August 2016, The Monthly, The message was clear. Brexit, Trump and the federal election show how the old categories of left and right are crumbling. Pauline Hanson is back in parliament, the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union, Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the United States’ border with Mexico, and the neoliberal agenda is failing badly at ballot boxes around the Western world. The old world order of the Washington Consensus has broken apart more quickly than a new one has been built, but the lack of a clear path forward in no way diminishes the significance of the collapse in public support for free trade, trickle-down economics and the privatisation of essential services. The new “right-wing” populists are hostile to all that the neoliberals held dear. The extent of the shift in public sentiment has been concealed by the chaos of new parties and new paradigms, which are being blamed, or credited, for the tumult. But it is not democracy that is in chaos, but rather the futile attempt to cram rapidly changing political alignments into the centuries-old categories of left and right. Take Brexit, for example. One of the Leave campaign’s most prominent voices, Nigel Farage, best known for his anti-immigrant politics, shamelessly argued that the UK’s financial contribution to the EU should be spent instead on improving publicly funded health care. This “left-wing” priority resonated across the political spectrum, and the political establishment spectacularly underestimated the potency of the issue. It was of symbolic importance, as was Britain’s migration program. The population voted for the promise of a national government that protected its people as well as its borders. Was Brexit a win for the “conservative right” on the issue of sovereignty, or was it a loss for the “libertarian right” on free trade? Read More here
Monthly Archives: August 2016
13 August 2016, Pacific Standard, America’s Latest 500-Year Rainstorm Is Underway Right Now in Louisiana. Observers are calling the record floods a “classic signal of climate change” — and high-resolution models predict another one to two feet of rain by Saturday evening. By mid-morning on Friday, more than a foot of rain had fallen near Kentwood, Louisiana, in just a 12-hour stretch — a downpour with an estimated likelihood of just once every 500 years, and roughly three months’ worth of rainfall during a typical hurricane season. It’s the latest in a string of exceptionally rare rainstorms that are stretching the definition of “extreme” weather. It’s exactly the sort of rainstorm that’s occurring more frequently as the planet warms. In response to the ongoing heavy rains, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards. declared a statewide state of emergency on Friday, and local governments aredistributing sandbags, conducting water rescues, and facilitating evacuations. The New Orleans Times-Picayune is maintaining a live blog of the latest developments. The Tickfaw River north of New Orleans soared 18 feet in about 12 hours to a new record crest on Friday morning, beating the water level of April 1983, and five feet higher than the high-water mark during Hurricane Isaac in 2012, the last hurricane to make landfall in Louisiana. Read More here
11 August 2016, NationTalk, IPCC meetings in Geneva, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is holding two meetings this month in Geneva to advance work on its forthcoming reports. From 15 to 18 August 2016, around 85 experts joined by members of the IPCC Bureau will take part in the scoping meeting for the Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (SR1.5). The IPCC was invited to prepare this Special Report by the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris in December 2015. The Conference reached an agreement to limit the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 ºC above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 ºC. The report will be delivered in 2018, in time for a “facilitative dialogue” that will take place that year to take stock of progress under the Paris Agreement. The Special Report is being developed under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups. Read More here
11 August 2016, Renew Economy, Frydenberg to push ahead with repeal of ARENA grant funding. New environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg says the Coalition government intends to go ahead with its plan to strip $1.3 billion of funds from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and end its grant-funding mechanisms, and says he expects Labor to support it. In an interview with RenewEconomy on Thursday, Frydenberg also canvassed other policy areas under his new combined portfolio. Among the highlights: He repeated his pledge that the current renewable energy target is “set in stone”, despite a big push from some in the fossil fuel industry to have the target weakened further. He will seek “co-ordination” from the states on their climate and energy policies, although he did not say whether he would be insisting that individual states abandon their own targets. (Three states – South Australia, Victoria and Queensland – and one territory, the ACT, have renewable targets that are more ambitious and longer lasting than the federal target, which is equivalent to a 23.5 per cent target by 2020). In a response that will disappoint many in the climate policy arena, Frydenberg insisted that next year’s climate policy review will be a “sit-rep” – a situation report that will assess the ability of current policies to meet existing targets – and will not look at longer-dated targets (such a zero emissions by 2050), or as an opportunity to set more ambitious targets. He says the price of gas is the key component of future electricity prices, and he will be bringing “many” of the recommendations by the ACCC and the AEMC to the COAG energy ministers meeting next week. He said he was monitoring the progress of solar thermal with storage plants, such as the new $1 billion plant in Nevada, although he did not mention any specific policy or initiative to bring the technology to Australia. The tone of the interview – which you can read in full here – was one of caution. Frydenberg shows no sign of deviating from Coalition policies, even if he does recognise that a lot of effort needs to be thrown at climate and clean energy policies to avoid an economic and political train crash. Read More here