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From: andyalcock
To: andyalcock
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2011 6:17 PM
Subject: guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 May 2011 22.00 BST: Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink

Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink
Exclusive: Record rise, despite recession, means 2C target almost out of reach

Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 May 2011 22.00 BST

Economic recession has failed to curb rising emissions, undermining hope of keeping global warming to safe levels Photograph: Dave Reede/All Canada Photos/Corbis
Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.

“I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said.

“Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

Birol said disaster could yet be averted, if governments heed the warning. “If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding,” he said.

The IEA has calculated that if the world is to escape the most damaging effects of global warming, annual energy-related emissions should be no more than 32Gt by 2020. If this year’s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule, making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree.

Emissions from energy fell slightly between 2008 and 2009, from 29.3Gt to 29Gt, due to the financial crisis. A small rise was predicted for 2010 as economies recovered, but the scale of the increase has shocked the IEA. “I was expecting a rebound, but not such a strong one,” said Birol, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on emissions.

John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said time was running out. “This news should shock the world. Yet even now politicians in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world’s last remaining reserves of fossil fuels – even from under the melting ice of the Arctic. You don’t put out a fire with gasoline. It will now be up to us to stop them.”

Most of the rise – about three-quarters – has come from developing countries, as rapidly emerging economies have weathered the financial crisis and the recession that has gripped most of the developed world.

But he added that, while the emissions data was bad enough news, there were other factors that made it even less likely that the world would meet its greenhouse gas targets.

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol.

He urged governments to take action urgently. “This should be a wake-up call. A chance [of staying below 2 degrees] would be if we had a legally binding international agreement or major moves on clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and other technologies.”

Governments are to meet next week in Bonn for the next round of the UN talks, but little progress is expected.

Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions. Initially, the agency had hoped the resulting reduction in emissions could be maintained, helping to give the world a “breathing space” and set countries on a low-carbon path. The new estimates suggest that opportunity may have been missed

This film has taken a long time to reach Australia even though it was produced by Australians.

The Adelaide premiere of Strange Birds in Paradise occurred on 27 February 2011and it was a great event.

An Adelaide reviewer of the film claimed that it is a documentary made by activists and that it is crammed with too many facts.

I strongly disagree with this description. This is an important documentary that shows the genocide being perpetrated by the Indonesian military (TNI) on a race of people who are close neighbours to Australia – the people of West Papua. Australians, especially our political leaders, need to be confronted with this film because the Australian Government is giving financial support to KOPASSUS or the Special Indonesian Forces of the TNI that are responsible for the mass murder and human rights abuses that continue to be perpetrated in West Papua.

It should be noted that KOPASSUS was also responsible for the major crimes committed against the people of Timor Leste during its 24 years of occupation by the TNI , Acheh and parts of traditional Indonesia like the Maluku Province (the Moluccan Islands).

This documentary is different to most. It reveals the history of West Papua through the interaction of West Papuan exiles living in Melbourne who share their independence songs and their music generally with well known Australian rock musicologist David Bridie of Not Drowning Waving and My Friend the Chocolate Cake fame.

The film features  two West Papuan refugees. One is Donny Roem, a recent exile from West Papua who escaped his homeland by crossing the Arafura Sea to Australia with his two young brothers and 42 other refugees in a homemade canoe.

The other is Jacob Rumbiak, who is considered as the leader of the West Papuan government-in-exile. He was a was a child soldier in the West Papuan resistance movement, OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka or Free Papua Movement) and has spent 11 years in Indonesian prisons .  His story is a saga of oppression and torture, which ends in his escape from East Timor. 

The film is directed by Charlie Hill-Smith, an Australian writer, cartoonist and comedian who has a strong interest in the many cultures of Indonesian and has forged close friendships with Jacob and Donny along with the Javanese families he met as a teenage exchange student.

He uses his visits to West Papua and Indonesia as backdrops to introduce the story of West Papua There are interviews with key academics like Professor Damien Kingsbury an expert on Indonesia, West Papua and East Timor

The documentary uses  archival film footage along with some footage of Charlie’s early trips to Java, animated cartoons and artwork of the characters from Indonesian mythology as shadow puppets to present the history about West Papua. Throughout the film we hear West Papuan music including a number of independence songs.

The occcupation of the country began in 1962 when Indonesian forces entered the country at a time when the Netherlands government was preparing the Papuans for self rule. The first massacres were carried out by the TNI within a few months of its arrival.

Because of support from the US, Indonesia was able remain in control until there was a UN supervised Act of Free Choice  in 1969.  The whole exercise was a farce and a very brutal one for the locals.

The Indonesian military organised the exercise. They arranged for 1,054 representatives to represent towns and villages across the country. These people were brought to the capital, Jaya Pura, where there was a vote that was supposedly supervised by the UN. Tragically, the UN contingent.was too small and was unable to monitor all the actions of the TNI within Jaya Pura – let alone the rest of the country.

The other is Theys Eluay, a more recent leader who was suffocated by the TNI in 2001.

Also mentioned is the fact that if West Papuans raise their Morning Star flag as a protest to the continuing Indonesian occupation, they are likely to be shot or be given lengthy terms of imprisonment.

This film is meant to confront viewers with the long term suffering of the West Papuans and to question why this should be allowed to continue. Of course, this state of affairs continues because Indonesia is a client state of the US and because the US and other western nation along with the TNI are exploiting West Papua’s vast mineral and natural resources.

After the Adelaide premiere, the 160 attending gave the film a sustained applause.

The event was followed by a short period of questions and discussion with the makers of the film. People were urged to contact politicians to raise the issue of the ongoing human rights abuses occurring on our doorstep in West Papua. Key demands should be to urge the Australian Government to stop all military cooperation with the TNI, to raise this in the UN to call for an international cessation of military aid to and cooperation with the TNI and a demand that the TNI  withdraw from the country and allow the West Papuans to have a genuine UN administered referendum to decide their own future and to call for the UN to establish an international war crimes tribunal to bring war criminals in the TNI to justice.

Evidently, DVDs of Strange Birds will soon be on sale. I would urge people to purchase it and show it to friends, families, union branches, church, human rights and social justice  groups etc.

The documentary will also appear shortly on SBS TV.

Andrew (Andy) Alcock

Member AWPA (SA)

Information Officer

Australia East Timor Friendship Association SA Inc

WEST PAPUA – SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

Although I have never visited West Papua, I feel as though I have become a strong supporter of this nation’s struggle for independence and freedom from the Indonesian military (TNI).

I first became aware of the Indonesian military in our region when I was a student. After the Suharto coup of 1965 in Indonesia and the subsequent bloodbath along with the US war in Indo China, I was shaken out of my political apathy.

During the middle to late 1960s, the Australian Student Christian Movement (ASCM) published a newsletter, Political Concern, which was edited by Helen Hill, who was later to write much about East Timor. Political Concern provided a great deal of information about the key political issues of the day and highlighted the crimes against human rights that were being committed by the Indonesian military. It looked fairly basic given that it appeared to have been copied onto blotting paper, however, it provided information about the situation in Indonesia that was not appearing in the daily Australian media

Between 1973-4 I worked in Malaysia as an Australian volunteer teacher and during that time visited Sumatra and Java. 

I first read about West Papua in a progressive politics journal Retrieval that was published by left wing Christians in Melbourne and Sydney. It existed for 6 or 7 years between the early to late 1970s. The editorial board had a novel approach to providing people with information.Various people were responsible for reviewing articles in specific newspapers and journal and these reviews were then printed in Retrieval. Often there would be several reviews of stories related to the same topic. It was then easy to get a rapid overview of a particular event wirh the reviews of the story from different sources and opinions.

If readers wanted more in-depth information, they could obtain the original source.

Retrieval was the idea of Geoffrey Lacey, an engineer I met in Sydney and the editor was Val Noone, a former Catholic priest in Melbourne who is now an academic historian of Australian and Irish history.

Topics in the magazine included the issues of war, peace social justice, human rights, independence movements across the world and the environment. Some specific issues that I recall were the US war Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the coup in Chile, many environmental issues such as environmental health, problems related with the car, the behaviour of multinational corporations eg Rio Tinto Zinc, the movement for a united Ireland, Palestinian human rights etc. 

Because of my involvement in the Vietnam anti war movement and my experiences in Asia, I had the role of reviewing some Asian papers.

It was due to this great little magazine that I learned more about West Papua. In early 1975, I heard a program about East Timor on Lateline, then an ABC National radio program. That edition looked at Timor’s independence from Portugal in 1974 and raised the question abourt Suharto’s intentions regarding this tiny nation that had supported Australia so strongly during World War 2. Listeners heard how Indonesia was inviting the East Timorese to become incorporated into Indonesia. The Indonesian dictatorship was giving the invitation by beaming radio broadcasts into East Timor. These broadcast invitations were not of the cordial type by any means; they began and ended with machine gun fire!

I felt sickened when I heard that program and felt that I had to do something given that I was aware of the 1965 bloodbath that accompanied Suharto’s grab for power and I observed the ever present and threatening TNI when I visited Sumatra and Java. Also, during my time in Malaysia, I had come across frequent references to Timor in the Asian media and I thought that I might spend some time there on my return home after my volunteer contract finished.

As it turned out, I had almost exhausted my finances as volunteers in Malaysia did not receive very much in the way of wages. I therefore flew home via Jakarta and spent just a few days looking at a small part of Java.

In preparing what became the first article on Timor prepared for Retrieval, I had to do a lot of research into the history and geography of the island. This was rather difficult because in those days not much had been written about Timor. In my search, I came across an amazing article by Hugh Lunn, a journalist with The Australian, about his experiences when he was in West Papua during 1969 while covering the story of the so called Act of Free Choice. I was certain after reading Lunn’s horrifying account of what happened that the TNI was certain to invade East Timor. My article gave an overview of the history and geography of Timor, the information in the Lateline program and Hugh Lunn’s article.

The article was published and as a result, I was recruited to the Campaign for an Independent East Timor in South Australia [CIET (SA) Inc] in May 1975 by Bob Hanney, who was the secretary group for the major part of the time the group existed. After East Timor won its independence in 2002, CIET became known as the Australia East Timor Friendship Association (SA) Inc [AETFA SA Inc] and still exists today.In early 1977, I was invited by the ASCM to attend its national annual conference as a resource person. The theme of the conference was Asia and it was held at the old Tatachilla Winery, in the SA wine growing area of McLaren Vale.  

At the conference, I met some very interesting people who were very knowledgeable about Asia and Indonesia and West Papua in particular. One was Professor Herb Feith, a Jew,  a refugee, a survivor of  Nazi concentration camps, an early Australian volunteer in Indonesia and politics professor at Monash University. Herb was a fluent speaker of Bahasa Indonesia and had witnessed at first hand the aftermath of the 1965 events in Indonesia.

Another was Jack Rumere, an exiled West Papuan living in Melbourne and a former OPM guerilla fighter.  Jack told me stories of the fighting he had been involved in between the OPM and the TNI and explained how dreadful  the living conditions were for ordinary West Papuans as a result of TNI brutality and corruption. I was very interested in what both men told me.

Towards the end of the conference, Jack suggested that I should visit West Papua. He told me that he could arrange for me to meet West Papuan refugees in PNG who would get me over the PNG/WP border illegally where I would be able to stay in an OPM camp. As it turned out, the West Papuans I met at Wewak needed more much time to get me across the border than I had. I was on holidays, but they were almost at an end and I needed to return to Australia to resume work.

However, the visit was not entirely wasted. I did have long talks with key West Papuan refugees at Wewak and gained a greater insight into their independence struggle . One night a group met for dinner and decided to have a music session. A number of people who attende brought thei guitars and they sang a number of their independence and guerilla songs for me. Fortunately, I had borrowed a small tape recorder from Denis Freney, probably the then most important activist for East Timor solidarity in Australia. The West Papuans wanted to know what was happening in East Timor as they considered that they were allies with the East Timorese in their common struggle for independence against the TNI.

Towards the end of the evening, the leader of the group read out a message of solidarity to FRETILIN, the key political party in East Timor that was organising the resistance to the TNI. Most of their songs and the message were in Indonesian.

There were some very amusing incidents in relation to my visit because the West Papuan refugees thought they might have problems with the PNG authoritieswho were under pressure by Indonesia to send the refugees back. In previous times a number were returned and many were machine gunned to death by the TNI.

After my return from PNG, Denis Freney arranged for the recording of the songs and the message to be sent over the illegal radio in Australia maintained by East Timor supporters with the Timorese resistance during the early days of the TNI occupation.

Shortly after, Denis took the tape with him to a conference in Europe where he met many Indonesian political exiles. Like the West Papuans I visited, they held a music evening and sang a number of songs in solidarity with the West Papuans and the East Timorese. Denis recorded the event and copies were made for those working in solidarity for both East Timor and West Papua.

The CIET (SA) Committee decided that whenever we were protesting against the actions of the TNI that we should mention both the East Timorese and the West Papuans. Our group also kept in touch with a small West Papuan support group in Melbourne.

In 1986, Bev Hall, a supporter of CIET (SA) visited Sweden where she met the exiled OPM guerilla commander, Jakob Prai. This resulted in a hurried Australian tour by Jakob Prai and two other other West Papuan exiles, John Ondawame and Nicholas Messett in late 1986 and early 1987 which was organised by our committee. We were not able to raise much money and with a very tight budget, most of their travel was by bus except for Tasmania. The West Papuan tour would not have been possible without the then independent Green member in the Tasmanian Parliament, Bob Brown. He kindly lent us a sum of $500, which was a lot of money at the time.

The tour began in Adelaide and a huge crowd attended a meeting in a community centre in St Peters to hear the West Papuans speak and to partake of a hangi, a Melanesian feast where the food is cooked underground on hot rocks.  The West Papuan delegation also visited Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart as well as Adelaide

Also working with the CIET (SA) Committee on the tour was Jack Rumere, who by that time was working in Adelaide. Sadly Jack died from cancer a few years later. His widow Debbie, is a member of Australia West Papua Association (SA).

In the past few years, the Australia West Papua Association (AWPA) exists in Australia’s capital cities. In Adelaide, there is an active group and one of its key members is David Arkins, who years ago worked on the illegal solidarity radio with FRETILIN. I myself am a member of the AWPA as well as being active in AETFA. The two groups work together quite closely because we realise that the two have something in common. They are both suffering because of the actions of the TNI and it is crucial to cooperate together to ensure that all victims of the TNI , whether they be West Papuans, East Timorese, Achinese or Indonesians, receive justice and that the criminals in the TNI are punished for the crimes they have committed and that they are made to compensate the victims of their crimes.

The key demands that we have to work for are:

* the Australian Government must stop all military cooperation with the TNI and raise this in the UN to call for an international cessation of military aid to and cooperation with the TNI until all the

  alleged war criminals in its ranks are brought to justice

* the UN must demand that the TNI  withdraw from West Papua and allow its people to have a genuine UN administered referendum to decide their own future

* the UN must establish an international war crimes tribunal to bring the alleged war criminals in the TNI to justice and to make them compensate the victims of their crimes

Indonesia cannot be considered to be a properly functioning democracy until the TNI become subservient to the elected government and the Indonesian Government takes responsibility for the crimes that the TNI has committed.

We cannot have peace and social justice in the SE Asian and Pacific region of the world until the key demands above are realised and we cannot claim to be truly committed to democracy, peace and international social justice unless we support them.

Papua Barat – Merdeka!

Viva Timor Leste Independente!

Andrew (Andy) Alcock

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