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The Sustainable Hour no. 491?| Transcipt | Podcast notes

Our guests in The Sustainable Hour on 21 February 2024 are Alopi Latukefu and Corinne Fagueret from the Edmund Rice Centre. We also listen to an excerpt of a talk by British climate scientist Kevin Anderson.

The conversation in this episode explores the impacts of climate change on Pacific Islands and the work of the Edmund Rice Centre in advocating for climate justice. It highlights the need for collaboration, innovation, and policy change to address the climate crisis.

We start the hour with acknowledging First Nations and the climate crisis, the impact of climate change on wildlife, the causes of extreme weather events, the suppression of climate protests, the need for a fossil fuel tax, legal battles and intimidation by fossil fuel companies, Australia’s potential as a renewable energy superpower, collaboration and innovation in the steel industry, and China’s rapid expansion of solar power

Then we turn to our two guests from the Edmund Rice Centre for a conversation about Australia’s role in climate change and Pacific relations, the importance of dialogue and trust building, and the challenges with reducing CO2 emissions while at the same time sustaining tourism in the Pacific. The Edmund Rice Centre, based in Australia, advocates for social justice and community education. Founded in 1996, they focus on three key areas:

• Indigenous peoples and reconciliation:?Supporting the rights and aspirations of Indigenous Australians.
• Refugees and asylum seekers:?Advocating for fairer treatment and policies for refugees and asylum seekers.
• Climate change:?Raising awareness about the impact of climate change,?especially on Pacific Island nations.

Through research, education, and public advocacy, the Edmund Rice Centre strives to challenge societal norms and promote a more just and equitable world.

You can support the centre here: www.erc.org.au/donate

. . .

In his introduction, Mik Aidt talks about saving the swifties. Save the Swifties is a campaign fighting to protect critically endangered Swift Parrots in Australia. They advocate for permanent protection of the birds’ forest habitat, threatened by logging, to ensure their survival.

We listen to an 8-minute excerpt of a video with British climate scientist professor Kevin Anderson: Where We Are Headed. He gives a frank update on the past and current policies heading to global climate catastrophe, calling for a rapid change of course.

We play this Nature Positive video narrated by Robert Plant.

And this Fossil Ad Ban video by health sector workers.

We end the Hour with the song ‘In This Together’ by Ellie Goulding and Steven Price, which was the theme song in the Netflix-series ‘Our Planet’.

. . .

Colin Mockett OAM‘s Global Outlook today begins in New York where the UN special rapporteur warned that the pressure from fossil fuel companies on governments to raise the fines and jail-time for climate protesters is having an effect worldwide. He said that they have gone past being unacceptable as they have resulted in “draconian anti-protest laws, massive sentences and court rulings forbidding protesters from explaining their motives to juries are now crushing ‘fundamental freedoms.’

He went on to list different countries, beginning with the UK, where, he said, ‘until recently it was very rare for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest,’ But now you can get six months merely for marching.” He then went on to detail that in Uganda, police assaulted and jailed activists during a peaceful protest in December against the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. Eleven university students were arrested; some allegedly were beaten and contracted typhoid or malaria while detained in an unsanitary maximum-security prison. Then in Spain, he noted that prosecutors have asked for nearly two years of prison time for protesters who threw beet-dyed water on a congressional building. In Germany, right-wing politicians smeared Letzte Generation (Last Generation) climate activists as “terrorists,” a framing duly echoed by some major news outlets.

In the USA, a thing called SLAPP lawsuits — Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — have been the fossil fuel industry’s ‘weapon of choice against protestors. ‘Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation whose oil pipeline sparked the Standing Rock protests in 2016, sued Greenpeace for $900 million, alleging that the group had orchestrated the protests,’ he said. That suit failed, partly because TV coverage showed Indigenous activists leading the protests. Nevertheless, Energy Transfer Partners then sued Greenpeace again, demanding $300 million in damages. “The aim of this suit is to put us out of business and scare others into silence,” said Ebony Twilley Martin, Greenpeace’s executive director talking about the case which is scheduled for trial in July.

Back home here in Australia, two of our nation’s top economists, ACCC chair Rod Sims and Age columnist Ross Garnaut have calculated that our nation could raise $100 billion in one year from a fossil fuel tax. They then took this a step further to say that if this were to be invested into subsidising green iron, aluminium and fuel production, it would set us on the path to becoming a world renewable energy superpower. And this, in turn, would create employment and raise the standard of living for all Australians.

They used the European 5-year average carbon price $90/tonne for their calculations, and our meteorological data as one of the sunniest and windiest places on the planet with bountiful open spaces – and concluded that ‘truly there are few countries better placed for the renewable era’. But the single big drawback to this progress, they said, is the Commonwealth Parliament. Because basically every state government and opposition supports good climate and energy policy, they noted. It’s only at federal level that politicians appear to be unable to make sensible climate decisions.

The only thing I’ll add to that is there’s an election coming this year so employ your vote wisely and talk to others about which parties we can trust.

Also this week the world’s two biggest miners – who both happen to be overseas-owned Australian corporations – teamed up to develop Australia’s first electric steel-smelting furnace. They are BHP and Rio Tinto who, along with Bluescope Steel, a former subsidiary of BHP, will share technology and research data on creating a pilot facility to produce clean steel – with the aim of commissioning the project as early as 2027. The aim is to reduce and then eliminate the use of coking coal in the steel-making process and replace it with sustainably-produced electricity. If successful, the process could be used in steel-mills globally, including those in China.

In that regard, it is worth spelling out here the enormity of what China is doing environmentally. The China Electricity Council says the country will add 210 GigaWatt of solar power to the nation’s grid this year. That’s twice the entire solar capacity installed in the US to date. And it won’t stop there. Carbon Brief says China’s output of solar panels was 310 GW in 2022; 500 GW in 2023 and it’s aimed to be 1000 GW in 2025. That’s four times the total installation of new solar worldwide last year.

And that comparison of just how slow our own government is moving ends our view of the global climate scene for this week.

. . .

Thanks to Alopi and Corinne for a fascinating discussion of the region which is in the front lines of the impacts of the climate crisis. What the Pacific Islands are already experiencing is what more and more countries will experience as the sea level rises. People in northern Australia are already having to relocate to Bouganville.

We continually ask: How many deaths, how much destruction is it going to take before we get real action on climate?

We’ll be back next week with more ideas on the transition we need to decarbonise our world.

“In Tonga and in other parts of the Pacific, people are having to move as a result of changes in climate and changes in their circumstances, and it may be not necessarily because of rising sea level in their homes, but because of the impact of substantial events, whether they are cyclones, or larger events that are related to climate change. These are where there’s inundations with king tides and other things where people’s homes have made it impossible, particularly where water, seawater has come in and basically salinated the freshwater lens in some contexts. And so people are already starting to move within Tonga. Tonga is a low-lying state, but not as low lying as some of the atoll states such as Kiribati and Kivali. So we have some room to move, but even there, the population is increasingly on a smaller amount of arable land, and that has its own impacts in terms of long-term sustainability and the ability to maintain populations. Pacific peoples have been in this region for thousands of years. Our histories, our traditions, our links to the place that we come from is part of who we are. And this impact of climate change, if people have to move and leave their homes, is not just about physical movement. It’s about social, cultural and other aspects.” ~ Alopi Latukefu, Director, Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education

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