Tag Archives for threats

Cattle prods and welfare cuts: mounting threats to Extinction Rebellion show demands are being heard, but ignored


Piero Moraro, Charles Sturt University

Scores of arrests have been made across Australia as the Extinction Rebellion enters its fifth day of protests.

The activists are desperately trying to force the Australian government to take serious and effective action against climate change. And their brand of civil disobedience has caused major inconveniences, from hanging off bridges to locking themselves to gates, vehicles or cement blocks.

But while inconvenient, their protests are still non-violent. This is an important point to stress, as the members of state and federal government peddle the view that they are criminals and anarchists.

In fact, as the movement grows stronger, so do the governments’ attempt to stop it. It shows the Extinction Rebellion’s demands are actually being heard, but at the same time, the drastic responses make it clear policy-makers will still choose to ignore them.

Draconian responses to social protest

Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk last month used social media to denounce the “sinister” tactics of “stupid” protesters. She claims the current XR protests are “absolutely ridiculous” and are endangering people’s lives.

Her government is now fast-tracking new legislation that would mean possessing a locking device could lead to a jail term of up to two years, or a fine of up to $6,000.

Pauline Hanson has said Queenslanders should use cattle prods on climate change activists, whom she labelled “unwashed idiots”. And a few days ago, Studio 10 host Kerri-Anne Kennerley said motorists should run over XR protesters.



Read more:
Animal rights activists in Melbourne: green-collar criminals or civil ‘disobedients’?

Peter Dutton and Michaelia Cash added fuel to the fire. The Home Affairs minister labelled the XR protesters “fringe-dwellers”, and claimed they should face mandatory jail sentences and welfare cuts.

Senator Cash added: “taxpayers should not be expected to subsidise the protests of others”, since protesting is not an exemption from a welfare recipient’s obligation to look for a job.

What’s more, NSW Police have imposed stringent bail conditions on protesters, traditionally used with members of bikie gangs. The bail conditions prevent them from “going near, or contacting or trying to go near or contact (except through a legal representative) any members of the group Extinction Rebellion”. They’re also not allowed to be within 2.5 kilometres of Sydney’s CBD.

These conditions had the curious result of also preventing defendants from attending court in the Sydney CBD.

Ad hoc laws

Yesterday, former Greens Senator Scott Ludlam had his bail conditions revoked by deputy chief magistrate Jane Mottley, who said they were not necessary given the low seriousness of the offences. It’s expected many more cases will be dismissed on the same ground.

Nevertheless, this use of bail conditions against XR activists raises serious concerns, as citizens are threatened with jail if they insist on partaking in political activism.

The conditions appear to violate basic democratic rights, namely, freedom of opinion, movement and assembly, according to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.



Read more:
Why does international condemnation on human rights mean so little to Australia?

But it’s not the first time we see these kinds of ad hoc responses to social protest. Earlier this year, the federal government introduced The Criminal Code Amendment (Agricultural Protection) Bill 2019, specifically targeting the growing animal rights movement in Australia.

Before then, the NSW government introduced the Inclosed Lands, Crimes and Law Enforcement Legislation Amendment (Interference) Bill 2016, targeting anti-mining protests.

And some have expressed concerns that Palaszczuk’s efforts to crack down on civil disobedience are reminiscent of the authoritarian Bjelke-Petersen era, when the QLD government allowed extreme police violence against peaceful protesters.



Read more:
Issues that swung elections: the dramatic and inglorious fall of Joh Bjelke-Petersen

But it’s worth remembering these XR protests have so far only caused traffic disruptions. While it constitutes a punishable offence, they are fine-only offences at most, as the judge noticed in Ludlam’s case.

Laws already exist to sanction those who breach traffic regulation. With reference to Queensland’s proposed anti-protest legislation, the Human Rights Law Centre noticed:

devices such as sleeping dragons, monopoles and tripods are commonly used in peaceful protest across Australia — our criminal laws already adequately cover their use when they cause major disruption.

The new laws may allow the police to search and arrest anyone who engages in a peaceful protest.

Communicative nature of protest

As I argue in my recent book on civil disobedience, this form of illegal protest has an inherent communicative nature. It seeks to elicit a reply from governments concerning the necessity of changing a law or policy.

From this standpoint, the tough, and seemingly unnecessary, responses to the XR movement are, paradoxically, encouraging. They reveal governments cannot continue to ignore the voices of environmental activists.

On the other hand, the way state and federal governments have chosen to respond show their unwillingness to entertain the activists’ demands.

Besides the mere goal of deterring people from engaging in further protest, governments are also following a familiar strategy involving the use of patronising language, aiming to dismiss XR activists as not worthy of its attention. For instance, the millions of young people who took part in the School Strike for Climate were just “skipping school”.



Read more:
‘Lock-on devices’ are a symbol of non-violent protest, but they might soon be banned in Queensland

These are all ways for governments to avoid having to answer for the legitimate questions about its controversial policies and careless attitude about scientists’ warning about rising global temperatures.

As they strives to come up with more demeaning labels for the XR movement, we are left to hope they may eventually apply their creative skills towards finding ways to finally cut Australia’s carbon emissions.The Conversation

Piero Moraro, Lecturer in Criminal Justice, Charles Sturt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The threats behind the plight of the puffin


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Louise Gentle, Nottingham Trent University

Puffins are facing a perilous future. Population numbers have fallen sharply, and there are even fears the sea bird could be heading towards extinction within the next 100 years.

A much loved and enigmatic creature, puffins are easily identified by their wonderfully coloured beaks. They waddle around in a characterful fashion and make the strangest of noises. Their endearing features have been used as the symbol of children’s books, and to illustrate many stamps – but they are now also appearing on lists of endangered species.

On Britain’s Farne Islands, numbers have gone down 12% on average over just five years, with one island’s population falling by 42%.

The common puffin, named after its puffed-up swollen appearance (although its scientific name, Fratercula arctica, arises from its resemblance to a friar wearing robes) has an extensive range across the northern hemisphere, with breeding colonies from Norway to Newfoundland.

Around 90% of the global population is found in Europe, with 60% of the population breeding in Iceland (which is also home to a tradition which involves children rescuing young, wayward puffins – “pufflings” – and returning them to the safety of the sea). The UK is home to 10% of the global puffin population, breeding on many islands and mainland coastal areas.

Although there are around 450,000 puffins in the UK, the species is threatened with extinction due to their rapid and ongoing population decline. Recent surveys of the Farne Islands revealed that despite a steady increase over the previous 70 years, numbers have declined by as much as 42% over the past five years.

Unfortunately, we know very little about the ecology of the puffin outside the breeding season. Although the birds amass in large numbers to breed, they spend two-thirds of their life alone, out in the north Atlantic sea. Consequently, they are very difficult to monitor.

What’s causing the decline?

Firstly, although puffins live for a fairly long time (the oldest recorded so far reached the age of 34), their breeding population is limited to a small number of sites. They also have a low reproductive rate, laying just one egg a year, which makes them particularly vulnerable to adverse changes in the environment and means they can take a long while to recover from negative impacts.

They are also hunted – by humans and other animals. Smoked or dried puffin is considered a delicacy (or a flavouring for porridge) in some places, such as Iceland and the Faroe Islands. But although they were once over harvested by people, hunting is now maintained at a sustainable level.

During the breeding season, puffins nest in burrows on clifftops. Although this offers the nest protection from aerial predators, such as gulls, chicks and eggs are not safe from mammals, including weasels and foxes. On Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, the population of puffins fell to just 10 pairs, but since the eradication of rats there, things are looking up. Nevertheless, the Arctic skua can be a particular problem as it steals food from adult puffins which is intended for their young.

Living on the open ocean makes the puffin highly susceptible to pollution such as oil spills. After the Torrey Canyon oil spill in 1967, the number of puffins breeding in France the following year decreased by a massive 85%.

The puffin feeds almost entirely on small fish, including sandeels, herring and capelin, which make up over 90% of the diet of pufflings.

The birds have a specialised beak with backwards facing spines, which prevents their prey (up to around 60 fish at a time) from falling out of their mouths when foraging. But in years where the main food source is low, many chicks starve to death.

Puffins have also suffered increased mortality from the rising frequency and intensity of extreme weather events associated with climate change. A recent succession of severe storms caused 54,000 seabirds, half of which were puffins, to be washed up along coasts. Starvation was cited as the main cause of death.

On a cliff edge

Sea temperatures have increased over the past 30 years, causing indirect effects on puffin survival. The rise in temperature decreases the abundance of plankton, which in turn leads to a reduction in the growth and survival of young sandeel and herring on which the puffins rely, particularly during the breeding season. Conditions in the North Sea are even causing some puffins to travel into the Atlantic, rather than the North Sea, in search of food – a perilous trek involving greater distances and different habitats.

It seems that a combination of factors are to blame for the decline in puffins, but the reduction in their food supply, particularly as a result of increased sea temperatures, appears to be the main culprit.

The ConversationWe need to continue monitoring puffins worldwide to better understand factors affecting populations. Hopefully, we can put measures in place to minimise pollution, reduce introduced predators and promote sustainable harvesting to try and ensure that the fate of this wonderful bird is not the same as that of the dodo.

Louise Gentle, Senior Lecturer in Behavioural Ecology, Nottingham Trent University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

It’s 30 years since scientists first warned of climate threats to Australia



File 20171129 29160 uqfgoi.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
The Barossa Valley in 1987 – the year that Australians (winemakers included) received their first formal warning of climate change.
Phillip Capper/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Marc Hudson, University of Manchester

Keen students of climate politics might recognise November 30 as the anniversary of the opening of the historic Paris climate summit two years ago. But you might not know that today also marks 30 years since Australian scientists first officially sounded the alarm over climate change, at a conference hailed as the dawn of the ongoing effort to forecast and monitor the future climate of our continent.

November 30, 1987, marked the start of the inaugural GREENHOUSE conference hosted by Monash University and attended by 260 delegates. The five-day meeting was convened as part of a new federal government plan in response to the burgeoning global awareness of the impending danger of global warming.

The conference’s convenor, the then CSIRO senior research scientist Graeme Pearman, had approached some 100 researchers in the months leading up to the conference. He gave them a scenario of likely climate change for Australia for the next 30 to 50 years, developed with his CSIRO colleague Barrie Pittock, and asked them to forecast the implications for agriculture, farming and other sectors.

As a result, the conference gave rise to a book called Greenhouse: Planning for Climate Change, which outlined rainfall changes, sea-level rise and other physical changes that are now, three decades on, all too familiar. As the contents page reveals, it also tackled impacts on society – everything from insurance to water planning, mosquito-borne diseases, and even ski fields.

Read more: After Bonn, 5 things to watch for in the coming year of global climate policy

Internationally, awareness of global warming had already been building for a couple of decades, and intensifying for a couple of years. While the ozone hole was hogging global headlines, a United Nations scientific meeting in Villach, Austria, in 1985 had issued a statement warning of the dangers posed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Pearman wasn’t at that meeting, but he was familiar with the problem. As he wrote after the 1987 conference, the strength of the Villach statement was “hardly a surprise, as recent evidence had suggested more strongly than ever that climatic change is now probable on timescales of decades”.

Meanwhile, the Commission for the Future, founded by the then federal science minister Barry Jones, was seeking a cause célèbre. The Australian Academy of Science organised a dinner of scientists to suggest possible scientific candidates.

The commission’s chair, Phillip Adams, recalls that problems such as nuclear war, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, were all proposed. Finally, though:

…the last bloke to talk was right at the far end of the table. Very quiet gentleman… He said, ‘You’re all wrong – it’s the dial in my laboratory, and the laboratories of my colleagues around the world.’ He said, ‘Every day, we see the needle going up, because of what we call the greenhouse effect.‘

Summit success

The GREENHOUSE 87 conference was hailed as a great success, creating new scientific networks and momentum. It was what we academics like to call a “field-configuring event”.

British magazine New Scientist covered the conference, while the Australian media reported on Jones’s opening speech, the problems of sea-level rise, and warnings of floods, fire, cyclones and disease

The GREENHOUSE conferences have continued ever since. After a sporadic first couple of decades, the meetings have been held biennally around the country since 2005; the latest was in Hobart in 2015, as there wasn’t a 2017 edition.

What happened next?

The Greenhouse Project helped to spark and channel huge public interest in and concern about climate change in the late 1980s. But politicians fumbled their response, producing a weak National Greenhouse Response Strategy in 1992.

The Commission for the Future was privatised, the federal government declined to fund a follow-up to the Greenhouse Project, and a new campaign group called Greenhouse Action Australia could not sustain itself.

Meanwhile, the scientists kept doing what scientists do: observing, measuring, communicating, refining. Pittock produced many more books and articles. Pearman spoke to Paul Keating’s cabinet in 1994 while it briefly pondered the introduction of a carbon tax. He retired in 2004, having been reprimanded and asked to resign, ironically enough for speaking out about climate change.

As I’ve written previously on The Conversation, Australian policymakers have been well served by scientists, but have sadly taken little real notice. And lest all the blame be put onto the Coalition, let’s remember that one chief scientific adviser, Penny Sackett, quit mid-term in 2011, when Labor was in government. She has never said exactly why, but barely met Kevin Rudd and never met his successor Julia Gillard.

Our problem is not the scientists. It’s not the science. It’s the politics. And it’s not (just) the politicians, it’s the ability (or inability) of citizens’ groups to put the policymakers under sustained and irresistible pressure, to create the new institutions we need for the “looming global-scale failures” we face.

A South Australian coda

While researching this article, I stumbled across the following fact. Fourteen years and a day before the Greenhouse 87 conference had begun, Don Jessop, a Liberal senator for South Australia, made this statement in parliament:

It is quite apparent to world scientists that the silent pollutant, carbon dioxide, is increasing in the atmosphere and will cause us great concern in the future. Other pollutants from conventional fuels are proliferating other gases in the atmosphere, not the least of these being the sulphurous gases which will be causing emphysema and other such health problems if we persist with this type of energy source. Of course, I am putting a case for solar energy. Australia is a country that can well look forward to a very prosperous future if it concentrates on solar energy right now.

The ConversationThat was 44 years ago. No one can say we haven’t been warned.

Marc Hudson, PhD Candidate, Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Australia: Double Dissolution Threat Over Carbon Tax


The link below is to an article that looks at threats by the Liberal Party to hold a double dissolution election should its plans to scrap the carbon tax are rejected by the senate.

For more visit:
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2013/s3762074.htm

The Great Barrier Reef


The link below is to an article that looks at threats to the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia.

For more visit:
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/great-barrier-reef-under-siege.htm

Amur Leopard Population Growing


The Amur Leopard population is growing and the link below is to an article that examines the threats to the population.

For more visit:
http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0409-hance-amur-leopard-fifty.html