Michael Green

Writer and producer

Bill McKibben

In Environment, Social justice on

Interview published in Smith Journal, Volume 7

Writer and activist Bill McKibben wrote the first book on climate change. Now he’s piloting the fastest growing social movement in the world: the campaign to sell out of fossil fuels. This is how he explains it:

IN the mid-1980s I was reading the early science about global warming and thinking about it. Then came the ungodly hot summer of 1988, among the worst in North American history to that date. Crops withered, barge traffic on the Mississippi ground to a halt. It wasn’t as bad as 2012, but at the time it seemed horrific. Suddenly the science felt very real.

The next year I published my first book, The End of Nature. In part, it was the first book-length piece of reporting about climate change, but it was also part philosophical essay about its meaning. I was interested in the way that suddenly no place on Earth was unaffected by human presence – that’s what the title meant. My dominant emotion was sadness, not fear. Over time I’ve come to have more practical reasons for working to slow climate change, but that sadness lingers.

For me, a new line of thinking opened up last year once I saw the numbers put out by an organisation called Carbon Tracker. I’ve followed this all closely, but I’d never really understood in my gut that the end of the story was written. That unless we somehow change it, there is no room for speculation or wishful thinking. The fossil fuel industry has five times as much carbon in their reserves as the most conservative government on Earth says would be safe to burn.

Once you understand that, you understand that this has become a rogue industry. This formerly socially useful thing is now the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.

The other side is that – at least in American politics – the same companies whose business plan guarantees that the planet will tank are also the ones who are most efficient at corrupting our political system. They give the most money in campaign donations and spend the most money lobbying and advertising. They are the reason we never get anything changed.

So it seemed to me it was high time we went on offense against this industry, instead of forever playing defence.

In November we launched the Go Fossil Free campaign with a tour of the US, calling for universities to sell their shares in fossil fuels. We started the night after the presidential election. We sold out big concert halls every night, all across the country. That was exciting, but the most exciting thing was helping midwife an explosive movement. When we started there were a handful of campuses thinking about it, and now, there are more than 300.

So far six colleges have divested, but it’s early days. It’s actually happening faster than we thought. The City of Seattle divested its funds too. A number of religious denominations are thinking about it.

Divestment in this country has a real history – it’s a tool we use every once in a while. Most of the time when you have a problem with a business, it makes more sense to pass a shareholder resolution, hold a boycott, or run a petition, because it’s something the company can easily fix. If we’re mad at Apple for paying low wages to Chinese workers it’s not because we hate iPhones. But in this case, it’s not like there’s a flaw in the business plan; the flaw is the business plan.

But we’re not trying to bankrupt Exxon – a group of colleges selling their stock is not going to do that. We’re trying to take away their social licence, trying to reduce their power to dominate events, trying to make people understand that these guys are now outlaws against the laws of physics.

These are hard fights. It took Harvard seven or eight years before they partially divested during the campaign against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. It won’t happen easily. All these students know that. But they also know this is their future.

One of the reasons that universities are such a powerful place is that it makes little sense to pay for people’s education with investments in companies that guarantee they won’t have a planet to carry out that education on.

The same goes for retirement funds. Unless your goal for retirement is to work in endless emergency response to fires and floods, you can make wiser choices about where to put your money.

The movement is getting bigger and it’s spreading around the world. There’s something on our side: public perception that climate change is real has shot through the roof.

In the US, more than three-quarters of us are worried about global warming. It’s hard to get three-quarters of Americans to agree on anything – half of America thinks Elvis is still alive. It demonstrates that there’s a limit to how much money the fossil fuel industry can spend and how much damage Rupert Murdoch can do. At a certain point, who are you going to believe: Fox News or your own lying eyes?

If anybody has a good sense of how important this is, it’s Australians right now. In January, you guys broke every temperature record, day after day.

I’m visiting in June, listening to people talk about their experiences with the changing climate and showing the basic math that makes our predicament so difficult. If there’s one lesson I’ll try to draw, it’s this: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Literally. It’s time to stop digging up new coal deposits.

Read these related articles: Bursting the carbon bubble and Unburnable carbon

Unburnable carbon

In Environment, Social justice on

This is an edited version of a talk I gave at the Wheeler Centre on June 6, 2013

AWAY from the glare and confusion on climate change, there is a deeper conversation going on. It is changing the way climate activists plan their campaigns, and it is changing conversations behind the doors where money talks.

Here is one example: on Tuesday, I went to a lunchtime meeting at Goldman Sachs, at 101 Collins Street, the swankiest office building in town.

In Rolling Stone, in 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs like this: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

But, arguably, this meeting on Tuesday was an unusual one. It was organised by the Investor Group on Climate Change. There were about 100 people from the superannuation and fund management industry, in a big teleconference in Sydney and Melbourne, and they were there to talk to the American climate activist Bill McKibben.

Now McKibben, who is touring Australia this week, also writes for Rolling Stone. In one article last year he wrote this: “We need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth.”

McKibben got arrested twice last year for his climate activism. The event went for nearly 2 hours – McKibben gave a short spiel, and then there was an extended discussion session with a panel of super fund managers and investment analysts. Why were they engaging with this guy?

Watch this video at the Wheeler Centre website

Before I get to why they’re all willing to be there, I want to offer one small update on our current climate projections.

Turn Down the Heat: World Bank report

Late last year the World Bank put out a report called ‘Turn Down the Heat’ report, which stated that even if all nations fulfill their pledges to reduce emissions, we’re still on track for 3.5 to 4˚C warming by the end of the century.

A 4˚C world means: “Extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” They concluded that there is no certainty that it’s possible for humanity to adapt to a 4˚C hotter world.

It’s a terrifying thought – put out by a very conservative public institution. It’s also hard to really comprehend what kind of changes that would involve, and what kind of suffering it would entail. But one thing it makes me think is that we need to do a better job of avoiding that situation.

Carbon budget: we’re blowing it

And that’s why I come back to that meeting at Goldman Sachs. The reason I was there and those finance types were there, is that a different way of thinking about the climate crisis has sharpened the debate. It’s the idea of a carbon budget. In 2009, scientists from the Potsdam Institute in Germany produced a set of emissions scenarios together with their likely influence on global temperatures.

Their paper says that to keep an 80 per cent chance of staying at 2 degrees or below, we can only release about one-fifth of the carbon dioxide in current proven fossil fuel reserves.

It’s worth noting that at the rate we’re going, we’ll have blown the budget by mid next decade. And of course, the fossil fuel industry is always searching for more.

Even for a 50-50 chance of going over 2 degrees, the report said, two-thirds of our coal, oil and gas must stay in the ground.

Subsequently, a British organisation called Carbon Tracker added to that analysis. They released some research saying that the reserves held by the world’s 200 largest listed coal, oil and gas companies alone is more than enough to exceed that threshold.

The moral case

Since the carbon budget idea has become more common, there have been two kinds of responses: the moral case and the business case. I’ll cover each one, and then the way they cross over, because that’s particularly unusual and relevant for us as citizens.

As I’ve mentioned, Bill McKibben is the person most associated with the moral case. Simply put, his argument goes like this: “if it’s wrong to wreck the planet, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage”.

Based on the unexpected popularity of his Rolling Stone article, he and others started a new campaign for calling for universities, churches, cities and pension funds to sell out of fossil fuel companies. It’s called Go Fossil Free, and it’s spread like wildfire across the USA. In just over six months there are already several hundred campaigns, and a dozen or so institutions have agreed to divest.

The argument isn’t so much that they’ll bankrupt the companies, but that they’ll undermine their social licence, and that open up room for regulation.

People are working on this moral divestment case here already. If you haven’t seen any yet, you can expect to. As with the US, it’s not only targeted at universities, but also churches and local councils, and for banks not to fund new fossil fuel projects.

They’ve had two wins so far: the NSW Synod of the Uniting Church has announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. And a couple of years ago, ANU students successfully campaigned for the university to sell stocks in a coal seam gas company called Metgasco. Those students are a cheeky bunch – they’re part of the national Lock the Campus campaign and they’ve since filed FOI requests for all the details of the university’s fossil fuel holdings. Now they’re moving onto the ACT government.

But most of all, the campaign here is aimed at superannuation funds.

There’s a campaign called the Vital Few – which is run by an organization chaired by former liberal leader John Hewson. It hasn’t had much success yet, but they say it’s early days. The Vital Few campaign says that across the super industry, about 55 per cent of funds are held in high carbon investments and only 2 per cent in low (although there’s no standard definition for what that means).

One plank of their campaign is a moral call to action for citizens: there’s no sense in greening your home if you’re investing in climate change all the while. You’ve got to change the way you invest.

All these campaigns have different approaches and different targets, but share a common thread – there’s a moral reason not to invest in fossil fuels, both for us as individuals and for our institutions.

The business case

But there’s another way to look at those numbers, and it’s this: “Holy heck, if four-fifths are going to stay in the ground, then someone is going to lose a lot of money.” Essentially, the argument is that investing in fossil fuels is risky, and you’ll want to sell down your stake, because if you don’t, at some point you’ll lose it.

In the case of listed companies, the value of their reserves is factored into their share price. Those reserves are assets on their books, and investors currently have an expectation that they will deliver an income stream in the future. And of course, it’s not just fossil fuels – all kinds of industries have a lot of assets tied up in the carbon economy.

Climate risk

This is one element of a broader set of risks that are described as “climate risk” – the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change.

The first, as I just mentioned, is the “carbon bubble” or the “unburnable carbon” scenario. It’s the prospect that we’ll get our act together to prevent emissions, and fossil fuels will lose value. That could be due to tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing or regulations, here, in China or elsewhere.

There are other kinds of climate risk too. For example, the risk that cheap clean technology will out-compete fossil fuels. Or, curiously, if you’re a long-term investor, there’s a risk in the possibility that others will switch away from fossil fuels.

Then there’s the mother of all climate risks: the physical impacts. At the lower end of the scale – which, as we’ve seen around the world already, is by no means low – perhaps it’s a flood that destroys infrastructure. But remember the World Bank’s scenario of a 4-degree hotter world: it’s safe to assume that a climate to which humanity can’t adapt is not consistent with steady returns for investors.

Reports on reports on reports

When I started researching this stuff, I was overwhelmed by the vast quantity of reports on it. The finance world is rife with warnings about it. Most of the words spilled have been about climate risk in relation to “asset owners”: pension funds, super funds, insurers and sovereign wealth funds, such as the Future Fund. Among investors, they have a uniquely long-term perspective. In Australia the average super member has 20 years before they’ll retire.

Last year, the Asset Owner’s Disclosure Project – the organisation chaired by John Hewson, and which also runs the Vital Few campaign – released ratings of the way the funds are dealing climate risk. Australia had six of the top ten funds around the world (Local Government Super, CareSuper, Cbus Super, VicSuper, UniSuper and AustralianSuper).

But there’s no cause for celebration. The report concluded that no fund had “accurately assessed or managed its climate risk”. The highest rating fund, Local Government Super, estimates that it has about 10 per cent of its money in low-carbon assets, and 45 per cent in high.

The head of sustainability for Local Government Super, Bill Harnett, was at that meeting at Goldman Sachs, and he said this: “There is an inescapable logic that there are more fossil fuels on balance sheets around the world than we will ever be able to realize in our investments. There is an inevitability. We don’t know when, but we know it will come.”

And yet, his fund’s portfolio is still a long way from investing in a way that is consistent with limiting global warming to 2 degrees.

Why isn’t there change?

At that meeting at Goldman Sachs, everyone in the room accepted the broad numbers that McKibben stated – that four-fifths must stay in the ground. I’m assured that all the big Australian superannuation funds accept that this risk exists, in a broad sense.

Much of the discussion was about how they don’t know how to evaluate it. A couple of large financial analysts have tried. In recent months, HSBC in London did some modelling that showed a deflating carbon bubble could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies. Citi Research did a similar exercise for the Australian stock exchange and found that 14 per cent of value of the ASX200 is in coal, oil and gas, and related industries.

But the superannuation funds in the room say they don’t know how to incorporate those scenarios into their investment decisions.

Ian Wood from AMP Capital said there are two broad reasons. One is that conventional financial modelling gives greater weight to short term earnings. Future dollars are discounted, so if a coal project is making money now, then that matters more.

The other reason is the immense uncertainty about how those scenarios could play out. What will government policy be, here and around the world? If the carbon price spreads, what will it be? When and where will it be brought in? What will happen to technology? What will China do?

Here’s the upshot: for the time being, almost all of our superannuation funds are taking a position that that we won’t limit warming to 2 degrees. They’re betting that we’ll exceed the safe threshold for human civilisation. And they’re not just betting on the game, they’re playing it as well. Their investment policy helps shape that 4-degree world, and helps us on course for a world where they won’t get a good return on very many of their investments.

With a couple of minor exceptions, they’re all just sitting there, watching each other and saying they accept that it’s all true, but they can’t do anything about it.

Bad news and good news

I left the meeting with two conflicting thoughts. The 100 people there that day, they’re the ones in the whole industry who are the most engaged. And even they can’t find it in their modelling to take account of a risk they all acknowledge to be real. They’ll figure out a way at some stage, but it’s clear the change isn’t happening fast enough. Right now, the business case isn’t enough to convince super funds to change.

But there was something else. The really interesting thing about that meeting on Tuesday was this: McKibben was in the room. And the fact that he was in the room made the climate risk more significant for everyone there who was listening. The same goes for all of the campaigns, both the moral and business ones, the civic and corporate pressure.

As McKibben put it at Goldman Sachs: “For our purposes the fight is as good as the win.”

There’s a kind of vicious cycle in the way we’re investing at the moment – it reinforces the systems that cause climate change.

But the carbon bubble idea is so uncertain at the moment, and public policy is so uncertain, that the more people are talking about the carbon bubble, the more likelihood there is one.

So there’s a virtuous circle too. If these big institutions move their money, and if individuals badger their funds and their friends about it, then it becomes more of a reality for the people who are deciding how money is invested. It becomes more likely that governments will implement policy and regulations consistent with 2-degree warming.

Because of the nature of investment decisions, the tipping point isn’t the day when all governments sign off on a radical climate justice agreement. It’s the day when enough people think that significant action is possible. Or when they believe that China really is shifting away from coal. Or when they accept that the cost of solar panels has come down so fast that our centralised, fossil fuel energy system is going to change. Or when they get frightened that others are going to trade out first.

There is a deeper conversation occurring, and it is one that accepts the science, and one that includes both climate activists and market analysts. It has the potential to shift rapidly. It is happening – the only question is whether citizens can make sure it happens in time. 

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website

Read this related article: ‘Bursting the carbon bubble’

Police have no leads in delayed investigation

In Social justice on

THE State Coroner has heard that the police have no leads into the death of a man who was found in the Maribyrnong River in July 2011.

Michael Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on 26 June 2011. His body was retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale eleven days later, on 7 July.

In February, the Coroner suspended the inquest into his death and directed the police to reinvestigate with a different detective in charge.

In a hearing yesterday, Acting Senior Sergeant Peter Tatter-Rendlemann, from the Hobsons Bay crime investigation unit, told the Coroner’s court that there were no witnesses or evidence about what happened during the period Atakelt was missing. “I have nothing so far that can shed any light as to what may have occurred,” he said.

Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum said he now believed the inquest would not provide any answers about how his son died. “From now, my hope to find the truth is diminishing,” he said.

The police initially claimed that Atakelt had entered the river near the Smithfield bridge in Footscray, several kilometres downstream from where the body was found. But at the inquest in February, Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, said it was not possible for a body to float such a distance upstream.  

The case has been controversial, especially among the Ethiopian and other African-Australian communities, ever since Atakelt’s body was found nearly two years ago.

In December 2011, the assistant commissioner responsible for the north-west metro region, Stephen Fontana, assured a public meeting in North Melbourne that the original brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation”. He said it had been overseen by both the homicide squad and the ethical standards department, and that he had “total confidence” in the Footscray police officer responsible, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher.

However, the Coroner heard today that CCTV footage from various locations near where Atakelt went missing was no longer available. It was not accessed during the original investigation.

Last month, the police made a new appeal for any witnesses to provide information through Crime Stoppers and displayed posters around Flemington and Ascot Vale. But Acting Senior Sergeant Tatter-Rendlemann said no new witnesses had come forward.

The inquest has been scheduled to re-commence on 26 August.

For background, read the other articles I’ve written about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’, ‘Watching a hearing’, ‘Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death’ and ‘Changing a whole system : racialised policing in Melbourne‘.

Planning for a climate disaster

In Community development, Environment, Social justice on

THE sky was black on February 4, 2011, and by late afternoon, Melbourne was teeming with rain. Over the clatter of the storm, John Richardson noticed the wail of car alarms and sirens.

Richardson – who leads Red Cross’s disaster preparedness program – had only just returned from Brisbane, where he’d been doing recovery work in the aftermath of the devastating floods. He had returned to his home in Elwood so he could drop off his daughters that morning, the first day of school.

At 7.30 pm, Richardson and his family walked into their street, which runs parallel to the Elwood Canal, and saw water rising toward them, up the road. They learned from a neighbour that high tide was due at 2 am, and that more thunderstorms were predicted before then.

They decided to evacuate. Richardson asked his daughters what they wanted to take: his older daughter chose a blanket she’d had since she was a baby, the younger one picked her skateboard and a giant teddy bear. As they were leaving, she burst into tears and asked, “Are we going to see our house again?”

***

Forget driverless electric vehicles, forget telecommuting from arty cafes, forget idyllic renderings by landscape architects. Forget vertical gardens.

In 2080, Melbourne’s future is in Leeton, western New South Wales.

Leeton is 550 kilometres west of Sydney, and the climate there is hot and dry – it’s about 4 degrees hotter than Melbourne on average, and it receives a third less rain.

This is CSIRO’s “analogue township model”: a way for people to understand immediately how our climate could change. But the analogy only goes so far. Lower rainfall and hotter days are just the unpleasant backdrops for the biggest risks we face: droughts, heat waves and bushfires; floods, storm surges and rising tides.

Last December, the state Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Professor Kate Auty, issued her Climate Change Foundation Paper, in preparation for the State of the Environment Report, to be released this year.

Here are a few points: global emissions are tracking higher than the worst-case scenario in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report; each decade since the 1950s has been warmer than the last; and disaster relief and recovery cost Victorians nearly five times as much between 2009 and 2012 than it did a decade earlier.

“In Australia we are vulnerable,” Auty concluded. “In Victoria our seaboard, our biodiversity, our infrastructure are all at risk. Native species and agricultural production are both exposed. The risk of extreme events is elevated.

“Impacts cascade and compound… To read them is to be deeply concerned.”

An intense storm can cut off communications, release sewage, and damage roads and houses. And in turn, it can send businesses broke, and render people sick and stuck at home. During heat waves, we can lose power – and therefore, air conditioning, refrigeration and phones – and that causes food spoilage, heat stroke and premature deaths.

The paper notes that if “the Eureka Tower in Melbourne lasts as long as the Royal Exhibition Building (1880) has already, it will have to deal with the climate of the year 2144”.

Planning for a city’s future involves many interconnected things: our food, water, power, waste and transport, our offices, homes, parks and gardens. Most broadly, it considers health and equity – the distribution of our ghettos and our Grollos.

It is not possible anymore to consider these things – to consider the present or future – without considering climate change. If we don’t prepare well, people will die. At the moment, we are not preparing well.

***

The Victorian government last year scrapped a requirement to plan for 0.8 metres sea level rise by the end of the century (except for new “greenfields” developments). The Minister for Planning, Matthew Guy, described his measure as “based on common sense”.

The previous government’s “extreme controls” had “locked many towns out of being able to grow sensibly,” he said.

Professor Barbara Norman, chair of urban and regional planning at University of Canberra, says all three eastern states have weakened their controls on planning for climate change.

“If you have flexibility in policy and flexibility in process then you really don’t have planning at all,” she says. “In the context of climate change, it means you open the door too widely for development on land that could be subject to environmental risks: to coastal inundation, extreme fire risk and floods.”

One of the biggest risks, Norman says, is a “coincidence of events”. In this year’s Brisbane flood, rising rivers combined with a king tide to create a disastrous inundation.

“We are not managing the impacts of current weather now, let alone being prepared for what climate change might bring,” she says.

“We need better discussions between scientists, planners and the emergency services to analyse those scenarios. What could be the consequences? What does that mean for planning today, and the next five years?”

Within the next two weeks, the Victorian government will table its climate adaptation plan in parliament. If its update on climate science – released in March 2012 – is any guide, we shouldn’t expect much. That document devoted only two-and-a-half pages to climate modelling and to the state’s future climate, and drew largely on the IPCC’s now outdated 2007 report.

A more up-to-date appraisal would have looked like the World Bank’s report from late last year, called Turn down the heat, which combined a review of recent climate science with analysis of the likely risks and impacts.

It stated that even if all nations fulfil their pledges to reduce emissions, we’re still on track for 3.5 to 4˚C warming by the end of the century. “The longer those pledges go unmet, the more likely a 4˚C world becomes”, it said.

And exactly what does a 4˚C world mean? “Extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” All of which adds up to this: “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4˚C world is possible”.

For citizens and governments alike, mitigating global warming – reducing carbon dioxide emissions – is inseparable from adaptation, because adaptation alone is not feasible. “The focus absolutely has to be on mitigation,” Norman says, “because we are not going to be able to survive in a four-degree world, so far as I can tell”.

And yet, Minister Guy’s recent 111-page discussion paper Melbourne – let’s talk about the future includes the word “climate” only four times. It refers vaguely to “a changing climate”, but not to climate change. This document will feed into our new metropolitan planning strategy.

“In Victoria, climate change is missing in action,” Norman says. “Whatever your views are, the solution is not to sweep it under the carpet. We have to deal with it, and we have to plan for it.”

Good planning, she adds, requires transparency and accountability, but also, a link to budgets.

Given the seriousness of the issue – one where many lives are at stake, here and now – a good adaptation plan will include specific measures, costings and timelines. It will set about strengthening natural barriers, investing intelligently in engineered systems, buying back the land most at risk, and empowering citizens to deal with some risks themselves.

It will focus on measures that mitigate climate change while also adapting: low-energy retrofits for low-income households; expanded public transport for the outer suburbs; more shade and open spaces to reduce the heat trapped in our city. It will steer away from maladaptations, such as desalination plants and the spread of air conditioning, which give temporary comfort at the cost of future pain. And it will do these things immediately.

If only we could rely on the Minister’s common sense.

***

On the night of February 4, 2011, the forecast second wave of thunderstorms passed over Melbourne. The floodwaters receded before they reached the Richardsons’ home. While thousands of residents nearby weren’t so lucky, the full coincidence of events, as Norman puts it, did not coincide – this time.

Even so, the storm resulted in insurance claims of $384 million across the city. This year, after another summer of flooding and extreme weather, insurers have hiked their Australian premiums, driven by higher costs for reinsurance. Last week, The Age reported “some residents of Frankston, bordering Carrum Swamp to the east, have been asked to pay at least $5000 more for flood coverage”.

Elwood was built on the Southern Swamp. The construction of the canal began in 1889, but before long, the developers’ dreams of a Venetian waterway had been replaced by a muddy, smelly “plague canal”.

If the tide is coming in, a rush of water has no place to go. The land is low-lying – vulnerable to sea-level rise, storm surges and flash flooding.

It is also vulnerable to infill development and poor planning. “In the past when it has flooded, the catchment has been fairly permeable,” Richardson says. “Now as more and more houses are bowled over and flats and apartments put on them, that is decreasing the permeability. And that only increases the potential for flooding.”

On the night of the floods, once his wife and daughters had evacuated, Richardson went out into the street. He checked on his neighbour Pat, who is in her eighties. “It’s a reasonably tight-knit community – we run street parties and stuff like that – which is really good because we knew who was here and who might need some help,” he says.

The next day, he went door-to-door and handed out information on flood recovery. A few weeks later, he and his neighbours held a barbeque for people from surrounding streets.

In the months that followed, residents established the Elwood Floods Action Group. The members meet once a month at the St Kilda RSL. They held a large community forum and attend local fetes. The group’s website includes local history and safety information, as well as a compilation of citizens’ suggestions for flood mitigation. There is a map with projections of the flooding risk associated with sea level rise and storm surges.

If our governments were to take climate adaptation seriously, this is the kind of neighbourhood they would be encouraging. American sociologist Eric Klinenberg studied the impacts of the 1995 heat wave in Chicago – the natural disaster that has killed the most people in the country’s history. In a recent article for the New Yorker, he described Englewood and Auburn Gresham, adjacent suburbs on the “hyper-segregated South Side of Chicago”. Both had similar proportions of elderly residents and high rates of poverty, crime and unemployment. But during the heat wave Englewood had one of the highest death rates, and Auburn Gresham, one of the lowest.

Auburn Gresham, it turned out, was the kind of place where “residents walked to diners and grocery stores. They knew their neighbours. They participated in block clubs and church groups,” he wrote. As the heat wore on, people knocked on each other’s doors. In Englewood, older folks were apprehensive about leaving home.

“During the severe heat waves that are likely to hit Chicago and other cities in the near future,” Klinenberg said, “living in a neighbourhood like Auburn Gresham is the rough equivalent of having a working air-conditioner in every room.”

Richardson says many Elwood locals have been calling for new drainage infrastructure and investment, to cope with more intense deluges. “That’s all well and good for the long term. But what happens if it floods again tomorrow?”

We are already experiencing weather extremes more often, and on a warming planet, they will only get worse. Left alone, this is the future of Melbourne. If our urban planning system does anything at all, it should be doing something about this.

“We’re looking at a completely new climate paradigm,” Richardson says. “We used to seriously flood here once every 25 years. If that’s changing, what does that mean for people?”

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre’s website.

Or this related article about scenario planning in Anglesea and Creswick.

Changing a whole system: racialised policing in Melbourne

In Social justice on

LAST week, the State Coroner began an inquest into the death of a young man whose body was found in the Maribyrnong River. The hearing didn’t make it halfway.

On Friday the Coroner, Ian Gray, suspended it, directed police to reinvestigate on his behalf, and requested that a more senior detective lead that search.

It is already over a year-and-a-half since Michael Atakelt disappeared. It will be many months yet before his family and friends learn more about what happened to him. After a week of public evidence, only one thing was apparent: the investigation by the Footscray police was woefully inadequate, at best.

***

Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on a Sunday evening, June 26, 2011. His body was spotted by a fisherman, and retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale, eleven days later.

Overland Journal contacted me in early August 2011 and asked me to write about the case. The editor said that while the details were unclear, Atakelt seemed “to have died either in, or directly after being released from, police custody”.

Before long, I learned the situation is not so simple, the institutional violence not so overt. In the early hours of the Saturday morning – more than a day before he disappeared – Atakelt was held in the Melbourne Custody Centre for drunkenness and then released without incident.

But the facts are still far from clear. The Coroner heard from crucial witnesses who had not previously been interviewed, and about whole avenues of enquiry that were not followed.

The most glaring error was this: the police brief said Atakelt had likely entered the Maribyrnong River near Smithfield Bridge, approximately 4 kilometres downstream from where his body was recovered.

On the fourth day of the inquest, Sergeant George Dixon from the water police gave evidence that it was “very unlikely” Atakelt’s body had entered the river near Smithfield Bridge. He said that although the river is tidal in its lower reaches, the body could only have entered the river “a very short distance” downstream from where it was found; it was more likely to have entered the river upstream, possibly as far as two kilometres.

Dixon has been in the water police since 1986 and he gave evidence for almost a whole day, about currents, tides, water flows and body recovery. Yet the investigator, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, had not spoken to him before the hearing began.

It was an extraordinary omission. But even so, you shouldn’t need three decades working on the water to form a hunch on which way a river flows. The Footscray police had not looked into the possibility that Atakelt entered the river upstream of where he was found.

The Sergeant’s evidence cut the previous investigation adrift. The barristers clutched at improbable new theories until it became clear that there was no sure footing from which to continue at all.

***

Atakelt arrived in Australia in 2006, from Ethiopia. He was from the Tigray ethnic group, who live in the country’s north and in Eritrea.

A week after his body was found, over 250 people from several African-Australian communities attended a public meeting in North Melbourne. It was fronted by Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana, who was then responsible for the north-west metro area.

Among the speakers he heard that day were many young men who complained of constant harassment by police; and Atakelt’s mother, Askalu Tela, who said Footscray police hadn’t taken her missing person report for three days, despite repeated visits and phone calls.

Shortly afterwards, several young people started a group called Imara Advocacy, to help them speak out on issues such as racialised policing. When the inquest was suspended, one of the founders, Reem Yehdego said the community had been “demanding an independent and comprehensive investigation from the moment Michael Atakelt’s body was found”.

***

On Monday, I joined a swarm of journalists outside the Federal Court, where six young men had just settled a racial discrimination case with Victoria Police. It is five years since they first lodged the claim with the Australian Human Rights Commission, when they were all teenagers.

They say the police regularly stopped them around Flemington and North Melbourne for no legitimate reason, and assaulted and racially taunted them.

Despite the settlement, Victoria Police denies the allegations and maintains that the teens were stopped for legitimate policing reasons. But it has agreed to a public review of its cross-cultural training and the way officers deal with “field contacts”.

It also agreed to release documents prepared for the case. One document – statistical evidence based on police data – shows that young African-Australian men in the area were policed out of all proportion: they were two-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched, even though they committed relatively fewer crimes than young men of other ethnic backgrounds.

Before the cameras, one of the men, Daniel Haile-Michael, said the courts alone wouldn’t be sufficient to put an end to racial profiling. “It’s going to take all Australians and the media and huge community support to get these changes to happen.”

An ABC journalist pressed him on why he’d settled the case, if police had really assaulted him. “I myself have been beaten up,” he said, “but it’s not a personal thing. We understand it’s a systemic issue and that’s why we’re trying to address it in a systemic way. It’s not about one police officer, it’s about changing a whole system.”

***

In the police force, the system starts at the top. Chief Commissioner Ken Lay had been subpoenaed to give evidence in the racial discrimination case, but when it settled, he was excused. “The Police Commissioner is off the hook,” said Justice Shane Marshall, to the amusement of the court.

Later, despite the statistics, Lay dismissed the idea that racial profiling is a problem within the force. He told The Age: “I do not believe our members would identify people and harass or continually check them simply because of their ethnicity.”

The case of Michael Atakelt goes just as high. In December 2011, Assistant Commissioner Fontana attended a second public meeting in North Melbourne. He assured the large gathering that the brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation” and that he had “total confidence” in the officer who prepared it.

At the same meeting, Detective Sergeant Sol Solomon, from the homicide squad, said he had overseen the investigation and that it was “first class” and “all possible leads have been explored”.

Later that month, Fontana repeated the same claim to me, over the phone: “We have had closer oversight of this particular case than we have of others,” he said. “The homicide squad were involved all the way through, in terms of a very close supervision, as were the Ethical Standards [Department].”

At the inquest, as I watched the police investigation unravel, it was difficult to believe those words could have been true – or if so, to accept what it implied about the quality of our detectives.

Worst of all, it was difficult to believe the investigation would have been so poor if it were me who had disappeared instead.

Something has gone badly wrong, whether wilfully or negligently. And because of that, Atakelt’s family and friends may never find out how and why he died.

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website.

For background, read the other articles I’ve written about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’, ‘Watching a hearing’ and ‘Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death’.