Winter is ending in Australia, but it is worrisome that their August was among the hottest on record this year, presaging a hot dry summer to come, and raising the real risk of further massive bush fires of the sort that scorched the countryside and killed billions of animals in 2019-2020. The continent-country is highly vulnerable to climate change, with its two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, right on the sea and facing coastal erosion from sea level rise. It is unfortunate that so many Australian politicians and firms have found it so difficult to let go of coal and fossil gas. Although Australia is a relatively small country, the emissions of which are not all that consequential, it just sets a poor example for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries, if a very vulnerable country like Australia is a big coal user. How can it scold China and India for using so much coal, which really is consequential for the fate of the world, if Canberra is itself so irresponsible?

Although Australia has had a love affair with coal, the dirtiest and unhealthiest of the fossil fuels, even that addiction is beginning to subside. Less that 50% of the country’s electricity now comes from coal, an unprecedented development. Obviously, not all the states are as environmentally conscious and ambitious as South Australia.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory are particularly bad actors, actually expanding their use of coal and fossil gas.

Some other states have made great strides and have ambitious goals. South Australia has gone in big on solar energy and has largely dumped coal, and is employing batteries to store and use the solar energy when it is needed at night and at usage peaks during the day. The state wants to have all its electricity come from renewables by 2027, in only three years. And it is a highly plausible plan. Already, 70% of the electricity in South Australia comes from renewables, the best record of any large state by far, though the small Australian Capital Territory in which the capital of Canberra nestles has reached 100% renewable electricity generation and in Tasmania it is 98.2%. South Australia is lightly populated, but some of the more populous states are beginning to make strides as well.

In the country as a whole, there is good news. Since 2018, Australia has doubled the share of renewables in its electricity grid, and much of this increase in clean electricity has been spearheaded by states and territories rather than the federal government.

With a population of 26 million (a little bigger than Florida, a little smaller than Texas), Australia has about 10 million households. A full 3.6 million of them, about 36 percent, have rooftop solar installations. Half of all households in Queensland now have panels on their roofs.

“Outback Solar,” Digital, Dream /Dreamworld v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024.

In the US, a country 13 times the size of Australia, only 4.5 million households have rooftop solar. To be at the same level as Australia, we’d need 47 million households with rooftop solar. Given how sunny it is in the US south and southwest, it is crazy that we don’t have more, but conservative state legislatures in the back pocket of Big Carbon have often legislated obstacles. Australia’s homeowners clearly have managed to outmaneuver the Coal Lobby there. (We have solar panels and even in Michigan they much reduce our bill most of the year.)

The most populous Australia state, New South Wales, with over 8 million people, has made some strides in renewables. Some 35.6% of its electricity is from renewables, and 34% of its households have rooftop solar. 13% of its travel uses shared transportation, and there is an uptick in purchases of electric vehicles, though the absolute numbers remain small. NSW has banned offshore drilling and mining for fossil fuels.

South Australia, despite its thin population, is a technological leader in renewables. Not only do renewables supply 74.4% of electricity, but it has large battery projects that allow sunshine to be captured and used at night and at peak hours. The state hopes to phase out gas electricity plants in only a few years.

Batteries have also been key to California’s remarkable uptake of renewables.

Now Australia as a whole has six enormous battery projects in the pipeline.

At $1.7 trillion, Australia has the 13th largest GDP in the world. If the G20 states can get to carbon zero by 2050, that will solve the bulk of our climate worries, since all the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution will be absorbed by the oceans over time. The temperature will immediately stop rising and will decline over time. If we go on spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere after 2050, however, we will outrun the capacity of the oceans to absorb them, and the world will get very hot, and the climate could go chaotic.

In other venues, Biden has repeatedly highlighted Washington’s efforts to incorporate the “Global South” — the developing nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — into just such a broad-based U.S.-led coalition. At the recent G7 summit of leading Western powers in southern Italy, for example, he backed measures supposedly designed to engage those countries “in a spirit of equitable and strategic partnership.”

But all of his soaring rhetoric on the subject scarcely conceals an inescapable reality: the United States is more isolated internationally than at any time since the Cold War ended in 1991. It has also increasingly come to rely on a tight-knit group of allies, all of whom are primarily English-speaking and are part of the Anglo-Saxon colonial diaspora. Rarely mentioned in the Western media, the Anglo-Saxonization of American foreign and military policy has become a distinctive — and provocative — feature of the Biden presidency.

America’s Growing Isolation

To get some appreciation for Washington’s isolation in international affairs, just consider the wider world’s reaction to the administration’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden sought to portray the conflict there as a heroic struggle between the forces of democracy and the brutal fist of autocracy. But while he was generally successful in rallying the NATO powers behind Kyiv — persuading them to provide arms and training to the beleaguered Ukrainian forces, while reducing their economic links with Russia — he largely failed to win over the Global South or enlist its support in boycotting Russian oil and natural gas.

Despite what should have been a foreboding lesson, Biden returned to the same universalist rhetoric in 2023 (and this year as well) to rally global support for Israel in its drive to extinguish Hamas after that group’s devastating October 7th rampage. But for most non-European leaders, his attempt to portray support for Israel as a noble response proved wholly untenable once that country launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians commenced. For many of them, Biden’s words seemed like sheer hypocrisy given Israel’s history of violating U.N. resolutions concerning the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and its indiscriminate destruction of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, and aid centers in Gaza. In response to Washington’s continued support for Israel, many leaders of the Global South have voted against the United States on Gaza-related measures at the U.N. or, in the case of South Africa, have brought suit against Israel at the World Court for perceived violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In the face of such adversity, the White House has worked tirelessly to bolster its existing alliances, while trying to establish new ones wherever possible. Pity poor Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has made seemingly endless trips to Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East trying to drum up support for Washington’s positions — with consistently meager results.

Here, then, is the reality of this anything but all-American moment: as a global power, the United States possesses a diminishing number of close, reliable allies – most of which are members of NATO, or countries that rely on the United States for nuclear protection (Japan and South Korea), or are primarily English-speaking (Australia and New Zealand). And when you come right down to it, the only countries the U.S. really trusts are the “Five Eyes.”

For Their Eyes Only

The “Five Eyes” (FVEY) is an elite club of five English-speaking countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — that have agreed to cooperate in intelligence matters and share top-secret information. They all became parties to what was at first the bilateral UKUSA Agreement, a 1946 treaty for secret cooperation between the two countries in what’s called “signals intelligence” — data collected by electronic means, including by tapping phone lines or listening in on satellite communications. (The agreement was later amended to include the other three nations.) Almost all of the Five Eyes’ activities are conducted in secret, and its existence was not even disclosed until 2010. You might say that it constitutes the most secretive, powerful club of nations on the planet.

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The origins of the Five Eyes can be traced back to World War II, when American and British codebreakers, including famed computer theorist Alan Turing, secretly convened at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking establishment, to share intelligence gleaned from solving the German “Enigma” code and the Japanese “Purple” code. At first an informal arrangement, the secretive relationship was formalized in the British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement of 1943 and, after the war ended, in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946. That arrangement allowed for the exchange of signals intelligence between the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — an arrangement that persists to this day and undergirds what has come to be known as the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Then, in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, that intelligence-sharing agreement was expanded to include those other three English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. For secret information exchange, the classification “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” was then affixed to all the documents they shared, and from that came the “Five Eyes” label. France, Germany, Japan, and a few other countries have since sought entrance to that exclusive club, but without success.

Although largely a Cold War artifact, the Five Eyes intelligence network continued operating right into the era after the Soviet Union collapsed, spying on militant Islamic groups and government leaders in the Middle East, while eavesdropping on Chinese business, diplomatic, and military activities in Asia and elsewhere. According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, such efforts were conducted under specialized top-secret programs like Echelon, a system for collecting business and government data from satellite communications, and PRISM, an NSA program to collect data transmitted via the Internet.

As part of that Five Eyes endeavor, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia jointly maintain a controversial, highly secret intelligence-gathering facility at Pine Gap, Australia, near the small city of Alice Springs. Known as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), it’s largely run by the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Its main purpose, according to Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers, is to eavesdrop on radio, telephone, and internet communications in Asia and the Middle East and share that information with the intelligence and military arms of the Five Eyes. Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza was launched, it is also said to be gathering intelligence on Palestinian forces in Gaza and sharing that information with the Israeli Defense Forces. This, in turn, prompted a rare set of protests at the remote base when, in late 2023, dozens of pro-Palestinian activists sought to block the facility’s entry road.

From all accounts, in other words, the Five Eyes collaboration remains as robust as ever. As if to signal that fact, FBI director Christopher Wray offered a rare acknowledgement of its ongoing existence in October 2023 when he invited his counterparts from the FVEY countries to join him at the first Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit in Palo Alto, California, a gathering of business and government officials committed to progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. Going public, moreover, was a way of normalizing the Five Eyes partnership and highlighting its enduring significance.

Anglo-Saxon Solidarity in Asia

The Biden administration’s preference for relying on Anglophone countries in promoting its strategic objectives has been especially striking in the Asia-Pacific region. The White House has been clear that its primary goal in Asia is to construct a network of U.S.-friendly states committed to the containment of China’s rise. This was spelled out, for example, in the administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States of 2022. Citing China’s muscle-flexing in Asia, it called for a common effort to resist that country’s “bullying of neighbors in the East and South China” and so protect the freedom of commerce. “A free and open Indo-Pacific can only be achieved if we build collective capacity for a new age,” the document stated. “We will pursue this through a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions.”

That “latticework,” it indicated, would extend to all American allies and partners in the region, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea, as well as friendly European parties (especially Great Britain and France). Anyone willing to help contain China, the mantra seems to go, is welcome to join that U.S.-led coalition. But if you look closely, the renewed prominence of Anglo-Saxon solidarity becomes ever more evident.

Of all the military agreements signed by the Biden administration with America’s Pacific allies, none is considered more important in Washington than AUKUS, a strategic partnership agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Announced by the three member states on Sept. 15, 2021, it contains two “pillars,” or areas of cooperation — the first focused on submarine technology and the second on AI, autonomous weapons, as well as other advanced technologies. As in the FVEY arrangement, both pillars involve high-level exchanges of classified data, but also include a striking degree of military and technological cooperation. And note the obvious: there is no equivalent U.S. agreement with any non-English-speaking country in Asia.

Consider, for instance, the Pillar I submarine arrangement. As the deal now stands, Australia will gradually retire its fleet of six diesel-powered submarines and purchase three to five top-of-the-line U.S.-made Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs), while it works with the United Kingdom to develop a whole new class of subs, the SSN-AUKUS, to be powered by an American-designed nuclear propulsion system. But — get this — to join, the Australians first had to scrap a $90 billion submarine deal with a French defense firm, causing a severe breach in the Franco-Australian relationship and demonstrating, once again, that Anglo-Saxon solidarity supersedes all other relationships.

Now, with the French out of the picture, the U.S. and Australia are proceeding with plans to build those Los Angeles-class SSNs — a multibillion-dollar venture that will require Australian naval officers to study nuclear propulsion in the United States. When the subs are finally launched (possibly in the early 2030s), American submariners will sail with the Australians to help them gain experience with such systems. Meanwhile, American military contractors will be working with Australia and the UK designing and constructing a next-generation sub, the SSN-AUKUS, that’s supposed to be ready in the 2040s. The three AUKUS partners will also establish a joint submarine base near Perth in Western Australia.

Pillar II of AUKUS has received far less media attention but is no less important. It calls for American, British, Australian scientific and technical cooperation in advanced technologies, including AI, robotics, and hypersonics, aimed at enhancing the future military capabilities of all three, including through the development of robot submarines that could be used to spy on or attack Chinese ships and subs.

Aside from the extraordinary degree of cooperation on sensitive military technologies — far greater than the U.S. has with any other countries — the three-way partnership also represents a significant threat to China. The substitution of nuclear-powered subs for diesel-powered ones in Australia’s fleet and the establishment of a joint submarine base at Perth will enable the three AUKUS partners to conduct significantly longer undersea patrols in the Pacific and, were a war to break out, attack Chinese ships, ports, and submarines across the region. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the Chinese have repeatedly denounced the arrangement, which represents a potentially mortal threat to them.

Unintended Consequences

It’s hardly a surprise that the Biden administration, facing growing hostility and isolation in the global arena, has chosen to bolster its ties further with other Anglophone countries rather than make the policy changes needed to improve relations with the rest of the world. The administration knows exactly what it would have to do to begin to achieve that objective: discontinue arms deliveries to Israel until the fighting stops in Gaza; help reduce the burdensome debt load of so many developing nations; and promote food, water security, and other life-enhancing measures in the Global South. Yet, despite promises to take just such steps, President Biden and his top foreign policy officials have focused on other priorities — the encirclement of China above all else — while the inclination to lean on Anglo-Saxon solidarity has only grown.

However, by reserving Washington’s warmest embraces for its anglophone allies, the administration has actually been creating fresh threats to U.S. security. Many countries in contested zones on the emerging geopolitical chessboard, especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, were once under British colonial rule and so anything resembling a potential Washington-London neocolonial restoration is bound to prove infuriating to them. Add to that the inevitable propaganda from China, Iran, and Russia about a developing Anglo-Saxon imperial nexus and you have an obvious recipe for widespread global discontent.

It’s undoubtedly convenient to use the same language when sharing secrets with your closest allies, but that should hardly be the deciding factor in shaping this nation’s foreign policy. If the United States is to prosper in an increasingly diverse, multicultural world, it will have learn to think and act in a far more multicultural fashion — and that should include eliminating any vestiges of an exclusive Anglo-Saxon global power alliance.

Copyright 2024 Michael Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has taken Australian policy a modest step towards embracing recognition of a Palestine state ahead of a two-state solution, as a pathway to a lasting Middle East peace.

In a Tuesday speech to an Australian National University national security conference dinner, Wong said the international community was “now considering the question of Palestinian statehood as a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution”.

She quoted British Foreign Secretary David Cameron saying the United Kingdom “will look at the issue of recognising a Palestinian state, including at the United Nations”. Cameron said this could make a two-state solution irreversible.

“There are always those who claim recognition is rewarding an enemy,” Wong said. But she said this was wrong on two counts.

“First, because Israel’s own security depends on a two-state solution.

“There is no long-term security for Israel unless it is recognised by the countries of its region.

“But the normalisation agenda that was being pursued before [the] October 7 [Hamas attacks] cannot proceed without progress on Palestinian statehood,” she said.

Australian government considering recognising Palestinian statehood | ABC News Video

“Second, because there is no role for Hamas in a future Palestinian state. Hamas is a terrorist organisation which has the explicit intent of the destruction of the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Wong said recognising a Palestinian state, which could only exist beside a secure Israel, did not just offer the Palestinians “an opportunity to realise their aspirations”, but also “strengthens the forces for peace, and undermines extremism”. The extremists included Hamas, Iran and Iran’s other proxies in the region.

“A two-state solution is the only hope to break the endless cycle of violence,” she said.

The Albanese government’s policy has been for a two-state solution, but it has not embraced recognising a Palestinian state ahead of that. The Labor Party’s 2023 national platform goes further. It says Labor:

• supports the recognition and right of Israel and Palestine to exist as two states within secure and recognised borders

• calls on the Australian government to recognise Palestine as a state.

In her speech Wong said Israel “must make major and immediate changes” to its military operations, in order to protect civilians, journalists and aid workers.

Earlier this week, the government appointed a former chief of the Australian Defence Force, Mark Binskin, to probe Israel’s investigation of its attack on a World Central Kitchen’s aid convoy in Gaza. Seven people, including Australian Zomi Frankcom, were killed.

Wong said Israel “must comply with the binding orders of the International Court of Justice, including to enable the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance at scale”.

The foreign minister also expressed dismay at the local divisions the conflict is causing.

“It is disheartening to witness the number of Australians that increasingly struggle to discuss this conflict without condemning their fellow citizens. This imperils our democracy. We have to keep listening to each other; respecting each other.

“But I have heard language demonstrating that people are losing respect for each other’s humanity. Blatant antisemitism and Islamophobia.”

She condemned politicians who were “manipulating legitimate and heartfelt community concern for their own ends.

“The Greens political party is willing to purposely amplify disinformation, exploiting distress in a blatant and cynical play for votes. With no regard for the social disharmony they are fuelling. This is not some game. There are consequences.

“At the same time, [Opposition Leader Peter] Dutton reflexively dismisses concern for Palestinians as ‘Hamas sympathising’. On this, and in his approach to the world, Mr Dutton needs to decide if he wants to be a leader in difficult times – or if he wants to continue being a wrecking ball, making those times even more difficult.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

This milestone is important, since it was reached entirely with rooftop solar on residential and business edifices rather than with industrial-scale solar farms, of which South Australia has some 300 MW worth. Some observers had questioned whether rooftop solar could supply 100% of an electricity grid, arguing that since it is a distributed system it is inherently unstable and would cause blackouts. It turns out that rooftop solar can be made stable, with superfast computer adjustments of feed inputs, with batteries, and other technology.

“South Australia. By TUBS – Own work This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Adobe Illustrator. This file was uploaded with Commonist. This vector image includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this file: Australia location map.svg (by NordNordWest)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16876418.

South Australia at one point supplied 114% of its electricity consumption on Saturday, such that some power inputs had to be switched off or the excess exported, or stored in the state’s 150 megawatt mega-battery.

As of early July 2023, 379,860 rooftop solar systems had been installed across South Australia, with a capacity to generate 2.186 gigawatts of electricity. That is roughly the output of two small nuclear reactors. Except the rooftop panels will never melt down or threaten anyone with radiation or become strategic targets in a war (as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has become in Ukraine).

Australia as a whole puts up about 3.25 gigawatts worth of new rooftop solar up every year.

7 News Australia: “Self-sufficient William Creek powered entirely by solar | 7NEWS”

South Australia only a decade ago was mainly dependent on dirty coal for its electricity. On Saturday, coal use fell to a new low, as did fossil gas use. A small amount of fossil gas capacity has been kept in order to stabilize the grid, but it may now be phased out as unnecessary. South Australia is on track to get 100% of its electricity from solar and wind by 2027. So Saturday’s extraordinary statistic is four years away from being an ordinary fact of life.

South Australia, with an area as big as Texas, has a population of about 1,854,000 — more than three-fourths of which lives in Adelaide down on the coast. I had noted earlier, “Adelaide was originally populated by the aboriginal Kaurna people, who called it Tarndanyangga. It is now about as populous as San Diego. It was settled by free British immigrants, unlike the rest of Australia, which was a penal colony. In the nineteenth century, “Afghans” were brought in as camel drivers. It has the oldest continuously functioning mosque in Australia, constructed in 1889, and the state is known for its dedication to religious freedom.”

The United States has many areas that are just as suited to rooftop solar as South Australia, but often Republican politicians working for Big Coal and Gas have put in punitive charges to discourage consumers from adopting them.

(The Conversation) – Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking.

Afshar was born in Iran and migrated to Australia in 2007. She began her practice as a documentary photographer in Tehran, having originally been attracted to acting.

Staging and creative intervention would become significant features of her work.

Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of.

Afshar is now one of Australia’s most significant photo media artists, so it’s a surprise that Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is her first major survey exhibition.

What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.

Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit.

Familiarity and distance

The exhibition is made up of six bodies of work, the first of which began with the passing away of her father in Iran.

In the exodus, I love you more (2014–) is a portrait of her home country formed by experiences of familiarity and distance. The artist is both at home and searching, like an outsider. Images suggest at times an intimate proximity, and at others a separation akin to the one made by raising a camera to your eye.

Afshar examines her experience of migration and, she tells me, seeks to “dismantle the idea of there being one way of seeing Iran”.

The final image in this series shows the erasure of a woman’s face in a painted Persian miniature.

In the adjoining room, the new series In turn (2023) is a suite of large, framed photographs of Iranian women based in Australia. Many images show them as they tenderly braid one another’s hair. These women are unidentifiable, apart from artist and activist Mahla Karimian, who appears airborne with a pair of flying doves.

This work was catalysed by the women-led protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman arrested in September 2022 for not following Iran’s strict female dress codes. The uprising filled the streets with women chanting “Women, Life, Freedom!” and “Say her name!” in fearless defiance of authorities, who responded with murderous retaliation.

Afshar was observing her homeland from afar. She says she wanted to “share voices the media was ignoring”. She was inspired by social media images of women plaiting each other’s hair in public: a rebellious act that echoes a practice of female Kurdish fighters preparing for battle.

But the images aren’t violent. They’re quietly peaceful, showing solidarity in grief, hope and determination. In making this “visual letter” to her Iranian sisters, Afshar has risked long-term exile from her country of birth.

Resolute defiance

Much of Afshar’s work fearlessly tells stories that have been hidden or misrepresented.

Remain (2018) was made in collaboration with asylum seekers detained on Manus Island.

This work is made up of a series of austere, absorbing portraits and a large-scale two-channel video installation.

We see men imprisoned in a place that would otherwise resemble paradise. We hear their voices recounting experiences of trauma and displacement. But, with Afshar, they co-create performative, narrative-evoking works that avoid degrading cliches of victimhood.

The most widely recognised image in this series is a portrait of Kurdish Iranian writer and filmmaker Behrouz Boochani, who chose to be pictured alongside fire. Smoke and flames echo the ardent strength of his gaze. This strength allowed him to emerge a free man after six years of incarceration.

In Behold (2016), once more we see acts of resolute defiance by people performing for the camera. Afshar was invited by a group of gay men to observe re-enacted gestures of protection and intimacy outlawed in most of the Middle East.

Unable to freely express their love in society, they disclose and affirm it for Afshar and her lens.

Agonistes (2020) pays homage to a group of Australian whistleblowers who appear as a Greek chorus of heroic truth tellers.

Created through a complex process of photographic recording and 3D printing that conjures lifelike detail, the portraits look like sculpted marble busts. But this rendering leaves the eyes blank, and captions describing the corruption revealed by each figure don’t divulge their names.

Afshar maintains her practice of disclosing truth while protecting those who have the courage to tell it.

Being alive is breaking

Speak the wind (2015–22) returns us to Iran, to the Strait of Hormuz, where “ill winds” are said to blow. African slaves were brought here over centuries, a trade only stopped in the 1920s.

Afshar’s photographs and video imagery explore a place haunted by history. We see the outward manifestations of an invisible wind (dramatically carved rock formations, ripples in water, flowing fabric). Shrouded figures bow on the dry earth, seeking cure from possession by malicious spirits.

Afshar investigates to what extent we are captives of history (in Australia we must grapple with the legacy of colonisation). In making this lyrical work, Afshar again collaborated with local people, some who made drawings of “wind spirits” they said they had encountered.

The title of the exhibition was inspired by lines in a poem by Kaveh Akbar:

a curve is a straight line broken at all its points so much
of being alive is breaking.

Hoda Afshar’s work addresses conflict, injustice, mobility and the often fragile state of being alive. It reminds us that dominant powers can be challenged by exposing truth and envisioning something new.

Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until January 21 2024.

Tom Williams, Lecturer – Visual Arts, University of Wollongong

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

(The Conversation) – Australia’s minister for foreign affairs, Penny Wong, has announced Australia will return to use of the term “occupied Palestinian territories”.

The Australian government will use this phrase to describe the territories in the West Bank and Gaza that Israel occupied in 1967.

Australian officials have generally avoided the use of “occupied” and “occupation” in relation to Palestine since 2014.

This move by Australia is an important means of signalling condemnation of Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian lands. It reorients Australia towards the orthodox position on the occupation under international law.

It has been reported that some at the upcoming Labor national conference will agitate for the government to recognise Palestinian statehood.

Former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans argues the time is right for the government to make such a move. He notes that 138 of the UN’s 193 member states have already done so.

There is no legal bar to Australia recognising Palestine as a state. Rather, it would be a political decision for the government of the day, aimed at promoting the long called-for two-state solution.

The position under international law

Since the United Nations (UN) was established in 1945, the status of Palestine has been a perennial question of modern international law. The UN General Assembly and Security Council have resolved that Israel violates the prohibition on the use of force through its occupation of Palestinian territories. Palestine has held the special status of “non-member observer state” in the UN since 2012.

Photo by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash

In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) gave an advisory opinion on the implications of Israel’s construction of a wall in the occupied Palestinian territories. The ICJ concluded the wall served to protect illegal settlements, shore up annexation of Palestinian lands and deny self-determination for the Palestinian people.

The UN’s longstanding condemnation of Israel’s occupation was reasserted in a General Assembly resolution on December 30 2022. The resolution noted Israel’s obligations, as the occupying power, to:

• comply with the Geneva Conventions on the protection of civilians during war

• cease violating the human rights of the Palestinian people

• cease efforts to modify Palestinian territory through illegal settlements, and bring an end to the occupation

• stop construction and dismantle the wall it has been constructing in the occupied territories

• respect the right to self-determination of the people of Palestine and the territorial unity of the occupied territories

• end the blockade of the Gaza strip and other onerous limitations on freedom of movement for people and goods.

The General Assembly also took the significant step of requesting a new advisory opinion from the ICJ on the legal implications of Israel’s continuing occupation. In January 2023 the UN secretary-general submitted the following questions to the ICJ:

1. What are the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures?

2. How do the policies and practices of Israel […] affect the legal status of the occupation, and what are the legal consequences that arise for all States and the United Nations from this status?

Image by helen35 from Pixabay

The ICJ is now reviewing submissions by UN member states on these questions. It is likely some submissions will explicitly raise the question of whether Israel’s policies and practices in Palestine amount to the crime of apartheid.

What happens now?

The ICJ’s eventual advisory opinion will not be a binding decision on Israel. However, it will be an authoritative view by the world court. Based on extensive precedent in international law and practice, the ICJ will surely conclude that Israel remains in illegal occupation of Palestine.

The Australian government’s reorientation on the status of Palestine is aligned with international law and state practice. Australia, along with all UN member states, is obliged to promote respect for international law and universal human rights.

Amy Maguire, Associate Professor in Human Rights and International Law, University of Newcastle

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

In a historic ruling today, a Queensland court has said the massive Clive Palmer-owned Galilee Basin coal project should not go ahead because of its contribution to climate change, its environmental impacts, and because it would erode human rights.

The case was mounted in 2020 by a First Nations-led group of young people aged 13 to 30 called Youth Verdict. It was the first time human rights arguments were used in a climate change case in Australia.

The link between human rights and climate change is being increasingly recognised overseas. In September this year, for example, a United Nations committee decided that by failing to adequately address the climate crisis, Australia’s Coalition government violated the human rights of Torres Strait Islanders.

Youth Verdict’s success today builds on this momentum. It heralds a new era for climate change cases in Australia by youth activists, who have been frustrated with the absence of meaningful federal government policy.

Via Pixabay.

1.58 billion tonnes of emissions

The Waratah Coal mine operation proposes to extract up to 40 million tonnes of coal from the Galilee Basin each year, over the next 25 years. This would produce 1.58 billion tonnes of carbon emissions, and is four times more coal extraction than Adani’s operation.

While the project has already received approval at the federal government level, it also needs a state government mining lease and environmental authority to go ahead. Today, Queensland land court President Fleur Kingham has recommended to the state government that both entitlements be refused.

In making this recommendation, Kingham reflected on how the global landscape has changed since the Paris Agreement in 2015, and since the last major challenge to a mine in Queensland in 2016: Adani’s Carmichael mine.

She drew a clear link between the mining of this coal, its ultimate burning by a third party overseas, and the project’s material contribution to global emissions. She concluded that the project poses “unacceptable” climate change risks to people and property in Queensland.

The Queensland Human Rights Act requires a decision-maker to weigh up whether there is any justifiable reason for limiting a human right, which could incorporate a consideration of new jobs. Kingham decided the importance of preserving the human rights outweighed the potential A$2.5 billion of economic benefits of the proposed mine.

From a legal perspective, I believe there are four reasons in particular this case is so significant.

1. Rejecting an entrenched assumption

A major barrier to climate change litigation in Queensland has been the “market substitution assumption”, also known as the “perfect substitution argument”. This is the assertion that a particular mine’s contribution to climate change is net zero, because if that mine doesn’t supply coal, then another will.

Kingham rejected this argument. She noted that the economic benefits of the proposed project are uncertain with long-term global demand for thermal coal set to decline. She observed that there’s a real prospect the mine might not be viable for its projected life, rebutting the market substitution assumption.

This is an enormous victory for environmental litigants as this was a previously entrenched argument in Australia’s legal system and policy debate.

2. Evidence from First Nations people

It was also the first time the court took on-Country evidence from First Nations people in accordance with their traditional protocols. Kingham and legal counsel travelled to Gimuy (around Cairns) and Traditional Owners showed how climate change has directly harmed their Country.

As Youth Verdict co-director and First Nations lead Murrawah Johnson put it:

We are taking this case against Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal mine because climate change threatens all of our futures. For First Nations peoples, climate change is taking away our connection to Country and robbing us of our cultures which are grounded in our relationship to our homelands.

Climate change will prevent us from educating our young people in their responsibilities to protect Country and deny them their birth rights to their cultures, law, lands and waters.

This decision reflects the court’s deep engagement with First Nations’ arguments, in considering the impacts of climate change on First Nations people.

3. The human rights implications

In yet another Australian first, the court heard submissions on the human rights implications of the mine.

The Land Court of Queensland has a unique jurisdiction in these matters, because it makes a recommendation, rather than a final judgment. This recommendation must be taken into account by the final decision-makers – in this case, the Queensland resources minister, and the state Department of Environment and Science.

In an earlier proceeding, Kingham found the land court itself is subject to obligations under Queensland’s Human Rights Act. This means she must properly consider whether a decision to approve the mine would limit human rights and if so, whether limits to those human rights can be demonstrably justified.

Kingham found approving the mine would contribute to climate change impacts, which would limit:

• the right to life
• the cultural rights of First Nations peoples
• the rights of children
• the right to property and to privacy and home
• the right to enjoy human rights equally.

Internationally, there are clear links made between climate change and human rights. For example, climate change is worsening heatwaves, risking a greater number of deaths, thereby affecting the right to life.

4. A victory for a nature refuge

Kingham also considered the environmental impacts of the proposed mine on the Bimblebox Nature Refuge – 8,000 hectares semi-arid woodland, home to a recorded 176 bird species, in the Galilee Basin.

She deemed these impacts unacceptable, as “the ecological values of Bimblebox [could be] seriously and possibly irreversibly damaged”.

She also observed that the costs of climate change to people in Queensland have not been fully accounted for, nor have the costs of mining on the Bimblebox Nature Refuge. Further, she found the mine would violate Bimblebox Alliance’s right to family and home.

Via Pixabay.

Making history

This case has made legal history. It is the first time a Queensland court has recommended refusal of a coal mine on climate change grounds, and the first case linking human rights and climate change in Australia. As Kingham concluded:

Approving the application would risk disproportionate burdens for future generations, which does not give effect to the goal of intergenerational equity.

The future of the project remains unclear. But in a year marked by climate-related disasters, the land court’s decision offers a ray of hope that Queensland may start to leave coal in the ground.

Justine Bell-James, Associate Professor, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

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

She said, “This reverses the Morrison Government’s recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” She later added, “I regret that Mr Morrison’s decision to play politics resulted in Australia’s shifting position, and the distress these shifts have caused to many people in the Australian community who care deeply about this issue.”

Former PM Scott Morrison, a right-wing leader of the “Liberal” Party (which in Australia means arch-conservative), had violated decades of Australian commitment to the rule of law and a two-state solution. The Australian “Liberals” are obsessed with a supposed immigration threat to Australia and clearly see themselves as settler colonialists who would lose out if the Aboriginals and immigrants gained full rights. Perhaps Morrison and his colleagues sympathized with Israel as another settler colonial state with an unresolved problem of indigenous people. Until the early 1970s Canberra had a policy of “White Australia,” intended to keep out Asian immigrants.

Wong continued, “Today the Government has reaffirmed Australia’s previous and longstanding position that Jerusalem is a final status issue that should be resolved as part of any peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian people.”

What she means by “final status issue” is that Jerusalem is a contested city. It was never awarded to Israel by any international legal authority. Even the unfairly pro-Israel 1947 partition proposal of the UN General Assembly retained international control over Jerusalem. (I call it a “proposal” rather than a “plan” because it was never endorsed by the executive, the UN Security Council, and so lacked the force of law.)

Neither Israeli leaders nor Palestinian ones accepted the partition proposal, although Israel apologists constantly allege that Israel did. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, noted in his diary that Israel had accepted no permanent borders, clearly envisaging that the state would expand beyond both what the UNGA proposed for it and beyond its initial 1947-48 conquests, including the Negev, which had not been included by the UNGA in Israeli territory. During that war, Israeli troops took West Jerusalem, but not the majority-Palestinian East Jerusalem. Then in 1967, after hatching many plots to do so for over a decade, the Israeli army used the chaos of the 1967 war that it launched on Egypt and Syria to seize East Jerusalem as well.

Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem and surrounding areas from the Palestinian West Bank — also not proposed for Israel by the UNGA — which is illegal by dint of the UN Charter, to which Israel is a signatory. As of 1945 you can’t acquire territory from your neighbor by aggressive warfare. The rule was an attempt to forestall war crimes of WW II, such as Mussolini’s annexation of the city of Nice from France. Israel then flooded the illegally annexed area of East Jerusalem and its surroundings with Israeli citizens. That is also illegal, by the 4th Geneva Convention of 1948. The rule was enacted in an attempt to prevent further episodes such as the German attempt to Germanize occupied Poland by flooding it with Germans while expelling Poles during WW II.

In international law, despite the right wing Israeli government’s conviction that Jerusalem will forever be an undivided Israeli city — ignoring the 380,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and environs — Jerusalem’s disposition can only be decided by final status negotiations between Israel and the State of Palestine, to the establishment of which Israel committed itself in the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

Israel has a problem with its international legal commitments, ignoring the UN Charter and a raft of UN Security Council resolutions rebuking its attempt to annex a neighbor’s territory, and ignoring the Oslo treaty, to all of which it gave free assent and the signatures of its lawful representatives.

The Labor government in Australia is renewing the country’s commitment to international law in taking this step. Minister Wong said, “The Albanese Government recommits Australia to international efforts in the responsible pursuit of progress towards a just and enduring two-state solution.”

The Albanese government has been more principled than the Biden administration, which has declined to reverse Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. Although the State Department maintains that this move does not change US policy in supporting a two-state solution, it is hard to see it in any other light than as an acquiescence in Israel’s lawless behavior.

The Israelis summoned the Australian ambassador over the decision. But then claim jumpers in the Old West were also upset if the sheriff intervened on the side of the rightful owner of the land.

You might feel despondent after reading news reports about countries doubling down on fossil fuels to cope with energy price spikes.

Don’t. It’s a blip. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to a temporary fossil fuel resurgence, it also accelerated Europe’s renewable ambitions. And the United States and Australia have finally passed climate bills. This week, federal energy minister Chris Bowen announced “Australia is back” on climate action.

There’s better news too. In March this year, the world hit one terawatt of installed solar. By 2025, the world’s polysilicon factories are predicted to bounce back from supply shortages and churn out enough high-purity silicon for almost one terawatt of solar panels every year.

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Can renewable energy turn Australia into a global superpower? | 60 Minutes Australia

Coupled with major growth in wind, pumped hydro, energy storage, grid batteries
and electric vehicles, the solar boom puts zero global emissions within reach before 2050.

Best of all – Australia could show the world how to add solar to their grid. You might not suspect it, but we’re the global leaders in finding straightforward solutions to the variability of solar power and wind. We’re showing that it’s easier to get carbon emissions out of electricity generation than many predicted.

Rapid, deep and cheap emissions reductions

This surge in the renewable supply chain allows sustained exponential growth that is already disrupting fossil fuel markets in some countries, notably Australia.

This year, global fossil fuel prices have skyrocketed in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In turn, that’s generated intense interest in solar and wind energy to boost domestic energy security, particularly in Europe, which needs to wean itself off Russian gas.

While fossil fuels are concentrated in countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and Australia, solar and wind resources are widely distributed. Most countries can generate all their own energy from the sun and wind.

Europe could readily become energy independent, harnessing its enormous North Sea offshore wind resources and solar in the south. Even densely populated countries such as Japan and Indonesia have far more solar and wind resources than they need.

Solar and wind now provide the cheapest new electricity generation in most markets. As a bonus, the widespread uptake of solar and wind will eliminate many of our worst air pollutants and improve our health.

Why are solar and wind winning?

In a word, cost. Solar and wind have won the race for the energy of the future because they are cheap. Once built, the fuel is free, and does not need to be imported or dug up.

Wind and solar are being built three times faster than everything else combined. It follows they will dominate future energy markets as existing fossil fuel generators retire and electricity use grows rapidly.

Nuclear generation hasn’t grown in the past decade. Coal and gas plants able to capture and store carbon have not got traction in the energy market. Hydroelectricity can’t expand much further. There will, however, be a huge market for off-river pumped hydro energy storage.

There are no serious technical, environmental or material constraints to solar power on any scale. However, solar has been hit by supply chain issues in recent months, with major price spikes in polysilicon. These are common to any rapidly growing industry, and should resolve as more suppliers see the opportunity and enter the market.

There is enough land

Most of the world’s population live at moderate latitudes with good sunshine on most days. Here, solar is effectively unlimited. Those further north have abundant wind energy (particularly offshore wind) to offset weaker solar in winter.

Sceptics point out you need more land or sea to produce the same amount of electricity as fossil fuel plants. While true, solar farms can happily coexist with livestock and cropping to create a double income for farmers. The solar electricity needed to power the world and eliminate all fossil fuels can be generated from about 1% of the land area devoted to agriculture.

Once we have cheap clean electricity, we can use it to eliminate the use of fossil fuels altogether by electrifying nearly everything: transport, heating, industry and chemical production. This could reduce emissions by three quarters.

Global electricity production will need to rise sevenfold to about 200,000 terawatt-hours a year to give everyone the energy needed to reach developed nation living standards. But this is not all that hard over the next 30 years. And the alternative – keep pumping warming pollutants into the atmosphere – will make the lives of our children harder and harder.

Together, solar and wind have passed two terawatts of installed capacity. That means we’re about 2% of the way to reaching the almost 100 terawatts of solar and wind required to decarbonise the world, while raising living standards.

Annual solar deployment needs to double every four years to get the job done by 2050–60 – similar to the global growth rate achieved over the past decade.

Australia can show the way

You might not think it, given the decade of political climate wars, but Australia is the world leader in terms of solar electricity produced per person.

In Australia, solar and wind are booming while coal is rapidly falling. We’re already on track to reach 80-90% renewables by 2030. Remarkably, our per capita solar generation is twice as large as the second placed countries (Germany, Japan and the Netherlands) and far ahead of China and the USA.

Australia is quietly demonstrating how to accommodate huge new flows of cheap, clean electricity. The world will soon follow suit.

Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University

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