More

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      in World Politics

      Indigenous Communities Can Counter Naxals and Protect Forests in India

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      On the night of July 11, Naxalites blew up 12 buildings in the forest department’s field office-cum-quarters in the Berkela forest area of Pashchimi Singhbhum district in Jharkhand, India. Naxalites are Maoists who have fought a bloody insurgency against the Indian state in some rural and forest areas for over six decades. In 2006, Manmohan Singh, the prime minister at the time, called this insurgency “the single biggest internal-security challenge” the country has ever faced.

      360° Context: The State of the Indian Republic

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      In recent years, the Naxalite insurgency has ebbed. So, this attack sent shock waves across administration in general and the forest department in particular. Fortunately, no one died in the attack. The Naxals asked staff to vacate the premises and warned of consequences if police were informed before destruction. Even as the police swung into action to apprehend the attackers, forest officials huddled together for introspection.

      Forests, Minerals and Indigenous People

      I have served in the jungles of Jharkhand as a forestry professional. The attack has made me reflect deeply. Naxalite attacks in Jharkhand are not new. For years, Naxals have intimidated state functionaries through various means, including attacks and assassinations. To understand the persisting nature of the Naxalite insurgency, we have to examine Jharkhand closely.

      Jharkhand is a state that lies to the south of Bihar and the west of Bengal, two fertile Gangetic states of India. To its southeast and southwest, it borders two other poor but resource-rich states of Chhattisgarh and Odisha. Jharkhand literally means “bushland.” It is endowed with rich natural resources, including both forests and minerals such as coal, iron, copper, mica and uranium.

      Jharkhand is predominantly inhabited by diverse indigenous communities. The Indian Constitution gives these communities a “scheduled tribes” status. As per the 2011 census, they comprise 8.2% of India’s population. In contrast, scheduled tribes form a much higher 26.3% of the population in Jharkhand. Historically, Jharkhand was a part of Bihar and the people of Jharkhand felt neglected and marginalized. Therefore, they agitated for a separate state both to safeguard their identity and to achieve control over their rich resources of “jal, jungle aur jameen,” Hindi for water, forests and land.

      Embed from Getty Images

      On November 15, 2000, Jharkhand was formed. I remember the date fondly. A grand function was held in Ranchi’s Raj Bhawan, the governor’s house. I was still what is called a “probationer” in government parlance. As an officer of the Indian Forest Service (IFS), I was doing my training at the Shri Krishna Institute Public Administration just across the road from the Raj Bhawan. Many officers were visiting from Patna and staying at the institute’s guest house. They were also milling around the resplendent surroundings of the Raj Bhawan.

      The staff of the guest house who belonged to the scheduled tribes were in a jubilant mood. I asked one of them, a gentleman named Khalkho, as to what the formation of Jharkhand meant for him. His instant response, “abua dishum, abua raj,” which translates as “our state, our rule,” still rings in my ears. Khalkho also went on to inform me that henceforth it would be his children, not dikus, the local term for outsiders, who would get preference in  jobs.

      Despite two decades of abua raj in abua dishum, all is clearly not well in Jharkhand. Berkela is barely 15 kilometers from Chaibasa, the district headquarters of Pashchimi Singhbhum. Scheduled tribes form 67.3% of the population in the district, and the region is rich both in mineral and forest resources. Forest cover forms about 47% of the area, making the district rich in biodiversity. The famous Saranda forest, known for excellent Sal trees and its natural regeneration, is also located here. Much of the Jharkhand’s mineral wealth, especially iron ore, is found under these forests.

      These rich resources have not improved the living standards of scheduled tribes of the area. Instead, the forests have become home to the Naxals who take refuge there. Various development agencies have shied away from this area. Only the forest department dares to venture there to fulfill its duty to protect and conserve Pashchimi Singhbum’s forests for posterity. The Naxal attack will certainly sap the department’s morale.

      To combat Naxalism, the forest department has to connect with local communities. Addressing their livelihood issues is essential for winning the trust of marginalized people in a resource-rich land. Only winning goodwill in Pashchimi Singhbhum and elsewhere would help combat the Naxal menace.

      Yet there is a problem. First, the mandate of the forest department is mainly the protection, conservation and development of forests, not providing livelihood or improving living standards for local communities. Second, the department lacks adequate resources to reach out to communities even if it was given the mandate to do so. The budget allocations for forest departments across India have been low and Jharkhand is no exception.

      Involve Indigenous Communities to Save Forests

      Few realize that forests and indigenous communities have a symbiotic relationship whether in the Amazon or in Pashchimi Singhbhum. They worship nature and tend to revere trees. They have used forest resources sustainably for centuries if not millennia. Therefore, it is important for any forest department to work with these communities. To be fair to the forest department in Jharkhand, it is already making an effort to do so. However, it faces a vicious timber mafia that is hell-bent on chopping down trees to meet rising urban demand. Mining — legal and illegal — is another threat to forests and local communities. Too often, the forest department finds itself outgunned and is unable to protect these communities or the forests they live in.

      Goal 15 of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations aims to “protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.” To achieve this, the government of Jharkhand has to focus on people-oriented natural resources governance. Simply put, they have to involve local communities in the conservation of forests and make the forest department work closely with them.

      My experience of working in various forests in Jharkhand tells me that sometimes, overzealous measures by dogmatic forest officials do more harm than good. They often take draconian action against indigenous communities for petty offenses that probably should not have been illegal in the first place. After all, these communities have to live. The forests are their only sustenance. So, draconian implementation of some laws leads to the forest department losing the trust and faith of the indigenous communities.

      Of course, there are many forest officials who are empathetic, courageous and exceptional. They interact with local communities on a day-to-day basis. Indeed, these officials maintain high moral standards even when their very lives are in danger.

      The Naxals are not like Russian or Chinese communists of the last century. They do not really have any ideology. Instead, they have become a vocation for unemployed, disgruntled and misguided youths. Many Naxals are recruited by intimidation and are then subjected to indoctrination. Quite a few of them start enjoying the power that comes from wielding a gun. These youths invariably come from marginalized indigenous communities and find Naxal propaganda seductive.

      To counter the Naxals, both the state and central governments must gain the confidence of the indigenous communities living in the forests. To do so, the government must protect their forest-based livelihood. It must also generate sustained employment through forest-based skill development programs that teach indigenous communities to put their incredibly rare know-how to good use.

      Such policies would increase the living standard of local people. They would also turn the indigenous communities into the eyes and ears of the government, thwarting Naxal violence. These policies would also involve the delegation of some powers and financial authority to local forest officials and indigenous communities. It would be fair to say that it is time for a real abua raj in abua dishum.

      *(Atul Singh, the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Fair Observer, provided inputs for this article.)

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      As Climate Change Worsens, How Far Will We Tip?

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      Although there are still those who deny it, the countdown for the planet under the threat of global warming began some time ago. If we were to seek an official starting point, it would probably be in the late 18th century, at the beginning of the industrial age. We now receive confirmation of melting at the poles and warming in the depths of the ocean on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

      The constantly accumulating evidence has overwhelmingly convinced the scientific community not only that the trend is real, but that the consequences will be particularly dramatic for human societies. Humans happen to be the only living species on Earth obsessed by the idea of controlling their environmental habitat for the sake of their own comfort and profit. The rest of the biosphere tries simply to get by with the hand it is dealt.

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      But now the dual goals of comfort and profit appear to be dangerously at odds. Responding to the demand for comfort of those who can afford it provokes increasing levels of discomfort for those societies and individuals that cannot. That simple fact has become one of the contributing factors to the increasingly evident revolt against growing income and wealth inequality.

      A report by the insurance company Swiss Re cited by The Guardian informs us that we are quickly approaching a point of no return. “One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats,” The Guardian reports. If 20% of the nations of the world succumb, it won’t be long before 30%, 40%, 50% and more are affected as well. It appears that Australia, Israel and South Africa are particularly exposed. The report also cites India, Spain and Belgium.

      In other words, this time it won’t be only the forgotten and neglected developing nations (Donald Trump’s “shithole countries”) that are the first to pay the cost. If people used to luxury and accustomed to thinking of themselves as sheltered from disaster are the ones who may suffer first, alarm bells will quickly start ringing.

      The Guardian cites some worrying figures: “More than half of global GDP — $42tn (£32tn) — depends on high-functioning biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Tipping point:

      For capitalists, an abstract target to both aim for and avoid, since on the positive side it represents the maximum reward expected from any endeavor designed to exploit and eventually exhaust a market or a body of resources, while, on the negative side, it threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The balancing act consists of finding the point of equilibrium between maximum exploitation and braking before reaching the tipping point.

      Contextual Note

      In the year 2000, which marks the beginning of the age of internet marketing and social media, tipping points became something to aim for rather than avoid. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” was released in that year. It reads like a recipe book encouraging the kind of viral development successful marketers manage to achieve for a new product or a new practice. 

      Gladwell praised and encouraged business models aimed at creating “social epidemics.” Though it may seem absurd and even macabre today, as the world battles an incomprehensible and unpredictable pandemic, Gladwell’s book offers advice on how to go viral. He even formulates laws and rules that describe the process: the “Law of the Few,” the “Stickiness Factor” and the “Power of Context.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic may have put a serious dent in the prestige our culture allotted to tipping points two decades ago. In the era of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good,” epidemic change represented seemed like a complementary and rather more respectable ideal. 

      The year 2000 marked the summit of the dot.com craze that quickly turned into the dot.com crash. Venture capitalists were hurting, but that was only temporary. Social media hadn’t yet taken off, but Gladwell clearly sensed its imminent arrival and understood its deeper logic. Global warming, with its threat of disastrous tipping points, had become an issue but it was already being dismissed by climate change deniers, who preferred to focus on a rapidly rising stock market.

      The rise and more recent fall of the image of tipping points raises a fascinating question about contemporary culture. If we admit that, in the year 2000, the idea of the tipping point promoted by Gladwell had mainly positive connotations and that, today, the prospect of a tipping point sets off alarm bells evoking the fear of imminent disaster, can we identify the tipping point that pushed us from the positive appreciation to the negative one? 

      There seem to be two candidates for the tipping point about tipping points: the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. If the dot.com crash of 2000 felt more like a thrilling roller-coaster ride than a traumatizing event, the 2008 crisis was an earthquake that leveled some institutions and seriously attacked the credibility of some of the previous decade’s ideals.

      The Gladwell version of a tipping point was associated with the inebriation that accompanies sudden commercial success and the rapid achievement of a monopoly position. That had become the goal of every economic actor’s ambition for the 30 years between 1980 and 2010. The current perception of a tipping point, as cited in The Guardian’s article, is one of a risk to be anticipated and avoided. The sense of having a mission of conquest eventually gave way to a simple hope for stability and survival.

      Historical Note

      A tipping point indicates a critical threshold beyond which the return to a previous state of equilibrium becomes impossible. Before Europe’s scientific and Industrial Revolution, people regarded tipping points as fatalities, the result of uncontrollable forces or trends. Since the industrial age, developed countries have evolved a culture of control that supposes human societies will have the ingenuity and the technology capable of fending off catastrophes and avoiding catastrophic tipping points.

      But that belief has recently been shaken by various uncontrollable events. And instead of ensuring mastery, the post-industrial culture of control has developed a perverse tendency to magnify its fear of tipping points. That is what’s behind the “science” of risk management and its method of contingency planning. Intended to increase our security, in the wrong hands it can become an irrational obsession. Instead of discovering solutions, it magnifies problems.

      In 2004, The Guardian broke a story about a secret Pentagon report warning “that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The Pentagon’s pessimism — or would it be more accurate to call it paranoiac optimism? — seems laughable today. It tells us more about the psychological climate inside America’s war machine and the budgeting rituals of the military-industrial complex than it does about the reality of the threats the world is facing.

      Today’s more realistic report by Swiss Re reveals that the trends the Pentagon identified are real and increasingly threatening, even if they don’t follow the logic of a Hollywood catastrophe movie that seemed to inspire the authors of the 2004 report. The threat is real, but the timeline was off by several decades. 

      In 2004, the Pentagon recommended to a refractory Bush administration that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” What better way to secure funding from Congress than to amplify their dread of unmanageable catastrophe? Alas, the Pentagon’s fearmongering had no effect on the Bush administration’s policy, though it probably did enable them to slightly pad their budget.

      Swiss Re announced that its objective is “to help insurers assess ecosystem risks when setting premiums for businesses.” This is bound to be more realistic than the Pentagon’s speculation, but the motive similarly focuses on getting other people to pay for what they are told to fear. That principle seems to be baked into the mentality of control cultures. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated, understanding tipping points is all about getting richer.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

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      The World’s Election

      Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

      The security council chamber at the UN headquarters in New York.
      Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

      The world is anxiously watching the election, with the candidates far apart on issues such as the climate crisis and nuclear weapons
      by Julian Borger in Washington

      Main image:
      The security council chamber at the UN headquarters in New York.
      Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

      Foreign policy barely gets a mention in this US election, but for the rest of the world the outcome on 3 November will arguably be the most consequential in history.
      All US elections have a global impact, but this time there are two issues of existential importance to the planet – the climate crisis and nuclear proliferation – on which the two presidential candidates could hardly be further apart.
      Also at stake is the idea of “the west” as a like-minded grouping of democracies who thought they had won the cold war three decades ago.
      “The Biden versus Trump showdown in November is probably the starkest choice between two different foreign policy visions that we’ve seen in any election in recent memory,” said Rebecca Lissner, co-author of An Open World, a new book on the contest for 21st-century global order.
      In an election which will determine so much about the future of America and the world, the Trump campaign has said very little about its intentions, producing what must be the shortest manifesto in the annals of US politics.
      It appeared late in the campaign and has 54 bullet points, of which five are about foreign policy – 41 words broken into a handful of slogans such as: “Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans”.
      The word “climate” does not appear, but there are two bullet points on partnering with other countries to “clean up” the oceans, and a pledge to “Continue to Lead the World in Access to the Cleanest Drinking Water and Cleanest Air”. (The phrase ignores a series of US scandals about poor water quality – and the fact that millions of Americans can no longer afford their water bills.)
      The US remains the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and the average American’s carbon footprint is twice that of a European or Chinese citizen. More

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      in US Politics

      Former Republican congressman says Murdoch's media outlets fuelling 'climate rejectionism'

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      A former Republican congressman has blamed Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets for fuelling “climate rejectionism” among conservatives, suggesting they could be part of the reason why the United States is failing to lead the world to tackle global heating.Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who has renounced his previous climate denialism and now leads a group seeking to rally conservatives to act, questioned the role of News Corp and Fox Corporation during an event hosted by the Australia Institute.Inglis told the progressive thinktank that Australia and the US shared a form of “climate rejectionism that comes in conservative clothing”.He said both countries also shared “a particular news organisation that has a great deal to do with that” – and pointed the finger at Murdoch’s Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in particular.“If you look at Fox viewers in America – that’s where you find the climate disputation,” Inglis said.Inglis said his group, RepublicEn, which campaigns for conservative leadership on climate action, believed that a change in the way the issue was covered by those outlets would be “the holy grail” in unlocking greater ambition in US policy.“If Fox would just change or if the Wall Street Journal editorial page would just change – either one of those and this would be finished, we’d be done with climate, we’d be acting,” he said. “It really is that important – so if anybody can get to the Murdochs please let me know.”Business leader and former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull also sheeted home some responsibility to large media businesses such as News Corp during the same webinar event on Wednesday.Turnbull’s husband, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted as leader of the centre-right Liberal party in 2009, and again in 2018, in part because of internal battles over climate policy.“There are a lot of people who have a huge level of conviction about the fact that climate change is with us, that we have to act,” she said. “The problem is that the polarisation makes it hard to do that because you have the people [who believe] that it isn’t a problem despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is.”In a clear reference to News Corp, Turnbull added: “They have a very loud voice in a lot of political debate aided by very large media organisations, especially one which crosses both the US and Australia and other countries besides.”She said this had resulted in a “fragmented, deeply polarised conversation”, which could be a symptom of the fragmentation of politics around the world.The comments come as another former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, campaigns for a royal commission to be launched into the Murdoch empire in Australia.The petition, launched on the Australian parliament’s website on Saturday, has so far attracted more than 236,000 signatures.The focus on the company comes after Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, said one of the reasons he had stepped away from his father’s media empire was because it legitimised disinformation and sowed doubts about facts.He told the New York Times climate change and coronavirus were both public health crises and “political spin” should not get “in the way of delivering crucial public health information”.James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, also issued a joint statement in January – midway through Australia’s summer bushfire crisis – to say they were “particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary”.Last year, however, Rupert Murdoch told shareholders “there are no climate change deniers” around his company and said his business was early to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and was working to reduce its climate emissions.Inglis and Turnbull discussed media coverage as part of the wide-ranging webinar on Wednesday, which also canvassed the forthcoming US presidential election.Inglis contended that Republicans would undergo a “reappraisal” of their position on climate policy in coming years, although that reassessment would come faster if Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord is due to take effect the day after the November election.Inglis, who previously visited Australia in 2017 as a guest of the Australia Institute, recounted how he had once insisted that climate change was “nonsense”.“I didn’t know anything about it except that Al Gore was for it and, in as much as I represented probably one of the most conservative districts in America, that was the end of the inquiry,” he said.But Inglis said he had a “three-step metamorphosis”, based on his children pressing him to take environmental issues seriously, his own visit to Antarctica to see ice core drilling evidence and his snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef.He spoke of the importance of bridging divides, saying he was grateful to have been “extended grace by people who knew it was real before I did”.Inglis urged people on the left of politics to accept new entrants to the conversation “without saying you’re the dumb kid in the class, the last one to get it” because “if you welcome them in we can solve this thing”. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Boris Johnson's Cop26: ask if GDP growth is sustainable | Editorial

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      Saving the planet ought to be a goal for, not a cost to, humanity. Yet this insight appears lost in the discussion about the climate emergency. Last week, it emerged that the Treasury was thinking about levying a UK-wide carbon tax. This approach, it was suggested, could be sold as a way of “raising revenue while cutting emissions”. Properly targeted taxes can change behaviour. But “revenue raising” green policies invariably end up being valued by the amount of taxes they produce rather than on their effectiveness in combating the climate crisis. UK governments have frozen fuel duties for a decade because it is politically easier to rake in cash than deter driving.A carbon tax is superficially appealing. The Treasury desires taxes to offset government spending. No 10 would like to align, rhetorically, with the green agenda. But without careful thought a carbon levy could backfire. A maladroit attempt to tax fuel on environmental grounds kindled France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests.By law, Britain has to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. To get there, life in the country will have to change. For example, for the next stage of a net-zero transition, the public should shift away from heating their homes with gas boilers. Raising taxes on voters until they squeal and switch to lower carbon intensive heating systems would not be popular or necessarily progressive. A better strategy would be for the state to finance new green technologies and to regulate energy companies to recoup the investment. The Treasury dislikes spending and then taxing. Rightwing governments resist interfering in markets. But a focus on ecological sustainability would provide a reason to act in such a way.The UK government requires an environmental sense of purpose that specifies the appropriate ends for economic activity. The economist Kate Raworth has pointed out that a failure to do so has left a gap, which politicians fill by maximising national income. They are not obliged to ask if additional economic growth is sustainable. Governments ought to confront whether the growth of real GDP is too destabilising for global ecosystems. For decades the planetary boundary for resource use has been exceeded because conventional economics has encouraged political leaders to concentrate on goals that are largely irrelevant to human welfare.A confluence of world events provides a rare opportunity to change such thinking. Owing to the pandemic, global greenhouse emissions are forecast to drop by about 5% this year, compared with 2019. If sustained this would be the largest year-to-year drop since the second world war, and it could mark a turning point. If Joe Biden wins the US presidential election the world’s top three emitters, China, the US and the EU, which account for nearly half of global emissions, should all have mid-century net-zero targets, placing the 1.5˚C warming limit of the Paris agreement within reach. Preparations for the postponed Cop26 climate summit, to be held in Glasgow, are the ideal way for Britain to take a lead in a global discussion. Boris Johnson should use the platform to frame UK policy proposals boldly in terms of their impact on people and the planet, not just the economy. More