Understorey RTRFM

Understorey brings the second part of Adrian Glamorgan's interview with Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John.

Australia's youngest senator warns that a belligerent "white saviour" attitude is not the best way to ease international tensions in our region. Jordon argues we should close all foreign bases, conduct a Truth & Reconciliation Commission into our past, honour international treaties, and then our conversations beyond our shores might have more credibility. Climate change is ticking away while the Australian and US governments have distracted the world with their war talk. While the two major political parties and the mainstream media remain uncritical of our recent and longer history of war-making, Senator Steele-John is convinced that community grassroots action - and the ballot box - will be enough to turn around the Morrison government's "post-it note" agreement known as the Australia-United Kingdom-United States arms deal.

Collage: Jordon Steele-John, Tuvalu drowning, and Virginia Class Submarine, collage by A Glamorgan, using photos sourced from Greens, Tuvalu Government and Creative Commons.

Australia’s youngest Senator, Jordon Steele-John, is well known for his campaign which led to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. But apart from his concern about peaceful inclusion for people with disability, the Australian Greens Peace and Nuclear Disarmament spokesperson is very clear about the need for peace at an international level, and has been an outspoken critic of the AUKUS nuclear arms deal. How does the new Australian-United Kingdom-United States alliance highlight the democratic deficit in Australia, especially when it adds to what some sense as the rising militarism? Today Understorey’s Adrian Glamorgan brings us the first part of an extended interview with Jordon Steele-John about Australia’s engagement with AUKUS and why it is may be a dangerous and costly distraction from the real enemy ticking away at humanity: the urgent need for action on climate.

Photo: Jordon Steele-John/Greens' peace sign, arranged by A Glamorgan

Only days after COP26 closed its doors in Glasgow, Woodside and BHP announced they will go ahead as joint venturers building one of the world's biggest fossil fuel developments, Scarborough gas field in the North West. The Scarborough Gas "abatement" plan involves increasing emissions until close to the 2050 net zero date. We'll let you know how that's going in 2046. But for those who were networking outside the COP26 inner sanctum, there’s a very different approach to economic growth in the 21st century. Banks and fund managers are quietly switching away from coal, and dubious about gas long term, and don’t give promises of carbon capture a thought. The bankers beyond Australia are funding new kinds of projects – the kinds that are about landscapes and climate action rather than expanding the burning of fossil fuels. This week Understorey’s Adrian Glamorgan catches up with Paul Chatterton, the founder and lead of the Landscape Finance Lab based in Vienna. Paul's meetings at COP26 highlight the fact that not all the action in Glasgow was happening in the conference halls. The 21st century will belong to the innovators. Around the planet, from Microsoft to the European Union, a new world is being built and investors are finding profits in a zero carbon economy. Australia, selling coal and arguing gas is a transitional fuel, is in danger of being left behind.

Photo: Landscape Finance Lab

On the last day of COP26, hundreds of people representing civil society walked out of the convention centre, wearing blood-red ribbons representing the red lines already crossed by COP26 negotiations. The whole civil society scene at COP was one of strong feelings about climate colonialism, an opportunity for environmental campaigners, trade unionists, young people, women, academics, farmers and faith groups to challenge an extractive, exploitative economic system.

Today Understorey’s Adrian Glamorgan brings you an interview with Grace da Costa, a political campaigner with Quakers, who attended COP26 for the first week, and who sheds a little light for us about what was behind the hundred thousand marching on the streets: people from civil society in all its forms, calling for the world to recognise climate justice, and for action on loss and damage.

Photos: Michael Preston

Climate Justice addresses climate effects that are borne by peoples who have had no real connection with causing the problem, nor have they gained any special benefit from the historic exploitation of fossil fuels. Thus global warming has sometimes been called climate colonialism, while climate justice has been linked to racial justice, because the poorest of the poor tend to be people of colour. Because of this structural violence of climate consequences, there should be a systematic redistribution of resources, and differential policies and institutions, that would reduce global inequality, and pay for climate adaptation by poorer countries at the richer countries’ expense.
Today Understorey features women leaders of colour attending the first day of COP26, each separately calling on world leaders to make practical plans connected with their heart and their genuine will to act: we hear from Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, powerfully laying the call for action at the feet of the polluters; environmental advocate for Samoa, Brianna Fruean, speaking up for island states around the world; and Kenyan environment campaigner, Elizabeth Wathuti, daring world leaders to admit and face the consequences of climate disaster, not just in the future, but as it is happening in Africa right now.

Photos: UN Climate Change

Yesterday Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was in Scotland, explaining to the world how Australia will stick to its 2015 targets in order to reduce even more carbon. But not everyone is convinced that recycling the Paris Agreement will keep temperatures rising no more than 1.5 degrees. The Understorey team brings us some of the young people protesting outside of the Western Australian Parliament a couple of weeks ago. But not just students and union organisers and grandparents are rising for climate. Understorey brings a British great-grandparent who yesterday addressed world leaders, and put everyone straight, including Scott Morrison, in the nicest possible way.
Photo: A Glamorgan