Earthsign

Climatologist James Hansen on “Cowards in Our Democracies”

2012-01-30T14:23:00.000-08:00

Cross posted from Climate Progress

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jan 28, 2012 at 3:40 pm

JR: “Leading climate scientists have given their support to a Freedom of Information request seeking to disclose who is funding the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London-based climate sceptic thinktank chaired by the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson.” As the UK Guardian reported earlier this week, “James Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, has joined other scientists in submitting statements to be considered by a judge at the Information Rights Tribunal on Friday.” Hansen has posted “Cowards in Our Democracies: Part 1” — his submitted statement and an explanatory intro — which I repost below.

by James Hansen

Global warming due to human-made gases, mainly CO2, is already 0.8°C and deleterious climate impacts are growing worldwide. More warming is “in the pipeline” because Earth is out of energy balance, with absorbed solar energy exceeding planetary heat radiation. Maintaining a climate that resembles the Holocene, the world of stable shorelines in which civilization developed, requires rapidly reducing fossil fuel CO2 emissions. Such a scenario is economically sensible and has multiple benefits for humanity and other species. Yet fossil fuel extraction is expanding, including highly carbon-intensive sources that can push the climate system beyond tipping points such that amplifying feedbacks drive further climate change that is practically out of humanity’s control. This situation raises profound moral issues as young people, future generations, and nature, with no possibility of protecting their future well-being, will bear the principal consequences of actions and inactions of today’s adults….
The public has the right to know who is supporting the foot soldiers for business-as-usual and to learn about the web of support for the propaganda machine that serves to keep the public addicted to fossil fuels and destroys the future of their children.

Figure 1. CO2 emissions by fossil fuels (1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon). Alternative estimates of reserves and potentially recoverable resources are from EIA (2011) and GAC (2011). [JR: Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks severe, irreversible warming impacts. We are headed toward 800 to 1,000+ ppm, which represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it -- as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear.]

Cowards in Our Democracies: Part 1

The threat of human-made climate change and the urgency of reducing fossil fuel emissions have become increasingly clear to the scientific community during the past few years. Yet, at the same time, the public seems to have become less certain about the situation. Indeed, many people have begun to wonder whether the climate threat has been concocted or exaggerated.

Public doubt about the science is not an accident. People profiting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use are waging a campaign to discredit the science. Their campaign is effective because the profiteers have learned how to manipulate democracies for their advantage.

The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions. This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science. But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position.

Why is the public presented results of the scientific method and the talk-show method as if they deserved equal respect? A few decades ago that did not happen. In 1981, when I wrote a then-controversial paper (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html) about the impact of CO2 on climate, the science writer Walter Sullivan contacted several of the top relevant scientific experts in the world for comments. He did not mislead the public by dredging up and highlighting contrarian opinion for the sake of a forced and unnatural “balance”.

Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability.

Distinguished scientific bodies such as national science academies, using the scientific method, can readily separate charlatans and false interpretations from well-reasoned science. Yet it seems that our governments and the public are not making much use of their authoritative scientific bodies. Why is that?

I believe that the answer, and the difficulty in communicating science to the public, is related to the corrosive influence of money in politics and to increased corporate influence on the media.

It is a tragic and frustrating situation, because when all the dots in the climate-energy story are connected it becomes clear that a common-sense pathway exists that would solve energy needs, stimulate the economy, and protect the future of young people. As I discussed in “Storms of My Grandchildren,” a gradually rising carbon fee should be collected from fossil fuel companies, with the money distributed uniformly to legal residents. This would stimulate the economy, making it more efficient by putting an honest price on fuels, incorporating their costs to society.

“Captains of industry” told me they would prefer such a course with knowledge of a steadily rising carbon price, which would stimulate innovations in efficiency and clean energies.

Despite the obstacles presented by the role of money in politics and by the huge advertising campaigns of the fossil fuel industry, the urgency of addressing the climate-energy issue demands that we do the best that we can to inform the public. One of the things we can do is try to expose how the public and our democracies are being manipulated for the benefit of those profiting from the public’s fossil fuel addiction.

For that purpose I provided the witness statement below in support of an effort to reveal the name of the seed funder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in the UK. GWPF is “successful” in casting doubt on the reality and significance of human-made climate change.

The newsletters of Benny Peiser, Director of GWPF, can be quite entertaining and sometimes include useful references. He pings the impracticality and costliness of an energy approach that relies excessively on renewable energies. But ultimately his purpose seems to be to persuade the public that climate science is flawed. I don’t know if GWPF is supported by the fossil fuel industry, but it seems to me that the public has the right to know. Ultimately, I hope and believe, the public will be able to appreciate how our democracies are being twisted by people with money for their own purposes. But that requires freedom of information.

Jim Hansen

Some clarification of what this is about, the secret efforts of Lords, the wealthy, the privileged, to dupe the public in our democracies into supporting their continued and growing privileges, is provided by this news article and press release:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/bid-to-out-the-money-behind-the-voice-against- climate-change-20120126-1qjfp.html
http://requestinitiative.org/2012/01/lord-lawson-should-name-funder-of-climate-sceptic-think- tank-judge-told/
Hansen's statement is below the fold

STATEMENT

I, James Hansen of Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, USA, say as follows

1. I am Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and Adjunct Professor of Earth Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. I write here in my personal capacity, not representing these institutions. I was trained in physics and astronomy in the space science program of Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa, receiving my Ph.D. in 1967. Since the mid-1970s my research has focused on Earth’s climate and understanding the human impact on global climate. I am a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, have testified about climate change to our Congress many times, and have met with officials of numerous nations concerning actions needed to stabilize climate and assure a bright future for young people.

2. I make this witness statement in support of Brendan Montague’s appeal. The facts and matters set out in this statement are within my own knowledge unless otherwise stated, and I believe them to be true. Where I refer to information supplied by others, the source of the information is identified; facts and matters derived from other sources are true to the best of my knowledge and belief. References in this statement are to documents in the bundles of documents prepared for the Tribunal hearing.

The current situation regarding global climate change is described in a paper, The Case for Young People and Nature: A Path to a Healthy Prosperous Future, which I am preparing with the help of 17 international colleagues for submission to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. The paper includes more than 100 scientific references supporting the discussion in my statement below. The abstract summarizing our paper is [posted at the top].

Science, as described in numerous authoritative reports, has revealed that humanity is now the dominant force driving changes of Earth’s atmospheric composition and thus future climate. The principal climate forcing is carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel emissions, much of which will remain in the atmosphere for millennia. The climate system’s inertia, which is mainly due to the ocean and the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, causes climate to respond slowly, at least initially, but in a very long-lasting way to this human-made forcing.

Governments have recognized the need to limit emissions to avoid dangerous human-made climate change, as formalized in the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Despite this, the Kyoto Protocol, established in 1997 to reduce developed country emissions and slow emissions growth in developing countries, has been so ineffective that the rate of global emissions has since accelerated to almost 3%/year, compared to 1.5%/year in the preceding two decades.

There is a huge gap between rhetoric about reducing emissions and reality. Governments and businesses offer assurances that they are working to reduce emissions, but only a few nations have made substantial progress. Reality exposes massive efforts to expand fossil fuel extraction, including oil drilling to increasing ocean depths, into the Arctic, and onto environmentally fragile public lands; squeezing of oil from tar sands and tar shale; hydro-fracking to expand extraction of natural gas; and increased mining of coal via mechanized longwall mining and mountain-top removal.

Governments not only allow this activity, but use public funds to subsidize fossil fuels at a rate of about 500 billion US$ per year. Nor are fossil fuels required to pay their costs to society. Air and water pollution due to extraction and burning of fossil fuels kills more than 1,000,000 people per year and affects the health of billions of people. But the greatest costs to society are likely to be the impacts of climate change, which are already apparent and are expected to grow considerably.

Climate change is a moral issue of unprecedented scope, a matter of intergenerational injustice, as today’s adults obtain benefits of fossil fuel use, while consequences are felt mainly by young people and future generations. In addition, developed countries are most responsible for emissions, but people in less developed countries and indigenous people across the world are likely to be burdened the most while being least able to adapt to a changing climate.

The tragedy of human-made climate change, should the rush to exploit all fossil fuels continue, is that transition to clean energies and energy efficiency is not only feasible but economically sensible. Assertions that phase-out of fossil fuels would be unacceptably costly can be traced to biased assumptions that do not account for the costs of fossil fuels to society or include the benefits of technology innovations that would emerge in response to an appropriate price on carbon emissions.

Fossil fuel emissions so far are a small fraction of known reserves and potentially recoverable resources, as shown in Figure 1. There are uncertainties in estimated reserves and resources, some of which may not be economically recoverable with current technologies and energy prices. But there is already more than enough fossil fuel reserve to transform the planet, and fossil fuel subsidies and technological advances will make more and more of the resources available.

Burning all fossil fuels would create a different planet than the one that humanity knows. The paleoclimate record and ongoing climate change make it clear that the climate system would be pushed beyond tipping points, setting in motion irreversible changes, including ice sheet disintegration with a continually adjusting shoreline, extermination of a substantial fraction of species on the planet, and increasingly devastating regional climate extremes.

Phase out of fossil fuel emissions is urgent. CO2 from fossil fuel use stays in the surface climate system for millennia. Failure to phase out emissions rapidly will leave young people and future generations with an enormous clean-up job. The task of extracting CO2 from the air is so great that success is uncertain at best, raising the likelihood of a spiral into climate catastrophes and efforts to “geo-engineer” restoration of planetary energy balance.

Most proposed schemes to artificially restore Earth’s energy balance aim to reduce solar heating, e.g., by maintaining a haze of stratospheric particles that reflect sunlight to space. Such attempts to mask one pollutant with another pollutant almost inevitably would have unintended consequences. Moreover, schemes that do not remove CO2 would not avert ocean acidification. The pragmatic path is for the world to move expeditiously to carbon-free energies and increased energy efficiency, leaving most remaining fossil fuels in the ground.

Transition to a post-fossil fuel world of clean energies will not occur as long as fossil fuels remain the cheapest energy in a system that does not incorporate the full cost of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are cheap only because they are subsidized directly and indirectly, and because they do not pay their costs to society. Costs of air and water pollution caused by fossil fuel extraction and use, via impacts on human health, food production, and natural ecosystems, are borne by the public. Similarly, costs of climate change and ocean acidification will be borne by the public, especially by young people and future generations.

Thus the essential underlying policy, albeit not sufficient, is a price on carbon emissions that allows these costs to be internalized within the economics of energy use. The price should rise over decades such that people and businesses can efficiently adjust their lifestyles and investments to minimize costs. The right price for carbon and the best mechanism for carbon pricing are more matters of practicality than of economic theory.

Economic analyses indicate that a carbon price fully incorporating environmental and climate damage, although uncertain, would be high. However, it is not necessary or desirable to suddenly increase fossil fuel prices. Instead the price should be ramped up gradually, with the money that is collected from the fossil fuel companies (at the first sale, at the domestic mine or port of entry) distributed on a uniform per capita basis to legal residents. More than 60 percent of the public would receive more in their monthly dividend, distributed electronically to their bank account or debit card, than they would pay in increased costs due to higher fossil fuel energy prices.

An economic analysis indicates that a tax beginning at a level of $15/tCO2 and rising $10/tCO2 each succeeding year would reduce emissions in the United States by 30% within 10 years. Such a reduction of carbon emissions is more than 10 times greater than the carbon content of tar sands oil that would be carried by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline (830,000 barrels/day).

Relative merits of a carbon tax versus cap-and-trade continue to be discussed. Cap-and-trade has had some, albeit limited, success in Europe, but failed in the arena of U.S. policy, as opponents won the rhetorical battle by describing it as a devious new tax. The merits of an alternative, a gradually rising fee on carbon emissions collected from fossil fuel companies with proceeds distributed to the public, have been summarized by DiPeso, Policy Director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, as: “Transparent. Market-based. Does not enlarge government. Leaves energy decisions to individual choices…. Sounds like a conservative climate plan.”

A rising carbon price is the sine qua non for fossil fuel phase out, but it is not sufficient. Other needs include investment in energy R&D, testing of new technologies such as low-loss smart electric grids, electrical vehicles interacting effectively with the power grid, energy storage for intermittent renewable energy, new nuclear power plant designs, and carbon capture and storage. Governments must support energy planning for housing and transportation, energy and carbon efficiency requirements for buildings, vehicles and other manufactured products, global monitoring systems, and climate mitigation and adaptation in undeveloped countries.

Rhetoric of political leaders, including phrases such as “a planet in peril”, leaves the impression that they fully grasp the planetary crisis caused by rising atmospheric CO2. However, closer examination reveals that much of the rhetoric is aptly termed “greenwash” (J. Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren, Bloomsbury, 2009, 304 pp.) as even nations considered to be among the “greenest” support expanded fossil fuel extraction including the most carbon-intensive fuels such as tar sands.

The reality is that most governments, rather than taking actions to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, are allowing and using public funds to partially subsidize continued fossil fuel extraction, including expansion of oil drilling to increasing ocean depths, into the Arctic, and onto environmentally fragile public lands; squeezing of oil from tar sands and tar shale; hydro-fracking to expand extraction of natural gas; and increased mining of coal via mechanized longwall mining and mountain-top removal.

How is it possible that a specter of large human-driven climate change has unfolded virtually unimpeded, despite scientific understanding of likely consequences? Would not governments – presumably instituted for the protection of all citizens – have stepped in to safeguard the future of young people? A strong case can be made that the absence of effective leadership in most nations is related to the undue sway of special financial interests on government policies and effective public relations efforts by people who profit from the public’s fossil fuel addiction and wish to perpetuate that dependence.

Such a situation, with the science clear enough to demand action but with public understanding of the situation, and thus political response, hampered by the enormous financial power of special interests, suggests the possibility of an important role for the judiciary system. Indeed, in some nations the judicial branch of government may be able to require the executive branch to present realistic plans to protect the rights of the young. Such a legal case for young people should demand plans for emission reductions that are consistent with what the science shows is required to stabilize climate.

Judicial recognition of the exigency and the rights of young people will help draw attention to the need for a rapid change of direction. However, fundamental change is unlikely without public support. Obtaining public support requires widespread recognition that a prompt orderly transition to the post fossil fuel world, via a gradually rising price on carbon emissions, makes overall sense and is economically beneficial.

The most basic matter, however, is not one of economics. It is a matter of morality – a matter of intergenerational justice. As with the earlier great moral issue of slavery, an injustice of one race of humans to another, so the injustice of one generation to another must stir the public’s conscience to the point of action. Until there is a sustained and growing public involvement, it is unlikely that the needed fundamental change of direction can be achieved.

A broad public outcry may seem implausible given the enormous resources of the fossil fuel industry, which allows indoctrination of the public with the industry’s perspective. The merits of coal, of oil from tar sands and the deep ocean, of gas from hydrofracking are repeatedly extolled, all of these supposedly to be acquired with utmost care of the environment. Potential climate concerns are addressed by discrediting climate science and scientists, including use of character assassination and every negative campaign trick that they have learned.

The fossil fuel kingpins who profit from the public’s fossil fuel addiction, some of them multi-billionaires, are loosely knit, but with a well-understood common objective of maintaining the public’s addiction. These kingpins have the resources to be well aware of the scientific knowledge concerning the consequences of continued exploitation of fossil fuels. However, they choose not only to ignore those facts, but to support activities intended to keep the public ill- informed. These kingpins are guilty of high crimes against humanity and nature. It is little consolation that the world will eventually convict them in the court of public opinion or even, unlikely as it is, that they may be forced to stand trial in the future before an international court of justice.

The fossil fuel kingpins are separated from the foot soldiers who serve as their public mouthpieces, separated by multiple layers of people, and even by corporations, which some courts have granted rights and protections of people.

The public has the right to know who is supporting the foot soldiers for business-as-usual and to learn about the web of support for the propaganda machine that serves to keep the public addicted to fossil fuels and destroys the future of their children.

This court cannot single-handedly cure the cancer that is afflicting democracies worldwide, the inappropriate power granted to money, to special financial interests. But by standing for the rights of the people, by exposing one link in the web of the oppressing fossil fuel propaganda machine, it just may start a process that allows the public to begin to realize what is at stake and where the public interest lies. Perhaps, if this process begins soon, there is still time to preserve a good future for young people and future generations.

I believe that the facts stated in this witness statement are true.

– James Hansen

Good News - Yes really!

2012-01-29T19:40:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I get tired of reporting the endless stream of environmental bad news and the greed and stupidity that seems to be driving us into the climatic abyss. So, for once this post will report GOOD NEWS.

Giles Parkinson at ReNew Economy reports that Zhengrong Shi, Head of the world's largest PV manufacturer Suntech, predicts:

"…that 4 gigawatts – or even more – of solar PV could be deployed in (China) in 2012. Shi, the former UNSW researcher who now heads the biggest solar PV manufacturer in the world, Suntech Power, said more than 3GW of solar was deployed in China in 2011 (more than previous forecasts). This suggests that even the most recently updated prediction of 15GW of solar by 2015 (the year-ago forecast was for 5GW by 2015) in the world’s biggest consumer of energy could be beaten quite handsomely.

This is especially GOOD NEWS as:

The China market is emerging as the key for the global solar PV industry – and for Chinese manufacturers – as subsidies in Europe and elsewhere are gradually wound back."

Further GOOD NEWS is that, according to a report released by the Clean Energy Council, in line with the global trend for solar power which has seen enormous growth in the last 5 years, Australian PV capacity has increased 35-fold since 2008. Not so GOOD NEWS is that even with this rapid growth, Australia now has a total installed capacity of only 1031MW (1.031GW – about 0.04kW per capita). The approximately 1 million solar photovoltaics (PV) systems installed throughout the country produced 2.3% (680 gigawatt-hours (GWh)) of Australia’s renewable energy. Renewable energy generation across Australia in the 2010-2011 financial year stood at 9.64% of all generation. The world leader in installed solar PV, Germany, has more than 17GW (17,000MW – about 0.2kW per capita) of installed capacity. Either in terms of per capita capacity or total generating capacity Australia plainly has much ground to make up.

More not so GOOD NEWS from Giles Parkinson at Renew Economy who reports that:

"The Queensland state-owned generator CS Energy has quit the Solar Dawn consortium that is proposing to build a 250MW solar thermal power station as part of the federal government’s Solar Flagships project. The decision by CS Energy creates further uncertainty about the future of the project, which – along with the other Solar Flagships winner, the 150MW Moree solar PV project – failed to arrange finance by the mid-December deadline.

The flagships program has been criticized by many in the industry because of the grandiose nature of the projects, when it might have been wiser to fund a broader range of smaller projects using different technologies, and so spread the risk. (See Matthew Wright’s piece on why grants should be ditched in favour of feed-in-tariffs)."

Failure to achieve the necessary interim financial goals casts into doubt the future of the Solar Flagships projects with the possibility that Federally allocated funds not utilised will revert to ARENA - the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. As this fund (Currently $3.2 billion) is under the control of the Energy Minister that Time forgot, Fossil Fuel Ferguson, and as he is prepared to guarantee only that the ARENA Board, when appointed will contain at least one expert in CLEAN (not renewable) energy technology there is every chance that Solar Flagships money will eventually go to funding CCS research. This could not be described as GOOD NEWS.

More GOOD NEWS. The estimable Giles Parkinson at Renew Economy reports:

"The US-based First Solar announced at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi that it had set a new record for thin film solar products, achieving a module efficiency of 14.4 per cent, up from its previous record of 13.4 per cent.

The record, which has been verified by the US Renewable Energy Laboratory, and was established in a commercial setting rather than just a test lab, takes First Solar closer to its interim goal of 15 per cent module efficiency, which it sees as key to taking its costs down to around 10c-14c/kWh by 2015, where it expects to be able to compete with other technologies without subsidies.

First Solar is building Australia’s first utility scale solar PV project near Geraldton, a 10MW facility featuring its cadmium telluride thin film panels that is expected to be completed mid-year."

More GOOD NEWS. The CSIRO have published a report titled "Exploring community acceptance of rural wind farms in Australia: a snapshot". Here are some highlights:

The study produced four high-level findings:
1. There is strong community support for the development of wind farms, including support from rural residents who do not seek media attention or political engagement to express their views.
2. The actual and perceived local costs and benefits of wind farms are strongly influenced by the design, implementation, and community engagement processes. Many of the benefits can be shared or communicated in ways that would enhance community support for the development of wind farms in a region. Many of the potential costs can be reduced by appropriate design, siting, and project implementation.
3. Existing regulatory approaches provide an appropriate framework for negotiating wind farm developments, but there is scope for improving outcomes.4. The emerging notion of a ‘Social Licence to Operate’ provides a useful framework for wind farm developers to engage local communities in ways that could enhance transparency and local support, and complement formal regulatory processes.

There is currently no evidence linking noise impacts with adverse health effects. However, proposed wind farms can create stress, leading to negative health outcomes.

Property prices have not been found to increase or decrease, although the potential market of buyers may be decreased.

The vocal minority are more often prominent in the media, and secure political attention. A group from the ‘Landscape Guardian’ movement of wind opposition contests half of all wind farm proposals. These groups often contact local residents early in the project and share concerns about wind farms.

This is good news because of the destructive influence the Landscape Guardians and other disingenuous industry funded astroturf groups like the Australian Energy Foundation, have exerted over the shockingly restrictive wind power policies of newly elected conservative governments in both Victoria and New South Wales.

The Climate and Health Alliance have released a position statement titled Health and Wind Turbines. Plainly echoing what the literature has shown for ages this statement says:

The evidence
To date, there is no credible peer reviewed scientific evidence that demonstrates a direct causal link between wind turbines and adverse health impacts in people living in proximity to them. There is no evidence for any adverse health effects from wind turbine shadow flicker or electromagnetic frequency. There is no evidence in the peer reviewed published scientific literature that suggests that there are any adverse health effects from „infrasound‟ (a component of low frequency sound) at the low levels that may be emitted by wind turbines.

There is some evidence to suggest that audible noise from wind turbines at elevated sound pressure levels may be associated with disturbed sleep and negative emotions. Annoyance levels may be expressed more about wind turbines than for comparable industrial noise, in particular when people hold pre-existing negative attitudes towards turbines. Annoyance may also be related to visual cues.

Fear and anxious anticipation of potential negative impacts of wind farms can also contribute to stress responses, and result in physical and psychological stress symptoms.
In addition, some people experience distress when they perceive a threat to the place that they live in the form of changes to the landscape, like a wind farm, but also other industrial developments, such as new housing estates, coal mines, or supermarkets.

Local concerns about wind farms can be related to perceived threats from changes to their place and can be considered a form of “place-protection action”, recognised in psychological research about the importance of „place‟ and people‟s sense of identity. The literature has previously identified the upsetting nature of place change, leading to feelings of grief or loss. However it is important not to presume that energy projects specifically, and proposals for place change more generally, will necessarily disrupt place attachments. How changes to places are interpreted, rather than the form of change per se, is critical in determining whether the pattern of association between place attachment and acceptance is positive or negative.

Economic reward can also affect attitudes to wind turbines, with people economically involved with wind farms more likely to show a more positive attitude to wind power than those who are not.

Fiona Armstrong at Climate Spectator has picked up on the CAHA position statement as has Adam Morton in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Fifth Estate.
Don't know about you but I think that any day the lying so and so's from the anti-wind movement get a bit of stick is a GOOD NEWS day.

Finally. Some good news of quite a different sort popped up on Larvatus Prodeo's Climate Clippings 64.

Zero-emissions engine that runs on liquid air

A new zero-emissions engine capable of competing commercially with hydrogen fuel cells and battery electric systems appeared on the radar when respected British engineering consultancy Ricardo validated Dearman engine technology and its commercial potential.

The Dearman engine operates by injecting cryogenic (liquid) air into ambient heat inside the engine to produce high pressure gas that drives the engine – the exhaust emits cold air. It’s cheaper to build than battery electric or fuel cell technology, with excellent energy density, fast refuelling and no range anxiety. It just might be a third alternative.

Among the advantages are that it doesn’t catch fire or explode and doesn’t require rare materials. Given the pathetic performance and relatively high cost of currently available EVs it seems to me that this bright idea can't come quickly enough. Perhaps our stumbling government struggling to balance its love of the 'market' with the imminent loss of jobs in the automotive industry might tie its support to the development of ths genuinely promising green transport initiative. Now that would be really GOOD NEWS.

Why we shouldn't Bankroll Coal

2012-01-27T14:18:00.000-08:00

Cross posted from New Matilda 25 Jan 2012

Why We Shouldn't Bankroll Coal

By Julien Vincent

Tags:

Should taxpayers finance a brown coal power station in Victoria? No, says Julien Vincent, and not just because it's dirty power. There are plenty of reasons why the grant to HRL should be cancelled.

On 1 February, Victorians will turn out in their hundreds to call for the cancellation of a federal taxpayer-funded grant allocated to a new brown coal power station in Victoria. It’s a call that may soon be answered. One of the federal Energy Department’s first tasks of the year is to decide whether or not to cancel this grant, or be the biggest financiers of Australia’s next dirty coal-fired power station.

In case they need any more convincing, here’s the case for cancelling the grant.

A company called HRL want to build a commercial-scale coal-fired power station at Morwell, Victoria, using their coal-gasification technology which makes a brown coal power station as clean as black coal (that is, dirty). In 2006 they were awarded a $100 million grant by the Howard government but in over five years have failed to meet the conditions of the grant. That means so far, none of this money has been given to HRL by the Commonwealth.

In comes Prime Minister Gillard in 2010, committing that "no more dirty coal-fired power stations will be built in this country". Then the Clean Energy Future legislation passes, finally invoking the principle that generating carbon pollution is wrong and should be penalised. The Prime Minister issues a deadline to HRL, giving them until 31 December 2011 to meet the conditions of the grant. That deadline has now passed and HRL have still failed to satisfy their conditions.

Those conditions included locking in private funding, developing a plan for how they would achieve carbon capture and storage, and obtaining all legal approvals. With no evidence of the first two being presented and HRL’s partial EPA approval being contested in court (by various parties including HRL themselves), it is safe to say that HRL have failed to meet their deadline and their grant must now be cancelled.

If that’s not compelling enough, there’s a swag of other great reasons why HRL should not retain its $100 million grant.

Firstly, HRL wasn’t supposed to be awarded the grant in the first place! An expert panel reviewing HRL’s application back in 2006 found that due to technical and financial risks the project was not recommended for funding.

Furthermore, HRL’s works approval from the EPA is for a 300 Megawatt plant (i.e. half of what was applied for). The expert panel assessing HRL’s application in 2006 knew that it would not be economically viable at a scale less than 400 Megawatts.

When the grant was awarded it was for a 400 Megawatt power station that was due to be operating in 2009. The current proposal is for a 600 Megawatts — and clearly we weren’t able to rely on HRL delivering their project by 2009.

And even if HRL built their plant at full scale, EPA advice is that it still would not be economically viable.

The funding deed for HRL’s grant was signed on 9 May 2008. It was a condition of the deed that the project commence within three months of the funding deed being executed. However, by 9 August 2008 there was no evidence to suggest that the project had commenced. HRL have failed to meet deadlines for their project milestones in the past, relying on extensions directly from the Minister.

While the project costs have ballooned in recent years, out from $750 million to $1.3 billion, financial support for HRL has dried up. The most significant financial development over the past four years is HRL’s joint venture partner, Harbin, pulling out of the project and taking $500 million with them. A number of domestic and international banks have gone on record as stating they have no interest in the project, including the big four of ANZ, Westpac, Commonwealth and National Bank.

Finally, there’s considerable opposition to the project. Last September, a poll of 600 Victorians showed that 67 per cent supported the government removing the grant and redirecting it towards renewable energy. Over 6000 people have so far signed a petition to Parliament calling for the grant to be withdrawn and invested instead in a clean, renewable energy future for Victoria.

There’s no shortage of substantial reasons to cancel HRL’s grant in other words.

And here’s one more: it’s 2012. We’re supposed to be moving towards a clean energy future. We’re not supposed to be allowing — let alone making the Australian taxpayer pay for — a project that would be both economically and environmentally disastrous. Retaining HRL’s grant would be wrong, pure and simple.

Over to you, Energy Department.

As if we didn't know: biased climate media in Oz

2012-01-25T16:17:00.000-08:00

Roger Jones at Understanding Climate Risk has drawn attention to the publication of a Report from the estimable Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ) A Sceptical Climate: Media coverage of climate change in Australia, Part 1 - Climate Change Policy. An estimated 25% of Australians read one of the ten capital city newspapers (omitting the Canberra Times). Between February and July last year, these ten papers printed almost 4,000 articles on climate change policy, a whopping 28% in The Australian alone. Most were on the Gillard Government’s carbon price policy. Of the total, 43% were negative, 41% neutral and 15% positive. News Limited publications comprised 65% of the total. For the News reader, the respective numbers were 50%, 41% and 10%. That’s right, less than 10% of the 2,770 articles on climate policy in the major News Limited papers during this period were positive towards climate policy. The results, summarized in the Tables below should not surprise anyone.

Total articles on climate change policy Feb-Jul 2011

Ratio of negative to positive articles in 10 major Australian newspapers Feb-Jul 2011

The study provided a snapshot of how climate change policy was covered over a six-month period from February to July 2011. The dominant issue during this period was the introduction of the Gillard Labor government carbon emissions pricing scheme. Despite the Gillard government's war with News Limited, negative coverage of their Clean Energy legislation is not in itself proof of the negative bias plausibly alleged by both the ALP and the Greens. The package of legislation is certainly not above criticism but was generally acknowledged by objective commentators as a small step in the right direction.

The ACIJ Report divided content into news, editorials, features and comment. Most comment was in-house and dominated by a few commentators. The top ten commentators were negative or neutral commentators, although the Fairfax media featured a number of consistently positive commentators outside the top ten. The report noted that being positive or negative did not preclude investigative reporting. However, Terry McCrann, Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Miranda Devine, Piers Akerman and Christopher Pearson accounted for 21% of the commentary. They are not noted for their investigative reporting skills. All regularly presented scientifically discredited allegations as fact and were overwhelmingly negative to almost all forms of carbon policy.

Four percent of the articles were editorials. They were slightly more positive than the sample average but displayed the same tendencies as total articles. The total was roughly one half negative, one third neutral and one quarter positive. The News Limited editorials were two-thirds negative, one-third neutral with a few positive; the Fairfax broadsheets were the other way around. The weight of ownership skewed the total sample towards the negative.

Framing and sources were also both investigated. The carbon price policy was framed mainly as a business issue. Economy, jobs and investment were 43%, prices 30% and No integrity (Gillard)/No point frames totalled 25%. The climate policy benefits and risk management aspects were not named in the framing section at all. 11% of all stories had no sources and 30% one. When the first three sources in all stories were added up: 28% were Labor, 18% Liberal and 23% business. Total civil society sources were 17%, emphasising the strong political, rather than policy, framing of the content. According to the report, when covering international climate policy, the only societies that had a lower level of civil society sources in such articles than Australia were Pakistan and Israel.

Business sources were also used highly selectively. Fossil fuel sources comprised 28% of all business sources, 8% of the total, although one might expect that given their exposure to the issue. Of the 826 business sources used, 79% were negative 4% neutral and 17% positive. The Fairfax/News split here was less pronounced. Some business sources were heavily utilised—Bluescope Steel 71 times—while other business interests favouring the policy complained that they were being sidelined. Businesses for a Clean Economy are hardly the driving power for the economy, but a look at their website demonstrates they could show the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance a thing or two about transparency.

Jones features some selective quotes from the Report

Yes, this report has established that the reporting of climate change in sections of the Australian media has been far from impartial, fair or balanced. Is it in the public interest for a media organisation that dominates the market to ‘campaign’ as The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun have done, on an issue which a huge majority of the world’s scientists have found threatens the lives of millions? In what circumstances does a lack of diversity and balance, represent a threat to democracy?

Our research has also found evidence of strong reporting, both in these ten publications, the ABC and the fledgling independent media. At the same time however, News Ltd amplifies the power of some of its most biased reporting through blogs, video, links with talk back radio and broadcast media.

Our second report which deals with the reporting of climate science will provide more evidence that while the carbon policy was the focus of intense attention, climate science reporting slipped right down the news agenda. Meanwhile Australian readers received their usual dose of climate scepticism.

Evidence in this report suggests that many Australians did not receive fair, accurate and impartial reporting in the public interest in relation to the carbon policy in 2011. This suggests that rather an open and competitive market that can be trusted to deliver quality media, we may have a case of market failure.

The report confirms what we already knew and the second part of the report promises more similarly-depressing but already-suspected material. Nevertheless it is useful and oddly reassuring to have some hard data to back up our suspicions.

Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere — Absent a Serious Price for Global Warming Pollution

2012-01-24T14:28:00.000-08:00

Cross posted from Climate Progress.

Gas is not a clean fuel, Gas is not an acceptable bridging fuel to an environmentally sustainable future.

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By Joe Romm on Jan 24, 2012 at 2:30 pm

President of American Gas Association, 1981: “In fact, gas energy — currently America’s largest domestically produced fuel — could prove to be the keystone to solving the nation’s energy crisis by serving as the ‘bridge fuel’ to the next century’s renewable energy technologies.”
VP of AGA, 1988, “refers to natural gas as a bridge fuel — the least harmful alternative while the world looks for other, longer-lasting solutions to the ‘greenhouse’ effect,” the Washington Post reported.
Chair of AGA, 2008: “Natural gas will be the bridge fuel to the future…. The electric industry is expected to turn to natural gas as a bridge until clean coal and nuclear generation are available.”

It’s the longest bridge in history! Heck, the Golden Gate Bridge only took 4 years to build!

The President will be touting natural gas in his State of the Union address tonight, according to sources. Nothing wrong with touting gas — if you also tout a rising carbon price, which the president once did but no longer does.

Way back in June 2009, I pointed out the value of gas in the context of a climate bill with a rising CO2 price — see “Why unconventional natural gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet.” But the key point of that post was that you could put gas in existing, underutilized plants to replace existing coal power cheaply to meet the key 2020 target Obama.

Building lots of new gas plants doesn’t make much sense since we need to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades if we’re to have any chance to avoid catastrophic global warming. We don’t want new gas plants to displace new renewables, like solar and wind, which are going to be the some of the biggest, sustainable job creating industries of the century.

Late last year, some of the leading (center-right) economists in the country — Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus — concluded in a top economic journal that the total damages from natural gas generation exceed its value-added at a low-ball carbon price of $27 per ton! At a price of $65 a ton of carbon, the total damages from natural gas are more than double its value-added!

For the record, stabilizing at 550 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2, which would likely still be catastrophic for humanity, would require a price of $330 a metric ton of carbon in 2030, the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted back in 2008.

The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was in fact, first demonstrated by the IEA in its big June 2011 report on gas — see I EA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. That study — which had both coal and oil consumption peaking in 2020 — made abundantly clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels.

Then came a remarkable new study by Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) that concluded:

In summary, our results show that the substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades.

Here was the key figure:

Coal, natural gas, and climate: Shifting from coal to natural gas would have limited impacts on climate, new research indicates. If methane leaks from natural gas operations could be kept to 2.5% or less, the increase in global temperatures would be reduced by about 0.1 degree Celsius by 2100. Note: This is a figure of temperature change relative to baseline warming of roughly 3°C (5.4°F) in 2100 (or nearly 7°F warming compared to preindustrial levels). Click to Enlarge.

What NCAR’s new study added is more detailed modeling of all contributors to climate change from fossil fuel combustion — positive and negative. Reducing coal use reduces sulfate aerosols that have a short-term cooling effect. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, so leakage throughout the natural gas production and delivery system adds to near-term warming. And, of course, since natural gas is a hydrocarbon, its combustion does produce CO2, albeit much less than the coal it might replace. When you put all these factors together, here’s what you conclude:

“Relying more on natural gas would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, but it would do little to help solve the climate problem,” says Wigley, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “It would be many decades before it would slow down global warming at all, and even then it would just be making a difference around the edges.”

Natural gas might have been a “bridge” to a low-carbon future 30 years ago when the term was first introduced, but now its primary value would be to reduce the cost of meeting a near-term CO2 target in the U.S. in the context of a rising CO2 price.

A key finding of the NCAR study is:

The most important result, however, in accord with the above authors, is that, unless leakage rates for new methane can be kept below 2%, substituting gas for coal is not an effective means for reducing the magnitude of future climate change.

The question of what the total leakage rate is remains hotly contested, but I know of no analysis that finds a rate below 2% including one by the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the DOE’s premier fossil fuel lab.

BOTTOM LINE: If you want to have a serious chance at averting catastrophic global warming, then we need to start phasing out all fossil fuels as soon as possible. Natural gas isn’t a bridge fuel from a climate perspective. Carbon-free power is the bridge fuel until we can figure out how to go carbon negative on a large scale in the second half of the century.

ADDENDUM: The 1988 Washington Post article, “Natural Gas, Nuclear Backers See Opportunity in ‘Greenhouse’ Concern” cited above quoting the VP of the American Gas Association contains this paragraph:

All told, worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide more than tripled from 1950 to 1980. If the trend continues, by the year 2030, temperatures could be warm enough to melt ocean-borne ice, raise sea levels, and radically change growing conditions for the world’s food supply.

Oops. Only missed by 20 years.

Let me end by pointing out another NCAR study, “Drought under global warming” (see here). That study makes clear that Dust-Bowlification may be the impact of human-caused climate change that hits the most people by mid-century, as the figure below suggests (click to enlarge, “a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought”):

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade(see here).

The large-scale pattern shown in Figure 11 [of which the figure above is part] appears to be a robust response to increased GHGs. This is very alarming because if the drying is anything resembling Figure 11, a very large population will be severely affected in the coming decades over the whole United States, southern Europe, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Chile, Australia, and most of Africa.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research notes “By the end of the century, many populated areas, including parts of the United States, could face readings in the range of -8 to -10, and much of the Mediterranean could fall to -15 to -20. Such readings would be almost unprecedented.”

For the record, the NCAR study merely models the IPCC’s “moderate” A1B scenario — atmospheric concentrations of CO2 around 520 ppm in 2050 and 700 in 2100, which looks close to what Wigley modeled. If this is the Golden Age of Gas, then it must be describing the color of the dust.

Thanks to Brad Johnson for finding the 1980s bridge quotes.

Not Smart

2012-01-08T01:33:00.000-08:00

YET ANOTHER UPDATE

I apologize again to those who receive these posts as emails for clogging their in-boxes with re-posts but this time I wanted to link to the Quit Coal campaign's Big Brother Ferguson is watching. Don't forget to read the excellent 'Op - Ed' piece by Shaun Murray from Quit Coal published in 'The Age' on January 10. This addresses the revelations of unethical government surveillance that prompted my original post. Since the original post this piece from New Matilda, 'Yes, You Are Being Watched' by Adam Brereton has appeared and is worth reading. This piece was prompted by a Melbourne forum ‘War on the Internet' highlights of which can be seen here. Bernard Keane's piece for Crikey 'Tracking the trackers: the cyber snoops working in Australia' can be seen here.

Above all don't forget the Quit Coal HRL Rally.

In 2007 the Howard Government awarded HRL a grant of $100 million to build a new coal fired power station in Victoria. But 5 years later HRL has failed to meet any conditions of this grant and it is now under review. Recent media reports indicate it may be revoked, making it unlikely that HRL would ever be built.

This would be a massive win for us, and that's why we're joining with other groups to holding the biggest HRL rally yet. Together we can send a powerful reminder to the government about the strength of our opposition to HRL, and a big turn out could be decisive in turning the decision in our favour.
Where: Parliament House, Spring Street, Melbourne CBD
When: 12.30PM, Wednesday February 1st
Featuring: Special guest speakers Adam Bandt MP and Kelvin Thompson MP
Bring: Signs & Placards telling the government you want renewable energy & NO NEW COAL!
Share!: Be sure to click 'attending' on our facebook event and invite all your friends!
For a year we have fought this project, doing everything from locking on in treasury place, holding rallies, performing media stunts (including helping on the largest banner drops in Australian history), and collecting signatures on our massive joint petition with Greenpeace and Environment Victoria that netted almost 13,000 signatures.

More importantly, however, it would be a massive win for the planet. The International Energy Agency tells us that building new coal infrastructure will lock in dangerous global warming. A victory against HRL, then, is a victory against precisely the kind of greed and short-sightedness that would do just that.

Please join us, then, and put February 1st in your diary as a day when we will draw a line in the sand and say No New Coal in Victoria!

The original post on Fossil Fuel Fergie's latest spying exploits is below:

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Having just finished a post on the latest not so excellent adventures of Martin Ferguson - the Energy Minister that time forgot - he's in the news again. Ferguson, apparently responding to the urging of his industry mates the (largely foreign owned) big miners and power generators, instigated an ongoing program of surveillance of Australian environmental groups on the laughably disingenuous pretext of protecting energy security. As a result, for some years the AFP has paid the private investigation group NOSIC to spy on various environment and climate groups. How much bang have they had for our bucks? A mental review of the last couple of years of climate action suggests not too much. Reaction so far has come from leader of the Greens, Senator Bob Brown who accused Ferguson of turning Australia into a police state. Ferguson of course followed the time honored tradition of hiding behind a statement from 'a spokeswoman' when the shit hit the fan. A spokesperson for Mr Ferguson said yesterday that governments at all levels were concerned to maintain energy security and economic activity. ''This includes maintaining the rule of law and energy supply where issues-motivated groups actively seek to engage in unlawful activity.''

The rebuttal of the ludicrous reference to 'energy security' written by Shaun Murray from Quit Coal and published in The Age on January 10 leaves this shambolic government (yet again) without a stitch to cover its ineptitude.

Over Christmas I read a new book from David Marr entitled 'Panic'. This examines the exploitation of governments of deliberately manufactured 'panic' as a recurrent feature of the Australian political landscape. The resonance of Marr's central idea with this bumbling, but nevertheless sinister, effort by this stumbling government is unmistakeable.

This is yet another lurch to the right by the Gillard Government which seems to have lost track of any basis in ethical behavior and a blow to the ALP which can apparently no longer be taken seriously as a source of rational, principled, progressive policy. On New Year's Day, Guy Rundle wrote an opinion piece in the Age 'Where's Labor's Brain?'. Rundle's argument is that over the last decade or so it has permanently relocated to The Greens. Whether he is right or wrong, this pathetic little adventure certainly makes it look as though Labor's brain, (not to mention its moral compass) has gone missing somewhere.

The last time I looked the following statements could be found in the Preamble to the Federal ALP platform:

"… Labor's enduring values, which were born in the collective struggle for better living and working conditions in the last century, are reflected in the progressive and reformist tradition which the Party embodies and in the continuing pursuit of a society which values our security; champions fairness and equality; believes in communities and families; promotes social justice and compassion; values environmental sustainability; supports freedom, liberty and enterprise; and strives for opportunity and aspiration.

* We value fairness and equality and believe in a fair go for all—we believe that a nation should be governed in the broader interests of all, not in the sectional interests of a few.

* We value the environment that sustains us all—and which we must now sustain with our country's united and urgent effort.

These are the Labor Party's timeless values and they are fundamental Australian values.
These are the values that have given this great nation of ours its moral compass—not allowing us to just look after ourselves, but always prompting us to look beyond ourselves. Not just to ask what is in this for me and my immediate family, but also to ask what is in this for my community and my country. These are the values that must now guide Australia's future."

I really don't know whether to laugh or cry.

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A blog post from academic and climate scientist Roger Jones made me aware of a talk at the Woodford Folk Festival by Guy Pearse. The focus was, of course coal specifically the greenhouse gas implications of Australia's ambitiously expanding coal export industry. Pearse estimates that Australia will export about 75 Gigatonnes CO2 conservatively between now and 2050. That’s 10% of the total budget estimated by the German agency WBGU (pdf) that can be emitted from 2008 to give a 2 in 3 chance of avoiding 2°C.

Not smart. Not smart at all.

The Empire strikes back

2012-01-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

Martin Ferguson is Energy Minister in the Julia Gillard led Australian Federal Labor government. A competent administrator (Ferguson is proud of the fact that none of the stuff-ups that have dogged this government can be attributed to him) a canny political operator and a hard working local member, Ferguson sits on a solid majority in his safe Labor seat of Batman. Irrespective of Labor's fate at the 2013 election and despite inroads made by the Greens in the last couple of elections it would be a miracle if he was not re-elected. Unfortunately for the world Ferguson is an energy minister completely out of step with the times.

Under his stewardship the Federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism produced just before Christmas, a Draft Energy White Paper (DEWP). A Highlights package summarizing the main features of the DEWP can be found here. Logically this document would reflect the frequently repeated claims that this government recognizes the message of the climate scientists that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion must be urgently and radically decreased if we are to avoid dangerous, possibly catastrophic, climate change. Unfortunately this is not the case.

The DEWP pays lip service to the now discredited view that an atmospheric concentration of 450ppm (CO2e) of greenhouse gas can be equated with global warming of 2ºC as the threshold of dangerous climate change, and acknowledges the IEAs contention 'that around 80 per cent of the world’s allowable carbon dioxide emissions budget under a 450 parts per million (or 2°C global warming) scenario is already locked in through existing capital stock (such as power plants, factories and buildings)' (IEA World Energy Outlook 2011).

Inexplicably it ignores the IEAs warning that the world is headed for irreversible climate change in five years. and that "if fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change." Instead the DEWP envisages decades of continued use of gas and coal as source fuels for large scale centralized power generation and is positively excited about the prospects of continued and greatly expanded coal and gas exports to Asia. It acknowledges 'the nature and timeframe of the international response to climate change' (Executive Summary p24) as a risk to be managed, but has nothing to say of the massive health, environmental and economic risks posed by a failure to take urgent action to reduce GHG emissions.

Giles Parkinson notes that the DEWP acknowledges the potential for energy efficiencies to reduce demand for fossil fuel generated power.

"Energy efficiency: The easiest and cheapest response to peak demand increases. The white paper says measures such as energy efficiency regulation on appliances will save 19.5 million tonnes of Co2e at a negative cost to the community of $56/tonne (That is, it saves money). It also speaks of the importance of incorporating distributed generation and direct load management, and forcing networks to seek demand-side alternatives, rather than just erecting more poles and wires."

However the main hope of avoiding climate catastrophe lies in the rapid growth of the renewable energy sector and the DEWP presents a misleading picture of the rate of progress of renewable energy technologies towards grid parity via its reliance on outdated, discredited energy modelling data.

The big achievement of the Gillard government in respect of climate change so far has been the passage of its Clean Energy Future legislation package. Attitudes to this legislation generally reflected heavily qualified approval. For anyone wishing to refresh their memory of this, readily understandable summaries of the key features of the package and its expected effects can be found here, here and here.

The DEWP is inexplicably profoundly at odds with the underlying intent of the Clean Energy Future (CEF) legislation. The intent of the CEF (repeatedly stated by government ministers) although weakened by caveats and exemptions, is to drive down greenhouse gas emissions on a time scale consistent with the warnings of the scientists. This is acknowledged in the executive summary of the DEWP.

"We have undertaken further key reforms in our domestic energy markets and have now legislated a carbon pricing mechanism that will drive a long term transformation to cleaner sources of energy."

Fair enough but the very next sentence reads:

"Technological advances and strong international gas prices have unlocked major new coal seam gas reserves on Australia's east coast and new offshore gas developments in Western Australia – this has broadened our energy possibilities and will significantly alter our east coast gas and electricity markets."

The DEWP summary continues:

"Over the next two decades, we expect to see significant growth in gas‐fired electricity generation in response to carbon pricing signals along with a continued expansion in wind energy and other renewable energy technologies as they become increasingly commercially viable."

These statements show that, for the Gillard government, gas fired power generation is 'clean energy' and that the growing body of research demonstrating that large scale gas-fired power generation is at best only marginally less GHG intensive than the coal-fired alternative will be ignored in their policy settings. Despite repeated claims that they recognize the urgency of the climate scientists' message, the weakness of GHG mitigation targets underpinning the Gillard government's Clean Energy Future legislation and the expectation of significant growth in gas-fired power generation way beyond the Critical Decade identified by the government's own Climate Commission show that they either don't understand the nature of the problem confronting us or they haven't the faintest idea how to address it. Probably both.

Robert Merkel at Larvatus Prodeo is spot on with his summary of the DEWP. Merkel is sharply critical and Labor voters should note that his critique is from the political left not the right. He says:

"It reads with the same subtext he manages to pack into just about every sentence – that you greenies have had your fun with the carbon price, now let us get back to digging up coal, drilling up gas, and we’ll ship in oil to run it all.
It’s the kind of document you’d expect a Turnbull-led conservative government to put out – finish the process of privatizing the energy sector, remove remaining price controls (and introduce smart meters to enable time-of-day pricing), phase out all green energy schemes other than the carbon price that aren’t clearly “complementary”, and trust the market to match supply with demand.
And the assumption dripping through the document is that changes to Australia’s energy mix will be glacially slow. Both stationary energy and transport will continue to run on coal, gas and oil for decades to come, with a mode shift from coal to gas and ultimately to renewables. Large-scale ones, mind you – the short shrift given to small-scale solar systems would be amusing if it wasn’t serious."

I have placed the emphases on the passages that I see as key to understanding the Labor Government's attitude-to/understanding-of the proximity and capacity for economic and environmental destruction of the ballooning climate crisis. This paper makes it crystal clear that either they still 'don't get it' or for some weird reason they just don't care. Political realities have required Ferguson to join the chorus with his colleagues that he accepts the science on climate change but this document for which he is responsible suggests that in his heart he doesn't believe it is happening or at least he doesn't believe it is happening as fast, or that it will be as devastating as the scientists predict. Whatever the truth, the DEWP is not, as Merkel terms it, merely 'an overconfident document', but is in fact, despite the soberly temperate language it employs, a devastatingly destructive document.

Climate Cognitive Dissonance: The “Profound Contradiction” Between Science and Markets on the Road to 10°F Warming

2011-12-23T12:38:00.000-08:00

While I'm still plodding through a post on the Draft Energy White Paper I thought this post from Grist Mill via Climate Progress was thought provoking.

Doug Evans

cross posted from Climate Progress

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 21, 2011 at 10:31 am

by David Roberts, cross-posted from Grist

Earlier this month, Nicholas Stern — respected U.K. economist and author of the famed Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change — cast a spotlight on what he calls a “profound contradiction at the heart of climate change policy.”

On one side, the world’s governments have pledged to hold temperature rise to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). To have even a 50/50 shot at meeting that target, humanity has a “carbon budget” of about 1,400 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between now and 2050. The more we exceed that budget, the more the 2 degrees target slips out of reach. Here’s the thing, though: The world’s proven fossil fuel reserves, if burned, would create about 2.8 trillion tonnes of CO2, double that carbon budget. If countries are serious about 2 degrees, they must be planning to leave a lot of fossil fuels in the ground. Right?

On the other side, however, the world’s top fossil fuel companies are valued at some $7.42 trillion (including the top 100 listed coal companies and the top 100 listed oil and gas companies). They are valued at this level because of proven fossil fuel reserves to which they have access. In other words, their valuation carries the implicit assumption that they will burn the fossil fuels available to them.

Markets are assuming that fossil fuel companies will burn the fossil fuels that the world’s governments have, at least implicitly, said they cannot burn. That’s the “profound contradiction.” So what are markets thinking?

Well, either they think a full-fledged carbon capture and sequestration solution is going to spring into being overnight (spoiler: they don’t think that) or they just don’t think countries are serious about climate change. They think it’s going to be business as usual. “If this is the case,” says Stern …

… the resulting rise in atmospheric concentrations could eventually mean, with a substantial probability, global warming of 5 degrees [C] or more, to temperatures not seen on Earth for more than 30m years. That would probably transform where and how people could live and lead to the migration of hundreds of millions, as well as to conflict and severe economic decline.

Yet markets don’t seem to be pricing those risks either! In fact, global markets don’t seem to be taking climate change or climate policy seriously. Even if you don’t care about that ecologically, it’s alarming economically. It’s a huge, unacknowledged, unhedged risk, and if we’ve learned anything in the past few years, it’s that having huge, unacknowledged risks at the core of your economy is ill-advised.

I was thinking about this “profound contradiction” as I looked over Black & Veatch’s latest “Energy Market Perspective” (they update it every six months), which contains a variety of predictions and projections about U.S. electricity markets. It’s a great example of what Stern is talking about, in microcosm. Here’s the core finding (keep in mind, this graph shows power produced — megwatt-hours — not capacity):

Click for larger version. Black & Veatch, Energy Market Perspective, Fall 2011

Renewables more than double their contribution over the next 25 years, mainly due to state renewable portfolio standards, but the big story is the shift from coal to gas, gas, gas. Coal declines from 41 to 16 percent; gas goes from 24 to 44 percent.

Here’s the impact on CO2 emissions (chart is a bit confusing: the green area is the CO2 eliminated by reductions; the other colors are regions of the electric grid):

Click for larger version. Black & Veatch, Energy Market Perspective, Fall 2011

Emissions decline, mainly due to a big wave of coal-plant retirements around 2020, but nothing like the amount that would be required under the carbon budget necessary to give the world a chance at 2 degrees. (After all, for large-scale reductions, electricity is central.)

To be sure, there are economic assumptions in B&V’s projections that could be disputed. They have natural gas prices staying low and stable all the way out to 2036, only reaching the highs of the early 2000s after 2030. But with demand rising through that whole period, there are reasons to expect far more volatility than that (see here and here). B&V also has wind deployment falling off after today’s state RPSs are satisfied, but I strongly suspect that underestimates both what states will do in the intervening years and wind’s increasing competitiveness.

But never mind all that. The core assumption, the one B&V shares with most analysts, is about policy. It is simply this: The U.S. is not going to do its part in a global effort to hit 2 degrees.

They don’t assume there will be no climate policy. They include state RPSs and even a carbon price starting in 2020. But as the results show, that level of policy is woefully inadequate.

It’s not that the U.S. electricity system can’t accommodate the level of changes necessary. Amory Lovins’ new book Reinventing Fire shows how to transform the U.S. electricity system at a profit. Or check out Michael Moynihan’s Electricity 2.0. Plenty of other analysts have charted out a course that U.S. policymakers could chart if they got serious. It’s just that mainstream analysts don’t expect them to.

And yet we do nothing to prepare for the future that inaction is going to bring us! It’s a widespread and increasingly glaring case of cognitive dissonance in the institutions and practices at the center of the modern global economy. One way or the other, it’s going to resolve itself, and I fear the results will not be pretty.

David Roberts is a staff writer for Grist. This piece was originally published at Grist.

Seeing things as they are.

2011-12-18T13:47:00.000-08:00

This illustrated lecture from Professor Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research is an excellent summary of the status of the ballooning climate change disaster. It's scary but essential to clearly understand what is happening and what we can do about it.

Professor Kevin Anderson - Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous

View another webinar from DFID

What would you like for Christmas?

2011-12-16T16:51:00.000-08:00

What would you like for Christmas? The Quit Coal Collective, a Melbourne-based collective affiliated with Friends of the Earth would like an end to expansion of the coal industry in Victoria. This is important because building new coal infrastructure locks in decades of dirty, old technology, when we should be moving towards clean, renewable energy. I have previously blogged about the Baillieu State government's disgraceful, irresponsible support for the growth of Victoria's (brown) coal industry.

Bacchus Action, September 19 2011 from Quit Coal on Vimeo.

The Quit Coal collective has already initiated many effective anti-coal actions and needs and deserves our support. Go to their website and get involved.

The 100% Renewables Campaign would like you to send an e-card to your local pollie to say thanks (or less thanks!) for their efforts this year and to tell them that 2012 needs to be the year of big solar. 2012 is going to be a big year for the 100% Renewables campaign so kick it off with this small easy action. Go to their website and do it. You'll feel better!

For Christmas I would like some feedback. After two years of posting more than once weekly on average the numbers of page views have crept up to between 50 and 60 per day. Modest growth but encouraging – even allowing for the numbers who have arrived on the blog as a result of an unrelated web search. However most of the recent rapid growth in interest has been from the United States. Currently 90% of page views originate in the US. In the last week of about 360 page views 293 were from the United States and only 28 originated in Australia. Thankful as I am that anyone reads my ramblings I am at a loss to know why interest is so high off shore given the strong local bias of the content. Anyone got any comments on this?

Finally Merry Christmas to anyone reading this. Hardened campaigners, nervous fringe dwellers, resistant politicians, delusional deniers and paid up deliverers of misinformation from industry funded astro-turf groups; we all live on this tiny fragile rock in the endless cosmos. Our futures are inextricably bound together and at this time of Good-will to all I wish you all the best.

Doug Evans

China solar goes for gold

2011-12-15T21:03:00.000-08:00

This gigantic array of solar hardware is on a Chinese office building

This is the second of two cross posts from Climate Spectator dealing with the growth of renewable energy in China. This article authored by Giles Parkinson focuses on the meteoric growth of Chinese solar energy.

Giles Parkinson

The scale of ambition in large-scale solar took a quantum leap forward this week when two Chinese companies announced they would soon begin construction on a 1,000MW (1GW) solar PV plant. The solar farm, near the Chinese city of Datong, would be by far the biggest in the world, and is being funded by CGN Solar, an offshoot of the China Guangdong Nuclear Corp, and Hong-Kong based polysilicon supplier GCL-Poly Energy.

The solar plant is not the largest ever announced, but it will be the largest when built. (First Solar in 2009 said it would build a 2GW solar PV plant in Inner Mongolia, also funded by China Guangdong Nuclear, but that project has faced delays and will likely now involve just a 30MW demonstration facility). GCL said the plant represented the start of a “golden development era” for solar in China, which aims to have 15GW of solar capacity by 2015, and 50GW by 2020. In 2009, it had next to zero.

The announcement of this gigawatt-sized solar plant comes as Chinese solar PV suppliers reveal a significant new dynamic in the market – China, courtesy of the introduction of its first feed-in tariff in August, is rapidly emerging as a major customer of its own solar PV, not just a supplier of silicon and modules.

Suntech, the biggest solar PV manufacturer in the world, said this week that China now accounted for 22 per cent of its market, up from zero in the first quarter of this year. Yingli Solar said the China accounted for 40 per cent of its sales in the third quarter, up from 4 per cent for the previous financial year.Another major China supplier, Trina Solar, said the China component of its market had risen from zero in the first quarter to 7 per cent in the 3rd quarter. The US market jumped to 21 per cent, while Germany fell by half to 32 per cent of its sales.

Arkx managing director Tim Buckley, whose fund has investments in China solar stocks, says while Germany and Italy have underpinned global growth in the solar market in the past few years, and will now likely decline, four of the biggest economies – China, Japan, India and the US – were likely to grow. ”Their advantage is that they are doing it later, and at a lower cost, and so with less consumer resistance.” Costs of modules had fallen by 25-30 per cent over the past year, and further falls were expected.

Buckley forecasts that the global market for PV will rise to 25GW in 2012 from around 21GW in 2011 (and 7GW in 2009). He predicts the Chinese market will add 1.5GW in 2011, but it could be as high as 2GW, nearly double market forecasts. This would make them the fourth-largest solar installer globally, behind Germany in 2011 (at 5GW), Italy (5GW), the US (2.1GW) and ahead of Japan at 1.5GW, which has renewed its interest in solar after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Industry analysts NDP Solarbuzz also predicts China may surpass the US market for the first time in 2011 and, with India, will more than offset declines in Europe.

“China recently more than doubled its target for solar to 50GW by 2020 (but) we believe that like each of China’s wind targets set three to five years ago, China will again blow away this 50GW solar target,” Buckley says. He expects China’s install rate to reach up to 4GW in 2012 and then run at 5-10GW a year thereafter – meaning China could have a solar installed base of 26GW by 2015 and 75-100GW by 2020. By 2013, he says it will overtake Germany, Italy, Spain and the US to become the number one market in the world.

He notes that China already manufactures more than 50 per cent of the world’s solar PV, but until this last quarter exported 95 per cent of all its capacity. That dynamic is likely to change dramatically. In contrast, Buckley notes, 99 per cent of all wind turbines manufactured in China are installed within China.

And, Buckley notes, China seems happy with the concept that green energy does create jobs. Trina employs 15,000 staff and GCL 29,000 staff in China. Neither firm existed six years ago. Indeed, a report released last week by the China Council of International Co-Operation on Environment and Development predicted the country could create a net 9.5 million jobs (10.6 million new jobs versus 950,000 lost jobs) over the coming five years if it made a big push into green energy. The council, which recommended spending $900 billion over that time on energy-saving and cleantech policies, is headed by Li Keqiang, likely to become the country’s next prime minister.

China's path to renewable superpower

2011-12-15T20:48:00.000-08:00

This is the first of two cross posts from Climate Spectator dealing with the growth of the renewable energy sector in China and the implications of this for Australia. Attentiopn is often so strongly focused on China's enormous and rapidly growing coal consumption that the even more rapid growth of renewable energy is often overlooked. This article by Matthew Wright, executive director of Beyond Zero Emissions, contrasts the spectacular growth of China's wind energy program with its nuclear energy industry.

Matthew Wright

Comparing China’s wind and nuclear power sectors reveal much about the fortunes of new and old energy technologies.

Wind power in China is growing at a blinding pace. China commenced construction of its first wind turbines in 2005 and in just six years has installed 58GW worth of wind power, which now contributes 128TWh to its grid. This is enough renewable electricity to power Australia’s most populous states – NSW and Victoria combined.

What’s remarkable about China’s wind sector is the speed and scale of its expansion. Wind generators are up and operating within nine months of breaking ground. This has resulted in the dramatic upward revision of the country’s wind deployment targets. Three years ago China’s 2020 target was set at 30GW, today it’s a massive 200GW.

Last month, the National Development Reform Commission Energy Research Institute released China’s first wind development plan to 2050. A whopping 1000GW – enough to provide 17 per cent of China’s electricity needs – will be built and operating by mid Century.

Given China’s track record of smashing its own deployment targets – such as the seven-fold upwards revising of their 2020 target in just three years – it is entirely possible that in 2050, China could have in excess of 3000GW of wind power operating, providing half of the country’s electricity demand.

Nuclear power, on the other hand, is a tale of decline.

China’s wind sector overshadows the 11GW worth of nuclear in their electricity supply. In only six years, wind has blossomed to deliver 55 per cent more electricity to the grid each year than nuclear – an energy source the Chinese have been building for the last 26 years.

The growth of nuclear in China, although slow, has slowed further since the Fukushima disaster in Japan. The Chinese have downgraded the country's forecast for nuclear power’s contribution to the electricity supply – the original 2020 target of 86GW has been abandoned in favour of a modest 40-60GW.

Government concerns about the safety of existing nuclear reactors is now the key factor in slowing the expansion of nuclear power. Chinese Environment Minister Zhou Shengxian concedes, “Safety standards of China’s early-phase nuclear facilities are relatively low, operation times are long, some facilities are obsolete and the safety risks are increasing.” Worryingly this prognosis includes a plant owned by China Light & Power, the parent of Australian company TRUenergy, which hopes to list on the ASX in 2012.

Cheap Chinese nuclear relied on outdated second-generation designs that could be built with more than 70 per cent local content. China won’t be rushing to build third-generation plants when over 80 per cent will require imported content. Then there’s the fact no third generation plant has been built and completed anywhere worldwide. In China, and globally, wind power will stay well ahead of nuclear for decades and replace it altogether.

So, what implications will the dramatic shift in China’s energy mix have for Australia?

China’s massive deployments will be driving renewables down the cost curve, so Australia can invest in wind today with certainty that the technology is a wise long-term investment. These cost reductions will make Australia’s inevitable transition to a 100 per cent renewable energy much cheaper. It will certainly be cheaper than what was estimated in the award winning Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy plan published by energy think tank Beyond Zero Emissions and the University of Melbourne Energy Institute last year.

Australia’s balance of trade is another consideration. Chinese demand for Australia’s coal exports will soften with their renewable energy build up. We can’t simply depend on balancing trade with dirty commodity exports such as coal and gas, and must concentrate on a diversified economy rather than one at risk of a terrible case of Dutch disease.

Ramping up renewable energy deployment is the only way for Australian firms to learn through doing to create niche products to compete with cheap Chinese, and leading German, technology. Without an immediate rollout of renewables there is no way for us to secure the lucrative economic opportunities associated with our intellectual capital and world-class engineering capabilities.

For years, status quoists used China as an excuse for why Australia shouldn’t invest in renewables. This is an unsustainable excuse, as China is reinforcing its ambitious renewable energy program with a fossil fuel all-energy cap.

Supporting renewables is an economy-wide primary energy limit of 120,000 petajoules (4.1 billion tones of coal equivalent), China’s carbon emissions will flatline from 2015. The cap is seven-times Australia’s current primary energy production (17,055 petajoules), which is extraordinary for a nation more than 60 times our population.

Australia must wake up. The Asian giant China provides the perfect rationale, and now even a model, for rolling out renewables and decarbonising our economy.

Matthew Wright is executive director of Beyond Zero Emissions and 2010-11 Young Environmentalist of the Year

COP 17 in Durban: Breakthrough or Spin?

2011-12-12T13:44:00.000-08:00

The UNFCCC Climate talks in Durban (COP17) have ended. The 194 participating nations agreed on four main elements of a global strategy to combat global warming. Although prior to the conference fairly gloomy predictions of the likely outcome were common, the outcome is better than many predicted.

The four agreed elements are:

A second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol. The second commitment period will run for five years from January 1, 2013 (when the first period expires) until the end of 2017.
The establishment of a Green Climate Fund to help poorer countries make the shift away from fossil fuels and undertake climate change adaption measures. Delegates made progress on the design of Green Climate Fund to channel up to $98 billion a year by 2020 to poorer nations, but achieved little on establishing where the money will come from to fill it. The current instability of the global economy must cast doubt over the actual delivery of the finance necessary for the operation of this fund. A proposal to generate cash from charging international shipping for the carbon emissions it generates faced such opposition it did not survive in the final text.
Agreement that all countries will commence negotiations next year aimed at delivering a legally binding agreement in 2015. This agreement will commit them to cut emissions no later than 2020. The details of this have yet to be worked out. Delegates agreed to define new market mechanisms under a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, but delayed the decision to develop rules for them until next year.
A work plan for next year. The delegates agreed to launch a work plan to identify options for closing the gap between countries' current emissions reduction pledges for 2020 and the goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. They agreed to define new market mechanisms under a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, but pushed forward a decision to develop rules for them until next year.

Amber Jamieson at Crikey has penned a piece useful as an aid to understanding the implications of the Durban conference entitled How legally binding is the Durban Deal?

Whether or not the talks are seen as a success depends on the expectations against which the talks are measured. Australia's Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Greg Combet sees them as a success because he is focused on the complexities of the negotiations and the degree of acceptance of Australia's goals for the talks. Combet enthusiastically hailed the outcome as a 'Breakthrough'. In a media release he stated:

"The Australian Government went to Durban with three key objectives: building on emissions reduction pledges made at last year's UN conference in Cancun; taking the next steps towards a legal framework to cover all major emitters; and promoting market mechanisms to cut emissions in the lowest cost. Durban has delivered on each of these objectives."

Well, he would say that wouldn't he? On the other hand the climate spokesperson for The Greens Senator Christine Milne has criticized the Government for failing to do more in Durban. She says the Australian delegation 'drove loopholes into agreements and weakened targets' during the talks. Milne, who is using the environmental imperative as her measure (Can there really be any other?) says Australia has lost any credibility it had gained from introducing a carbon price.

"Australia could have done a lot more and played a much more constructive role. First of all, we had increased credibility in the talks because Australia had just passed a clean energy package. The whole world was incredibly excited about that. People came up to me all over that place saying how encouraging it was that Australia was now back in the fold on climate action."

The assessment of the outcome from the talks made by Giles Parkinson at Climate Spectator is closer to Combet than Milne. Parkinson commented:

"The United Nations ended their annual climate change talks in Durban on Sunday in much the same way they have done for the past 17 years – after all-night sittings and amid a cloud of conspiracy theories, accusations, frayed tempers, backflips and compromise. Only this time they managed to go into a second day of overtime and pluck from apparent failure an agreement that is being hailed as the most significant since Berlin in 1995."

Writing for the Crikey blog Rooted Clancy Moore summed up the talks as a qualified success. He writes:

"The EU took an important step by signing onto a second period of the Kyoto Protocol, the bedrock of international efforts to fight climate change, and a key demand of African countries. But the new round of Kyoto falls short of what was needed and opens loopholes that weaken it.
The failure to seal an ambitious deal will have painful consequences for poor people around the world. A four degree temperature rise could result in utter devastation for the poor — particularly those reliant on agriculture — who will face increasing hunger and poverty."

Writing for Inside Story Fergus Green notes that irrespective of the Gillard government's Clean Energy legislation and/or the outcome of the Durban talks Australia has a massive task in front of it and delay is not an option. He writes:

"Even if the government adopts caps equivalent to the emissions reduction target of 80 per cent by 2050, Australia’s emissions are projected to be about the same as they were in the year 2000 – around 550 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – according to Treasury’s modelling of the impact of a carbon price."

Noting the complete climatic inadequacy of this outcome Green suggests a number of strategies that could be adopted but concludes:

"Yet a reform package along these lines is nowhere near the political radar of the two major parties. Now that we have overcome the trauma of the facile carbon price debate, the climate movement and the community at large must put such a package, and the vision that underpins it, on the national agenda and campaign for it vigorously – without compromise. The Australian movement for truly transformative climate action must start now."

Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth speculates on the usefulness of the apparently endless UNFCCC process. He writes:

"Once again, it’s worth considering whether this process is worth sustaining. I believe — just barely — that it is, despite the profound problems I see with the terms of the core treaty on climate and current efforts to update it.
The talks may seen “incremental forever” — a phrase I first heard in connection with climate research from the retired climate scientist Jerry Mahlman).
I think it’s important to recognize that this process is indeed incremental, perhaps not forever, but certainly through this century. While there is eagerness for breakthroughs and great ambitious leaps — either diplomatic or scientific — accelerating the decarbonization of humanity’s energy menu even as human numbers and resource appetites crest is implicitly a task of generations."

The good news is that there is still a basis for coordinated global action on climate change and that for the first time all 194 participating nations have agreed to be legally bound to jointly determined goals in respect of climate change mitigation and adaptation. The bad news is that a binding legal global treaty is not envisaged before 2015 and meaningful action under the umbrella of the UN has been pushed back until 2020. The world can't afford further delay.

When asked what the delay built into the outcome of the Durban talks meant Will Steffen climate scientist and Professor at the ANU summed it up succinctly. To halt global warming at or around two degrees centigrade would require global emissions to fall by around 5% per annum from 2015 a massive task. If delayed until 2020 the required rate of reduction of global GHG emissions necessary to meet the two degree threshold becomes 9 or 10% per annum. This he claims could only be achieved by placing the nations of the world on what amounts to a war footing. The extra five years means that the task has become twice as difficult and far more expensive, and if the cautious conservative IEA is right the extra five years may mean that the two degree thresh-hold has become impossible to achieve.

For those interested I have posted the text of Climate Minister Combet's Media release below the fold.

Australia's Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Greg Combet hailed the outcome of the Durban talks as a 'Breakthrough'. In a media release he stated:

The Australian Government went to Durban with three key objectives: building on emissions reduction pledges made at last year's UN conference in Cancun; taking the next steps towards a legal framework to cover all major emitters; and promoting market mechanisms to cut emissions in the lowest cost.

Durban has delivered on each of these objectives.

Firstly, it has built on the decisions made in Cancun where 90 countries representing 80 per cent of global emissions made pledges to reduce carbon pollution by 2020 as part of a goal of keeping average temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

In Durban, countries ensured further progress on this agenda by agreeing to:

• Improved transparency and better monitoring, reporting and verification of countries' emissions reduction actions;

• Governance arrangements which will establish a new Green Climate Fund to help developing countries reduce emissions and adapt to climate change;

• Progress the REDD+ mechanism which will reward developing countries for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation;

• Develop new market mechanisms to drive opportunities for low cost greenhouse gas abatement;

• An Adaptation Committee to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of climate change;

• Rules for a new Technology mechanism to speed up transfer of low pollution technologies to developing countries.

These initiatives will add momentum to the extensive climate change action already under way around the world and provide a strong foundation for reducing emissions through to 2020. The transparency measures are especially welcome because they will ensure countries deliver on their emissions reduction pledges.

The second achievement at Durban was the adoption of a mandate for parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to negotiate a new legal agreement by 2015. The new agreement would take effect from 2020.

A central element of this mandate is that the new agreement will establish for the first time a common legal framework applying to both developed and developing countries.

This is an important first step towards a comprehensive agreement covering all major economies.

If the agreement is concluded it will see developing countries take on obligations, allowing the world to move on from the Kyoto Protocol's unsustainable divide between developed and developing countries and ensuring all nations do their fair share to cut global emissions.

The US, which has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and China have agreed to be part of the new legal architecture. These two countries account for 37 per cent of global emissions, so their decision to join a new international legal framework is a breakthrough. They are also Australia's major trading partners.

The timetable for concluding this agreement will allow parties to take account of the latest science in the next IPCC report in 2014 and the UNFCCC's 2013-15 review of the goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees.

As a bridge to 2020, a number of developed countries intend to make new emissions reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol when its current commitment period ends in 2012. The Australian Government went to Durban saying it would only enter a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol if all major emitters were covered by a new legal framework.

We argued that a broader global solution was needed. The world has now adopted a mandate for achieving this solution.

Australia's third objective of promoting carbon markets was also progressed at Durban.

The Durban decisions will encourage expansion of carbon markets which cut emissions at the lowest cost.

Kyoto Protocol rules will continue to provide for market mechanisms like the Clean Development Mechanism. The Clean Development Mechanism generates carbon credits which Australian businesses will be able to access under the Clean Energy Act's carbon price mechanism.

Australia reached agreement at Durban with the European Union and New Zealand to examine opportunities to link Australia's carbon price mechanism with their emissions trading schemes.

Mr Combet met colleagues from China, Korea and California, where emissions trading schemes are being established, and agreed to share information and exchange expertise.

He also discussed cooperation with Japan and Indonesia on developing carbon markets our region.

Promoting carbon markets and international linking of these markets will benefit Australia's economy by allowing pollution to be reduced at the lowest cost wherever it can be achieved around the world.

More about Coal

2011-11-29T19:26:00.000-08:00

This rather wordy post is the text of a lecture Guy Pearse gave earlier this year. I have a link to a 'pdf' of the lecture in my previous post. It seemed to me that the topic is so important and the contents are so informative that I should post it fully. The scariest part of the lecture is that Pearse has since claimed that the numbers he used in this speech 'were woefully conservative'.

"Australia may well treble rather than double its coal exports by 2020. Factor in the “carbon light” CO2 from coal seam gas projects in the East (and other LNG expansion in the north and west) and you’re talking about Australia’s fossil fuel emission exports equating to TWO Saudi Arabias by 2020, not one as I’ve been saying to many disbelieving ears.
This would mean that by 2020 the 159mtpa CO2-e saved by the Gillard CEF (with heavy reliance on imported offsets, many of which I expect to be very dodgy for reasons I won’t get started on here) would be erased more around 10 times over, not 4 times as I said in that speech…"

Here are some more figures highlighting just what the Gillard government really stands for in respect of climate policy. They can be found in a post comment by Dr Gideon Polya from Latrobe University on a New Matilda article entitled 'We've got Climate Cred - now what?'.

Success in “tackling climate change” is surely measured in terms of GHG pollution reduction but Australia’s Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution increased from 1,077 Mt CO2-e (CO2 equivalent) in 2000 to 1,415 million tonnes CO2-e in 2009 and is expected to reach about 1,799 Mt CO2-e by 2020 and 4,490b Mt CO2-e in 2050.
However Treasury ABARE and US EIA data show the following Australian Domestic and Exported GHG pollution (in millions of tonnes of CO2-equivalent, Mt CO2-e) for Australia under the proposed Carbon Price plan:
2000: 555 (Domestic) + 505 (coal exports) + 17 (LNG exports) = 1,077.
2009: 600 (Domestic) + 784 (coal exports) + 31 (LNG exports) = 1,415.
2010: 578 (Domestic) + 803 (coal exports) + 34 (LNG exports) = 1,415.
2020: 621 (Domestic) + 1,039 (black coal exports) + 80 (LNG exports) + 59 (brown coal exports) = 1,799.
2050: 527 (Domestic) + 2902 (coal exports) + 1,061 (LNG exports) = 4,490.
Treasury analysis in its key July 2011 report “Strong Growth, Low Pollution - Modelling a Carbon Price” (see: http://cache.treasury.gov.au/treasury/carbonpricemodelling/content/repor… ) shows (above) that Australia’s Domestic GHG pollution was 578 Mt CO2-e in 2010 but INCREASES to 621 MT CO2-e by 2020, an INCREASE of +11.9% over the 2000 value i.e. NOT a “5% decrease of 2000 Domestic GHG pollution by 2020” as promised by Labor .

Perhaps my new best friend from COALPORTAL.COM would like to comment?

Doug Evans

_____________________________________

“If we don’t export it someone else will” etc: debunking the excuses for Australia’s precious place in the coal industry’s world’

Speech by

Guy Pearse

Research Fellow, Global Change Institute

University of Queensland

At: School of Political Science and International Studies

University of Queensland

5 August 2011

Lock the Gate Alliance Forum,

University of Southern Queensland

Toowoomba

7 August 2011

I’d like to give yet another heretical speech today – essentially an updated version of the one I gave at climate camp in the Hunter Valley last December. I’m giving it again because as the debate over whether a largely inconsequential carbon price package rages, the topic of my talk: Australia’s precious place in the coal industry’s world---by which I’m referring to our dominance of the global coal trade—seems more neglected than ever. It’s not that I don’t care about the emissions that occur inside Australia, but coal exports are this country’s biggest contribution to climate change by far, and the more I watch our coal export emissions grow, the more absurd it seems to me that they’re not considered ‘our problem’. Australia now exports over 270 million tonnes of coal annually which equates to around 730 million tonnes of CO2. That’s about a fifth more greenhouse pollution than is currently emitted within Australia’s borders.

The 5 million tonnes of coal we export weekly produces the roughly the same amount of CO2 as a million Australian households do yearly.i Coal exports are set to double over the next 10 years with enthusiastic bipartisan political support. On average, that involves increasing coal exports by another million tonnes every fortnight—the CO2 equivalent of adding nearly 50,000 cars every single day.ii We often hear about China building a new coal fired power station every week or so, but few of us realize Australian coal exports effectively add a new coal fired power station or steel mill somewhere in the world every 3 or 4 weeks.iii

That statistic is worth dwelling on for a moment, given the attention that is paid on the domestic front to ‘plans” for a dozen new coal fired power stations within Australia. Those projects may be ‘on the books’ but between strong environmental opposition and a very modest carbon pricing scheme, few if any will be built over the next decade. Yet, over the next year, against almost no public opposition more than a dozen new coal-fuelled facilities will most definitely be built on the back of Australian coal exports.

The domestic emission reduction programs to which so much attention is devoted are similarly dwarfed by coal exports. To give you an idea, the Gillard government says that by pricing carbon it will achieve a 5% emission cut by 2020 that amounts to a 159 million tonne reduction in greenhouse pollution.iv According to the government this is equivalent to removing 45 million cars from the road. Much of that emission saving won’t happen in Australia, since from 2015 up to half the reductions can be met with imported carbon credits. That issue aside, however, by 2020 our coal exports are likely to have doubled, adding something like another 700 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, which is equivalent to adding 200 million cars. In other words, our growing coal exports erase the benefit of the so-called Clean Energy Package more than 4 times over.

One of the mines being proposed in Queensland – by Indian company, Adani – will eventually add as much CO2 on its own as is saved by the Gillard package.v Factor in existing coal exports and a growing LNG export industry, increasingly reliant on coal seam gas under prime agricultural land, and Australia could by 2020 be exporting more CO2 annually in fossil fuels than Saudi Arabia does today.vi Thanks to the expansion in fossil fuel exports – by 2020 renewable energy will account for less than 2 per cent of Australian energy production—so it’s hardly a ‘Clean Energy Future’. Yet, somehow, the debate remains fixated with domestic emissions.

It’s as if no-one even paid attention to all those television and billboard ads that ran nationally reminding us that our coal exports are indeed ‘something big’. People seem convinced that a domestic carbon price and a ‘no new coal fired power’ campaign ‘tackles’ climate change in Australia, hurts the coal industry and coal addicted governments. It’s as if they don’t notice that governments are getting by pretty well expanding existing coal fired power stations and refurbishing mothballed ones, and that their coal export royalty revenue is hardly affected by domestic measures. It’s as if no-one realizes the coal industry’s main game is exporting to developing nations, that the industry views sluggish domestic demand here and in other developed country markets as a fact of life.

There’s so much wool over so many eyes, and so many convenient excuses to ignore coal exports. There’s the accounting argument – that the international community has agreed that emissions should count where they occur. So, responsibility lies with the country burning the fossil fuels, not the country supplying them. Next comes the argument that coal isn’t a big contributor to climate change – only ••• of global emissions.vii We’re told Australia is a relatively small coal producer—accounting for just 5.6% of global production.viii Then there’s the line that our coal exports are essential for steelmaking, as if the comparable CO2 from that process are magically benign for the climate. We’re assured that carbon capture and storage and other ‘clean coal’ technologies will come to the rescue. And, anyway, we’re told: if we didn’t export the coal we do, someone else would. Last but not least, we’re told the coal industry is our economic backbone—that messing with it is to ‘taking the back of the axe to the Australian economy’ as the Climate Change minister puts it.ix Lump all these arguments together and you have a seemingly unassailable case that interfering with the coal rush is economic vandalism of no environment benefit.

A depressingly broad cross-section of Australia has unfortunately bought into this logic—including most ‘big brand’ environment groups. Some with limited resources consider coal export emissions too big, and a few of the excuses plausible enough to leave it in the ‘too hard basket.’ Until now, for those with an interest in keeping coal exports off the table in the debate, the list of excuses has been a sweet recipe for success. But, as the carbon price issue mercifully comes off the table and our coal export emissions spiral, becoming more conspicuous internationally, they’ll come out of the too-hard-basket. So, today let’s chip away at the seemingly unassailable case, ask why the excuses are unsustainable, and consider why phasing down coal exports can have a much bigger environmental benefit internationally than we think, without wrecking our economy.

Let’s begin with the accounting argument. Under the current internationally agreed framework, countries only count emissions occurring inside their borders. Fair as that may sound, it means that large exporters of fossil fuels like coal don’t have to worry about the emissions generated when their product is eventually used offshore. In a world where all countries had to reduce their total emissions, this wouldn’t present a problem. Even if there was a global deal that collectively required large emission reductions you might have an argument for standing back and allowing the ‘invisible hand’ of a global carbon market to either clean up or cut fossil fuel use worldwide. The world we live in, though, is different. Almost all the growth in fossil fuel demand is in developing countries that don’t have to worry about absolute emission reduction targets any time soon. And because there’s little pressure for them to constrain emissions, they’re importing much more fossil fuel, and more crucially, the overall use of fossil fuels globally is spiraling along with emissions.

When you look where the emissions path we’re on is rapidly heading, it’s clearly unsustainable to keep ignoring fossil fuel export emissions. If China and India import potentially 1-1.5 billion tonnes of coal annually by 2020, as is projected, with much of it coming from developed countries like Australia and the US, the chance of returning the climate to safe territory evaporates, even if developed countries cut their own coal use to zero. For Australia, to double its coal exports over the next 10 years is to brazenly gamble that in 2025 the global community will still turn a blind eye.

Next we come to the argument that coal shouldn’t be singled out. The industry argues quite correctly that global warming has many causes—there are many emission sources, various fossil fuels, and deforestation is a major contributor. Yet, among these factors, coal is pre-eminent. Around 50% of fossil fuel emissions have come from coal; in the last few years it’s overtaken oil as the most significant fossil fuel emission source; and, as the industry brags, coal has been the fastest growing fuel source over most of the past decade.x The reason why scientists like James Hansen say that eliminating coal emissions is 80% of the solution to the global warming crisis is that if the world’s coal reserves are used without carbon capture and storage, the probability of keeping temperature increases under 2 degrees falls to less than 30%, even if we cut all other emissions to zero.xi In other words, there can’t be an effective climate change response unless coal is singled out.

One of the favourite excuses used to ignore our coal export emissions is to argue that much of our coal is used for steelmaking world rather than power generation. The Queensland government routinely argues that most of its coal exports are for steel, and shrugs its shoulders, as if the emissions are unavoidable. Perhaps terms like ‘carbon-steel’ lead people to imagine that where coal is used for steel there are no CO2 emissions. In fact, the amount of carbon retained in steel is minimal and steel production produces roughly the same amount of CO2 per tonne of coal as coal-fired power.xii Moreover, when someone says ‘but our coal is for steel’, it implies that steel is sacrosanct—that you can’t make steel without coking coal, and that there are no practical alternatives to steel.

It’s an increasingly flimsy argument. Because the most emission intensive way to make steel is the cheapest, iron ore, coking coal and a blast furnace are what you mostly see. But it’s not the only way to make steel, which was produced with charcoal for centuries before we started using coal instead. Brazil still produces millions of tonnes of steel annually using charcoal, and they’ll be producing a great deal more in years to come – and no, the extra charcoal is not to come from Amazon rainforests, but from eucalyptus plantations. The explicit aim is to cut emissions, cut coking coal imports, and use greener steel production to differentiate Brazilian steel.xiii Beyond Brazil, there’s increasing interest in biomass as a replacement for a large amounts of coal used in blast-furnaces.xiv

Much of the world’s steel today is made in electric arc furnaces rather than blast furnaces. Here, scrap metal is the main feedstock and the process can be powered with renewable energy. Over 300 million tonnes of steel are produced annually in electric arc furnaces – about a third of global supply. There is a lot more recyclable scrap steel out there than you might imagine too--what’s called the world steel reservoir is around 11 billion tonnesxv—roughly enough to coat the state of Tasmania with steel nearly an inch thick.xvi And for ever tonne of steel recycled, we save a tonne of iron ore and two-thirds of a tonne of coking coal.xviiixvii Along with recycling scrap steel, it’s possible to feed electric arc furnaces with ‘direct reduced iron’, nearly 50 million tonnes of which is now being produced annually with natural gas rather than coal. Direct reduced iron can be produced with gasified biomass too—from things like forestry and agricultural waste.xix So, contrary to what’s widely assumed, it’s possible to make steel without coal—it’s already happening—but perhaps more importantly, steel isn’t the only way to make many things for which it is currently used.

In many applications – most notably in transport – aluminum and other lightweight metals are replacing steel, and they can be made without coal.xx Just look at the rush to produce aluminum from hydro and geothermal power in Iceland. Even more significantly, composite materials – mostly thermoplastics – actually perform better than steel in many applications—in transport, aviation, and construction--including some types of reinforced concrete.xxi As the steel price rises, composite materials are increasingly cost-competitive. So, if the world takes the CO2 in coking coal seriously, civilization won’t rush back to the caves—it’ll see a rapid switch to green steel production and alternatives to steel. At the moment we’re not seeing that. Instead of seeing lots more direct reduced iron being produced without coal, and much greater use of that enormous pile of recyclable steel out there, we’re seeing electric arc furnaces losing market share against blast furnaces fed with coal. Most of those blast furnaces are being build in developing countries with no CO2 caps, and who do you suppose is the biggest exporter of the cheap iron ore and coking coal making that happen--you guessed it – Australia.xxii

The next great excuse for ignoring Australia’s coal exports is that they’re not so significant and that if we stopped, someone else would step in and take our place. This suggests that countries are lining up to replace Australia—that the biggest coal users have lots of options, and that the biggest producers can rapidly up production. The truth is different. While Australia accounts for only 5.6% of total world coal production, some 70% of the world’s coal is consumed by the three countries mining it—China, India and the US.xxiii What makes Australia so important is how integral we are to enabling India and China to turbo-charge their coal addictions in the next decade, and to hooking up other developing nations to the habit.

Australia is the undisputed king of the global seaborne coal trade, providing just under 30% of the world’s exports, including more than half of coking coal exports.xxiv But we’re more important than that suggests because our companies are at the heart of coal mining in the other big coal exporting nations. Indonesia, for example, is our nearest rival as a coal trader, and Australian companies mine at least 1/3rd of their exports.xxv It’s a similar story in other fast-growing export nations like Mongolia and Mozambique. Even excluding companies that many people consider Australian – like Rio Tinto and Xstrata, Australian firms will within the next 5 years be mining close to 350mt of coal annually in other countries—more than we currently export. So when the industry says – ‘if Australia didn’t export coal someone else would' what they really mean is that 'if Aussies couldn't mine coal here, Aussies would go off and mine someone else's coal.

Other coal exporters, however, can’t dramatically up production with the flick of a switch. In South Africa, rail infrastructure obstacles make it very hard to increase exports at anything like the same pace as we’re seeing in Australia. In Indonesia, there’s growing pressure to use coal domestically, and there, as in Mozambique, the need to ferry huge quantities of coal down rivers is a major obstacle to ramping up exports quickly.xxviixxvi In Russia and in Mongolia, freezing temperatures are among a host of problems. The US is enthusiastically diverting large amounts of coal production to the export market, partly driven by recession and rising opposition to coal. And it’s conceivable that the US could quadruple coal exports this decade. Even so, the US would take a decade to match Australia as a coal exporter. So, sure, there are coal rushes elsewhere, but the coal trade depends on our coal rush more than any other.

That’s mainly because, in spite of all the ‘China is going green’ stories you may have read, Chinese coal demand is projected by UBS to go from 3 billion tonnes a year to 5.5 billion tonnes a year in 2020. If China can’t grow its own coal production by the 6% a year needed to meet that demand, it may need to import nearly all the coal that the seaborne trade currently provides.xxviii India also looks set to rely heavily on imports as its own annual coal use more than doubles to perhaps 1.4 billion tonnes by 2020.xxix To give you an idea of the pace of the expansion, 173 new coal fired power stations were approved in India last year.xxx The likely consequence of the growth in Chinese and Indian demand is a more than doubling of the global seaborne coal trade in the next 10 years.

That’s why the Australian coal industry is anticipating a bonanza irrespective of what happens domestically, and it’s why companies like Peabody are banking on a 53% increase in global coal demand by 2030.xxxi It hinges mainly on Chinese and Indian demand, and on Australian supply—not because Australia is such a big producer, but because it’s the crucial exporter. Take Australia out of the equation over the next decade and other countries cannot pick up the slack. They may pick up some, but there’s no filling the hole that Australia could leave in the global coal trade, not in the current Chinese and Indian demand timeframe anyway.

The final, and perhaps greatest bit of wool over our eyes is ‘clean coal’--the apparently permanent alibi that carbon capture and storage seems to have won the industry. The oil and gas industry has been capturing and storing CO2 for years—not with the aim of saving us from climate change mind you, but to ‘enhance’ oil and gas recovery. In the decades since CCS was first used, a grand total of around 50 million tonnes of CO2 has been captured and stored underground.xxxiixxxiii That sounds pretty impressive until you learn that that conventional coal use without CCS emits about that much CO2 every 24 hours. Nor is it so impressive when you discover that virtually none of the CO2 that has been captured CO2 has even come from coal.

Right now, there’s not one commercial scale coal fired power station capturing and storing its emissions anywhere in the world. As the World Coal Association recently lamented, ‘We’ve been talking about demonstration CCS plants for quite a long time…but when people actually say “does it apply to a full scale power plant?” at the moment we just don’t have the evidence to back that up.’xxxivxxxvixxxviixxxviii The industry cites the International Energy Agency to argue that you can’t deal with climate change without CCS—yet according to the IEA, perhaps 3000 CCS plants would need to be built between now and 2050 to clean up coal’s actxxxv – that’s more than one every 5 days for the next 40 years! More realistically, the G8 has targeted 20 commercial scale CCS plants by 2020 (some but not all of which would relate to coal use). That might save 150 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2020 which again sounds impressive ‘til you realize that over 99% of coal fired power stations and steel mills would still not be using CCS a decade from now, and they would be generating at least 20 billion tonnes of CO2 annually.

But right as it’s becoming clear that carbon capture and storage isn’t happening on any meaningful scale or timeframe, there’s a new alibi – carbon capture and recycling—taking CO2 from coal fired power stations and pumping it into pools full of algae to turbo charge its growth, then producing everything from biofuels to stock-feed to omega 3 food supplements. There’s already been a pilot plant at Hazelwood power station, and within the next year there will be another three at coal fired power stations in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.xxxixxliii, even if algae was deployed en The same coal companies and politicians that sold us carbon capture and storage are about to sell us coal-fed algae.xl Once again though, it’s no solution. The process doesn’t work at night, which mainly is why the US Department of Energy says it can only save around 20-30% of emissions from a coal fired power stationxli, and many of the emissions saved are spent to feed the algae fertilizer and keep the water in which it grows moving.xlii

Moreover, there’s no reason to believe the coal industry is serious about doing algae on a major scale. And, even if they were, with coal use set to grow by over 50% by 2030-masse, it would result in no overall emission reduction relative to today—let alone the sort of deep cuts demanded by the science.xliv Once again, it is all about rationalizing expanded coal use, with Australia in the thick of the action.

In the time remaining, I want to speak briefly about the equation facing Australia. Having already decided on the path of doubling coal exports, it will take enormous political will to get back to the ‘fork in the road’ in order to take an alternative path. The Australian coal industry cannot be closed down overnight, but we can as a nation can decide now how to prepare for coal phase-down over a 10-15 year timeframe in the very likely event that coal emissions can’t be captured and stored safely, or recycled, on scale or on time. That sort of transition timeline gives coal-addicted governments and investors who have dived into coal knowing the risks, fair notice. It gives industries and communities in Australia, and coal export customers, time to prepare. As politically charged as that course would be, it’s realistic, affordable, and a whole lot more responsible than the current plan to allow our coal export emissions to double in size without any Plan B whatsoever.

Australian coal phase-down wouldn’t magically stop China, India and the US, continuing to use lots of coal. They wouldn’t suddenly follow our lead, and to the limited extent that they’re able, some countries may try to increase coal output to take advantage of the space left by Australia in the international trade. So, coal-based electricity and steel production wouldn’t vanish overnight, any more than developing countries would keep going without electricity. If Australia exited coal, therefore, it wouldn’t prevent economic development, let alone condemn millions of people in the developing world to poverty, as our coal industry would have us believe. That said, we shouldn’t underestimate the impact domestically, or the ripple effects around the world.

Rather than waiting for a climate agreement that may never arrive to constrain coal global demand, we would be placing a very significant constraint on supply. If Australia exited the coal trade over the next decade, it could result in the loss of over half a billion tonnes of anticipated annual export supply. That would substantially increase the traded coal price and make investment in coal a riskier proposition. Countries like the United States and Russia – both of which are currently looking to cash in on coal exports—would be more conspicuous. The current expansion of US coal exports might even become untenable without the political cover that Australia’s example provides. If, by phasing down coal exports, Australia and the United States were to become the world’s best mates instead of the world’s worst ‘coal mates’, it’s conceivable that a billion tonnes of coal use annually could be avoided annually by 2020. That’s equivalent to saving over 8 per cent of current global CO2 emissions--so it’s anything but a futile gesture.

By making coal less affordable and available, therefore, Australia and hopefully the US too, can help change the equation for countries deciding right now on the extent to which their industrialization will be coal-based or something different. China and India would be unable to import enough cheap coal to stay on their current course--in electricity production, steel manufacturing and all of the associated industries. The magnitude of economic development in these countries would hardly be effected, but many more coal-based investments would be less competitive against cleaner alternatives than they are today. That’s why I refer to Australia’s precious place in the coal industry’s world—it’s the jewel in King Coal’s crown, and coal phase down by Australia could be the biggest blow the industry has ever experienced.

The industry of course banks on us leaving this sort of scenario in the ‘unthinkable’ basket—believing as the Institute of Public Affairs puts it that replacing coal with renewables involves ‘returning the nation to some nineteenth century pastoralist past and hoping that we will all prosper in such an economy’.xlv When we stop swallowing that sort of nonsense, the really exciting thing is that Australia can deal with its biggest contribution to climate change and its domestic emissions without wrecking the economy.

When you look at the consequences of phasing down coal—which by extension means replacing all coal fired power stations in Australia with mostly renewable alternatives--it’s hard not to conclude we can transform the economy for the better. Staged over a 10 year period, even if we assume the worst--with almost no coal industry left and half of the most coal-dependent industry gone—by 2020 Australia’s GDP is nearly a third larger than today. Our export basket would recover from the loss of coal and other coal-dependent commodities—partly because the removal of coal reduces our exchange rate and makes other export industries that have suffered through the resources boom more competitive. Our economy doubles in size in around 2037 instead of 2034.xlvi

I don’t mean to suggest that coal phase down doesn’t cause economic and political pain—or that it’s not a very big deal for regional communities and people whose livelihoods are tied to coal’s fortunes. Clearly it is. But the question for communities, families and governments now hooked up to coal is this: how much harder will the transition be if in ten years time, in the face of climate change, the world won’t turn a blind eye, and our coal industry is twice its current size? Australia’s environmental movement faces a similar dilemma: if campaigning against Australia’s biggest contribution to climate change is ‘too hard’ now, how much harder will it be when the coal industry is twice its current size? And we face a similar question as a nation. Right now we export very little coal to China and India—most of our coal goes to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Consider the major political, diplomatic and strategic implications of trying to phase down coal exports once China and India are heavily reliant upon us.xlvii It’s clearly easier and more courteous to signal our intentions before we reach that point—to have the conversations sooner rather than later.

Once we grasp that coal phase down dramatically cuts our carbon footprint abroad and makes our domestic efforts really count, that it transforms the economy for the better, that it's affordable, and that it has a positive environmental benefit internationally right as the world is on the brink of leaving any chance for a safe climate behind, it's pretty clear that this is a window of opportunity that we must take seriously before it closes.

i The average Queensland household produces 13.77t per year—so a million such households would produce 13.77mt of CO2 per year. Currently Australia exports 5.2mt of coal per week or 14.07mt of CO2 per week.

ii 74,246 tonnes of new coal exports are added daily to double coal exports by 2020. At that rate, a million tonnes of new coal exports would be added every 13.5 days. 74,246 tonnes of extra coal daily equates to 200,465t of CO2 being added. With the average car in Queensland emitting 4.13t of CO2 per year, a doubling of coal exports involves the CO2 equivalent of adding 48,538 cars every day between now and 2020.

iii At the rate it would take to double Australian coal exports by 2020, coal exports are rising by around 2.25mt per month. A 1GW power station might use 1-1.5t of coal annually. So this is a conservative estimate.

iv Clean Energy Future—Securing a clean energy future: the Australian government’s climate change plan, Commonwealth Government, July 2011, p.14

v The Carmichael Coal Project, proposed by Indian company, Adani would produce 60 million tonnes of coal annually by 2020; This will produce around 162 mt of CO2-e which is slightly more than the estimated ‘abatement task’ facing Australia under a 5% emissions reduction target for the year 2020. Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal Project would produce another 40mt of coal annually or 108mt CO2-e. Sources: Carmichael Coal Mine and Rail Project, Factsheet, Queensland Government. http://www.dip.qld.gov.au/projects/mining-and-mineral-processing/coal/carmichael-coal-mine-and-rail-project.html; See: ‘Carmichael Coal Mine and Rail Project‘ Initial Advice Statement by Adani Mining Pty Ltd, 22 October 2010; http://www.dip.qld.gov.au/resources/project/carmichael/initial-advice-statement.pdf; ‘China First—Developing the Galilee Basin’, Bowen Business Information Forum Presentation by Peter Lynch, Waratah Coal, 8 October 2009; http://www.belyando.com.au/Portals/21/China%20first%20-%20Waratah%20Coal%20-%20Peter%20Lynch%2008-10-09.pdf See also: ‘Galillee Coal (Northern Export facility)’ Fact Sheet, Queensland Government, http://www.dip.qld.gov.au/projects/mining-and-mineral-processing/coal/galilee-coal-project-northern-export-facility.html and http://www.dme.qld.gov.au/media_centre.cfm?item=811.00.

vi Saudi net oil exports are currently around 8.7 million barrels a day (CIA World Factbook). This amounts to 3.175 billion barrels a year which equates to around 1.36 billion tonnes of CO2 exported annually. (Conversion factor: 430 kilograms of CO2 per barrel of crude oil; Source: USEPA). If Australia doubled its current coal exports between now and 2020—to 542mt annually, coal export emissions would rise to 1.46billion tonnes annually. Add in a 50mt a year coal seam gas export industry in Queensland generating another 140mt of CO2 and you have fossil fuel export emissions from Australia of over 1.6b tonnes annually (excluding other LNG sources in WA).

vii http://www.worldcoal.org/coal-the-environment/climate-change/

viii Total hard coal production in 2008-9 is estimated by the World Coal Institute as 5.99 billion tonnes. http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/ Australia produced 334-5mt of salable black coal in that year, or 5.6 percent of global hard coal production. http://www.australiancoal.com.au/the-australian-coal-industry_coal-production.aspx nb this excludes brown coal which is less than a billion tonnes a year globally.

ix Coal industry is safe says Greg Combet, The Australian, 13 September 2010 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/coal-industry-is-safe-says-greg-combet/story-fn59niix-1225919936683

x As James Hansen notes “The amount of CO2 already emitted to the atmosphere...is about 50% from coal, 35% from oil and 15% from gas... On the long run, coal will be even much more important... The coal reservoir is larger than either oil or gas... there is enough CO2 in coal to take the Earth far into the ‘dangerous’ zone of climate change, to doubled atmospheric CO2 and even beyond.’ ‘Testimony of James E Hansen before the Iowa Utilities Board re: Interstate Power and Light Company’, November 2007, www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2007/IowaCoal_20071105.pdf pp.25-6; The Global Carbon Project noted in 2009 that ‘Emissions from coal are now the dominant fossil fuel emission source, surpassing 40 years of oil emission prevalence.’ See: Fossil fuel CO2 emissions up by 29 per cent since 2000, Media Release by the University of East Anglia, 19 November 2009 http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/08/files/UniversityEastAnglia_UK.pdf See also:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2007.ems For more on coal as fastest growing fuel source in the world, see: http://www.theage.com.au/national/old-king-coal-20091107-i2w7.html and See also: Green Coal: Limitless Energy for our Future, Presentation by Fred Palmer Senior Vice President of Government Relations--Peabody Energy, World Coal Conference, Amsterdam Oct. 18, 2010, p.9; and BP Statistical Review of World Energy, June 2009 http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/2009_downloads/statistical_review_of_world_energy_full_report_2009.pdf Hydro ousted coal in the BP report in 2010 for the first time since 2002. https://uctcriminology.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/hydropower-ousts-coal-as-fastest-growing-fuel-source/

xi See ‘Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 degrees c’ Letters, Nature, Volume 458, Number 30, April 2009, p.1158-1162

xii Source: Energy Strategies Ltd – private correspondence with the Author.

xiii http://www.cop15brasil.gov.br/en-US/?page=noticias/green-steel-for-the-brazilian-steel-industry http://www.gwm-tv.com/news/article/brazil-turns-to-eucalyptus-for-green-steel-production-163692.html http://www.forestry-invest.com/2010/eucalyptus-charcoal-brazils-choice-for-the-steel-industry/268 http://sbbnews.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/arcelormittal%E2%80%99s-charcoal-production-to-double/

xiv See, for example, in Canada: ‘Biomass in Ironmaking Expected to Reduce Emissions’ Natural Elements, NRCan's Monthly Newsletter—Issue 31, Natural Resources Canada

http://www.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/com/elements/issues/31/biomass-eng.php ’

xv http://www.aist.org/magazine/wsd/10_june_Ask_WSD.pdf

xvi A cubic metre of steel weighs around 77850kg or 7.85 tonnes. http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_metals.htm11bilion tonnes of steel equates to around 1.4 billion cubic metres, or about 1400square km to a depth of one metre. Tasmania is around 11

68km2, or around 48 times that area, so if it were covered in steel the depth would be roughly 1 48th of a metre or just over 2cm. A cubic metre of steel weighs around 7850kg or 7.85 tonnes. http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_metals.htm

xvii http://www.cleanup.org.au/PDF/au/scrap-metal-recycling-factsheet.pdf

xviii For more information on the more than 45 million or so tonnes of direct reduced iron (DRI) produced annually without coal from gas based processes, see ‘World Direct Reduction Statistics’, Presentation by Midrex, http://www.midrex.com/uploads/documents/MIDREXStatsBook2009rev4.pdf For more info on the alternative steelmaking processes, see: Steel and Energy Fact Sheet, World Steel Association, http://www.worldsteel.org/pictures/programfiles/Fact%20sheet_Energy.pdf See also: The scope for fuel rate reduction in iron-making, Technical Note 16, Cooperative Research Centre for Coal in Sustainable Development, January 2005

xix ‘Biomass gasification for DRI production’ paper by Thomas Buergler1 and Antonello Di Donato2, Proceedings of the 4th Ulcos seminar, 1-2 October 2008; See: http://www.ulcos.org/en/docs/seminars/Ref23%20-%20SP12_DiDonato.pdf

xx http://aluminumintransportation.org/main/growth/did-you-know ; http://www.csiro.au/science/ps1jb.html http://www.motorauthority.com/blog/1032636_aluminum-use-in-cars-hits-all-time-high http://www.aluminiumleader.com/en/around/transport/aircraft

xxi http://wardsauto.com/ar/composite_replace_steel_080922/ http://www.linearcomposites.com/ap_reinforce_soil.htm http://scienceblog.com/community/older/2001/D/200114560.html

xxii http://www.mbironoreindex.com/Article/2124630/Australia-dethrones-Brazil-as-biggest-iron-ore-exporter.html

xxiii http://www.worldcoal.org/coal/coal-mining/ & http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/

xxiv 259-(270)/951mt (more recent figs) = at least 27.5% of total seaborne trade; 135/232mt of the trade in coking coal. http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/

xxv As of mid 2010, Australian companies were involved in coal mining projects (either under way or planned in the next few years) that account for around 95mt of coal production annually. Include BHP Billiton’s Adaro (Murawi) project and the tally may rise to 110 mt. Almost all of the projects involve export coal, and total Indonesia exports are around 228 million short tons about 205 metric tonnes. So 1/3 is a conservative estimate. See also: ‘Land of the Long Black Cloud’ by Guy Pearse, The Monthly, September 2010

xxvi See for example, http://hello.news352.lu/edito-54866-mozambique-to-ship-coal-on-zambezi-minister.html

xxvii US coal exports have more than doubled since 2002 whereas Australia’s have increased by around •••. So US exports are increasing relatively much faster in percentage terms. However, they are about 1/3rd of Australia’s total exports. See: World Total Coal Exports (spreadsheet), US EIA. For an example of Appalachian coal going to China see: http://www.coaltransinternational.com/htm/w20100113.186336.htm Nations That Debate Coal Use Export It to Feed China’s Need, New York Times, 21/11/10 ; ‘Mining companies aim to export coal to China through Northwest ports’, The Oregonian, 9 September 2010.

xxviii ‘Enough coking coal for the next 30 years?’ Presentation by Peter Hickson, Head of Global Materials, Mining & Commodities Research—UBS Ltd, Coaltrans World Coal Conference, 18 October 2010, slide 6 & 8

xxix Overview - Long term prospects for Indian coal requirements, Presentation by Sudhir Nair -- Head, Energy & Infrastructure CRISIL Research, 10 March 2010 www.coaltrans.com/EventDocument.aspx?eventID=1130...2928...

; Facilitating Queensland’s Export Growth (2010 –2025), Presentation by Leo Zussino-- Chief Executive Officer Gladstone Ports Corporation, World Coal Conference, Amsterdam, October 2010, Slide 8 ; See also http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/business/indonesian-coal-mines-in-sumatra-kalimantan-draw-interest-from-indias-ntpc/393658

xxx http://www.grist.org/article/2011-07-01-the-struggle-against-indias-coal-rush

xxxi Green Coal: Limitless Energy for our Future, Presentation by Fred Palmer Senior Vice President of Government Relations--Peabody Energy, World Coal Conference, Amsterdam Oct. 18, 2010, p.17

xxxii http://www.worldcoal.org/ (Accessed 23/11/10)

xxxiii Globally, around 6 billion tonnes of hard coal is consumed annually. This excludes close to a billion tonnes of lignite. (http://www.worldcoal.org/coal/coal-mining/ & Coal Industry Advisory Board – International Coal Market and Policy Developments 2009, Feb 2010, pp.12,19). This equates to 16.2 billion tonnes of CO2 annually or 44.4 million tonnes of CO2 a day. Including lignite would take that figure closer to the 49m cited by the WCI CCS counter.

xxxiv Carbon capture and storage: Industry in the making –a coal perspective, Speech by Benjamin Sporton--Policy Manager, World Coal Institute, World Coal Conference, Amsterdam, 19 October 2010

xxxv http://www.iea.org/roadmaps/ccs_roadmap.asp

xxxvi Approximately 14,600 days between now and 2050 – 3000 CCS plants between now and then means one every 4.86 days. 12

xxxvii Assuming these facilities were large 1-gigawatt scale (which is very unlikely – they’d probably be smaller demonstration projects), and assuming that carbon capture and storage (CCS) saves 80–90 per cent of emissions, they might save around 6.5 metric tonnes of CO2 annually each, or about 130 metric tonnes in total. This is without incorporating the extra energy required by the CCS process – between a quarter and a third more than conventional coal-fired power generation.

xxxviii Current global hard coal consumption is around 6 billion tonnes per annum. Notwithstanding efficiency improvements (According to the World Coal Institute, 21st century coal fired plants emit 40% less than the 20th century average. http://www.worldcoal.org/), Peabody Energy projects global coal demand to increase by 53% to 11-12mt per annum by 2030, driven in large part by a doubling in demand for metallurgical (coking) coal. On that basis, by 2020, it is entirely conceivable that global coal demand may be over 8 billion tonnes per annum. Even if 150 million tonnes of CO2 were saved annually by 2020 should the G8 meet its CCS target through coal projects, emissions from coal burning would still be well over 20 billion tonnes of CO2 per annum. For Peabody’s projections, see (Slide 12) ‘Energizing the world one BTU at a time’ Presentation by Greg Boyce—Chairman and CEO of Peabody Energy, Barclays CEO Energy Power Conference, 15 September 2010. http://www.faqs.org/sec-filings/100915/PEABODY-ENERGY-CORP_8-K/c60242exv99w1.htm; and Green Coal: Limitless Energy for our Future, Presentation by Fred Palmer Senior Vice President of Government Relations--Peabody Energy, World Coal Conference, Amsterdam Oct. 18, 2010, p.17

xxxix ‘Capture and conversion of CO2 emissions for the sustainable production of fuel and other algae biomass products’, presentation by Tony St Clair (MBD Director), All Energy Australia 2010 conference, Melbourne (on file).

xl For more detail see: ‘Coal’s Next Alibi’ Comment by Guy Pearse, The Monthly, August 2011

xli According to a peer-reviewed report from the US DOE, ‘The CO2 generated by the power plant can only be effectively used by the algae during the photosynthetically active sunlight hours. As a result, the greenhouse gas emissions offset will be limited to an estimated 20% to 30% of the total power plant emissions due to CO2 off-gassing during non-sunlight hours and the unavoidable parasitic losses of algae production.’ See: National Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap, US Department of Energy, May 2010, p.80

xlii http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/algal_biofuels_roadmap.pdf p.80-82 http://www.csiro.au/files/files/poit.pdf See also, ‘Coal’s Next Alibi’, Comment by Guy Pearse, The Monthly, August 2011

xliii http://www.worldcoal.org/coal-society/ Green Coal: Limitless Energy for our Future, Presentation by Fred Palmer Senior Vice President of Government Relations--Peabody Energy, World Coal Conference, Amsterdam Oct. 18, 2010, p.9; http://www.guypearse.com/docs/guypearse.com/Pearse%20Climate%20Camp%20Speech%20Final.pdf p.5-6; See also: ‘Enough coking coal for the next 30 years?’ Presentation by Peter Hickson, Head of Global Materials, Mining & Commodities Research—UBS Ltd, Coaltrans World Coal Conference, 18 October 2010, slide 6 & 8 ; http://www.scribd.com/doc/31940956/EIA-2010-International-Energy-Outlook-with-projections-to-2035

xliv Let’s assume algae can only capture 50% of coal CO2 emissions, and that is very optimistic—the US DOE thinks 20-30% is more realistic, saying ‘The CO2 generated by the power plant can only be effectively used by the algae during the photosynthetically active sunlight hours. As a result, the greenhouse gas emissions offset will be limited to an estimated 20% to 30% of the total power plant emissions due to CO2 off-gassing during non-sunlight hours and the unavoidable parasitic losses of algae production’ http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/algal_biofuels_roadmap.pdf p.80/ Even if algae captures 50% and it is applied at say 2/3rds of the world’s coal use, and that coal use increases 50%, even allowing for no process energy losses at all, the emissions saved through the displacement of other fossil fuels would be eroded entirely by the growth in coal use.

xlv ‘DCC briefing: a farrago of spin, obfuscation and exaggeration’, Opinion piece by Alan Moran Director, Deregulation at the Institute of Public Affairs ABC Online – The Drum, 4/11/10 http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/40764.html

xlvi Sources: Australia’s Low Pollution Future: The Economics of Climate Change Mitigation (Canberra: Commonwealth Treasury, 2008), 145, 164; Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Research Economics (ABARE), Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. This assumes a GDP of around $1.5 trillion by 2020 under business as usual. Losing coal would cost around 3 per cent of projected GDP; and the cost of losing half the steel, aluminium and other EITEs would be similar. Together, this cost would equate to about $100 billion a year, leaving a GDP of around $1.4 trillion or about 30 per cent more than today’s GDP of $1.1 trillion.

xlvii In 2008-09 Australia exported 25mt of coal to China and 24.7mt to India – 49.7mt combined which 18.8% of the 263.4mt of coal exported that year according to the Australian Coal Association. http://www.australiancoal.com.au/the-

australian-coal-industry_coal-exports_coal-export-details.aspx Our exports account for less than 1.25% of the combined coal use of China and India.

Old King Coal still going strong

2011-11-28T00:07:00.000-08:00

The illustration and nursery rhyme above were published in the Illustrated London News of January 1 1829, the height of the Industrial Revolution, a more technologically optimistic time. The last verse of the heavily amended nursery rhyme goes:

"Old King Coal is a merry old soul
A Merry old soul is he
May he never fail in the land we love
Who has made us great and free
While his miners mine and his engines work
Through all our happy land
We shall flourish fair in the morning light
And our name and our fame and our might and our right
In the front of the world shall stand"

Despite the passing of the Federal Government's long overdue Clean Energy Futures legislation we might be excused for thinking that some in the Gillard government think nothing has changed since then.

One who is wondering is Andrew Revkin at the New York Times environment blog Dot Earth. He has posted Can the US and Australia slake China's Coal Thirst and still claim CO2 Progress? Revkin notes the massive expansion proposed for US coal exports to China and Australia's coal exports almost all of which go to Asia. Australia currently exports about 300 billion tonnes of coal (both thermal and metallurgical). This is predicted to grow at 5% per annum to around 500 billion tonnes by 2020. Revkin's point is a simple one. Given the massive amount of carbon leakage caused by this very damaging export trade can Australia really claim its modest cap and trade scheme is progress on the road to a carbon constrained future?

The issue of whether the exporter or the importer owns the emissions from traded fossil fuels is irrelevant to the atmosphere but important to governments in fossil fuel rich countries seeking an alibi to continue to profit from their environmentally ruinous export practices. In Australia anyone who cares about our future environmental viability is mightily relieved that at last the Federal government has put in place legislation offering the possibility of curtailing our domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

Everyone acknowledges that this is just the first teetering step towards a carbon constrained future but the feeling is abroad that now that we have made a start we can afford to look elsewhere for a while. This is absolutely not the case but, understandably given the epic struggle it has had to pass this legislation, our Federal Government is currently uninterested in the next and any subsequent steps towards an environmentally viable future. The Government which of course describes gas as a 'transition fuel' is counting on a rapid expansion of local gas extraction for both export revenue and domestic consumption. I have been forwarding information on the increasing number of studies highlighting problems with the GHG emissions of gas to my Federal MP Martin Ferguson (Minister for Minerals and Energy). His reply gives a pretty good pointer to the strength of the Gillard Government's commitment to a clean, green, environmentally viable future.

"It is important to note that coal currently provides around three quarters of Australia's grid connected electricity generation and is integral to the provision of secure reliable and low cost electricity supply. As it is not realistic to expect a transition away from coal to occur overnight, solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation must include investment in low emission fossil fuel technologies, such as natural gas-fired generation and carbon capture and storage (CCS). Natural gas-fired electricity generation represents a growing proportion of the sector in Australia and is an important transition phase between a fossil fuel dependent economy and a lower carbon one." (Source: Personal communication from the office of Martin Ferguson 23/11/11)

This quote raises two possibilities: Either that the Minister for Resources and Energy believes in gas-fired power generation and CCS as viable technologies to slow, halt and reverse the growth of domestic GHG emissions or that he knows the truth – that they won't – but wants us to believe they will for obvious political reasons. Ferguson and the Gillard government are wrong but are they dishonestly trying to mislead us?

One respondent to Revkin's post was Guy Pearse a research fellow at the Global Change Institute of the University of Queensland and well known to Australian climate change activists. No-one speaks with more authority on this topic than Pearse. He commented:

"Australia may well treble rather than double its coal exports by 2020. Factor in the “carbon light” CO2 from coal seam gas projects in the East (and other LNG expansion in the north and west) and you’re talking about Australia’s fossil fuel emission exports equating to TWO Saudi Arabias by 2020, not one as I’ve been saying to many disbelieving ears.

This would mean that by 2020 the 159mtpa CO2-e saved by the Gillard CEF (with heavy reliance on imported offsets, many of which I expect to be very dodgy for reasons I won’t get started on here) would be erased more around 10 times over, not 4 times as I said in that speech you quoted.

Of course, industry, government, and others can offer lots of arguments why this expansion is an unstoppable force, not Australia’s responsibility, and not so unique in the world. Most of these arguments are self-serving nonsense as I discussed in my August speech. It’s perhaps also worth noting that that the pace of fossil fuel export emission growth in Australia is accelerating rather than contracting, in spite of a carbon tax and a resources tax."

Such an expansion of this environmentally ruinous trade is unthinkable. Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent for the UK Guardian newspaper in reporting the conclusions of the IEA's recent World Energy Outlook 2011 (WEO 2011) headlined her article as follows:

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns. If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change.

WEO 2011 warns:

"If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available "carbon budget" will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA's calculations."

Faced with this prospect the sort of expansion of fossil fuel export predicted by Pearse and apparently sanguinely contemplated by the Gillard Government is the stuff of nightmares and Revkin is right to draw attention to it. Somehow this sleepwalking government must be persuaded to stop teetering on the brink and literally sprint towards the rapidly fading vision of an environmentally sustainable future. What are the chances?

Too hot to handle 1

2011-11-16T00:23:00.000-08:00

A legal challenge by a coalition of climate groups to the proposed HRL Dual Gas brown coal fired power plant is currently running in the Victorian Civil Administration Tribunal. Anyone interested in this might also be interested in this summary of legal challenges to the Australian coal industry by Giles Parkinson at Climate Spectator. The success rate so far is not encouraging but perhaps there is reason to hope for more success ahead.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

I have already posted on the alarming implications of The 2011 World Energy Outlook - released by the International Energy Agency late last Wednesday night. This report finds the world is on track to build enough fossil-fuel power stations, energy-intensive factories and buildings by 2017 to close the door on keeping climate change to a safe level. Predictably its appearance has prompted a wide spectrum of responses from our elected representatives in Canberra.

Brian at Larvatus Prodeo has posted a thoughtful commentary on media and political responses to the Report.

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The starting carbon price for the newly legislated Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), $23 per tonne, is fixed for three years from its start in 2012 until 2015. Given that this price would need to triple to drive the transformation to renewable energy the ETS will not deliver our clean green future by itself. Those of us who have not yet lost hope look to the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation to drive this transition. This body, which of course Abbott has vowed to destroy when/if he comes to power looks to the ratbag right like the political gift that keeps on giving. Now Robert Merkel has posted his thoughts on The Politics of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation on the blog Larvatus Prodeo. Read what difficulties this important initiative of the Federal Greens is likely to experience in the near future.

Climate Crimes

2011-11-11T02:27:00.000-08:00

Sandi Keane environment correspondent for the blog Independent Australia says that, to get elected, Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu deceived Victorian voters into thinking he was a moderate. The climate and energy policies that Baillieu et al have unfurled over their first year in office shows them to be dangerous reactionaries. In just 12 months, they have gone a long way towards scrapping the state’s natural heritage. This post summarizes the Climate Crimes of Ted Baillieu.

The Baillieu Government – Renewable Energy Policies

Since coming to power the Baillieu government has steadily backed away from its legislated commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent this decade, repeatedly describing this legislated and therefore legally binding, target as ‘aspirational’.

Premier Ted Baillieu has distanced himself from it by labeling it 'old Labor government policy'.

''[It's] a legislative target set by the previous government and as we've said, that is an aspirational target,'' he said. ''As we have consistently said if there is to be a systematic approach to this then that will be taken by the Commonwealth."'

Baillieu apparently thinks it is Canberra's task to preserve our environmental viability and that his government is free to indulge in exactly as much environmental vandalism as it wishes.

In September 2011 the Baillieu government broke an election promise and greatly slowed the expansion of the small-scale solar power industry in Victoria by reducing the solar feed in tariff available as an incentive to households and small businesses to install solar power.

Since coming to power the Baillieu Government has introduced draconian restrictions on the siting of wind power developments. These include 2km setback from houses and 10km buffers around national parks (which is not in the new laws, but seems to be based on Coalition policy that calls for “The exclusion of wind farms in or near national and state parks”). Any house within 2 kilometres of a proposed wind power development has an effective right of veto. If all of these restrictions are applied there is virtually nowhere in Victoria available for siting wind power developments. Further the Baillieu Government has given planning controls to local councils ensuring that local self-interest will always take precedence over the greater good. The brown areas on the Map of Victoria reproduced below show where wind power developments have become impossible as a result of the Baillieu Government’s restrictions on siting.

The Baillieu government’s environment policies are likely to cost Victoria $3.6 billion in clean energy investment according to the Clean Energy Council. Friends of the Earth says up to $955 million of wind projects in Victoria, costing almost 2000 jobs, have been lost or stalled since the laws came in. Many currently valid planning permits for wind power projects will expire in March.

The Baillieu Government – Fossil Fuel Policies

The Baillieu government is plainly prepared to sacrifice jobs and revenue in the coming green economy but appears to be happy to make any shortfall up by expanding brown coal mining and coal seam gas extraction.

Sandi Keane commented:

"The mining industry has been repaid handsomely for the millions of dollars it contributes to the Liberal Party through “blind” trusts. Until Australians demand total transparency on political donations, vested interests will continue to dictate their own agenda with dire consequences…"

On March 3 this year, The Age reported that a controversial scheme to mine and export brown coal (regarded as today’s asbestos and shelved by the Brumby government in 2009) had been dusted off by the Baillieu government. When Big Mining saw the coming bonanza with the election of the Baillieu government, it responded with a flurry of activity.

Hundreds of brown coal mining leases have now been issued by this government for the very areas out of bounds to wind farms — coastal regions and areas of significant environment value….Oh, and Victoria’s prime agricultural land, as Phil Piper, president of the Mirboo North Landcare Group and owner of a property in rolling green hills of South Gippsland discovered, via an article in The Age.

It would appear that the company, Mantle Mining, was granted a licence by the Baillieu government this year to explore for coal over 19,000 hectares at Mirboo North. According to Piper, no-one knew about it as no applications were ever advertised, a legal requirement. If there is one thing we all agree on, it is the need to preserve prime agricultural land for food production. Heaven knows, there’s little of it in Australia.

The massive EL4416 lease to Ignite Energy Resources issued earlier this year shows that the Baillieu government doesn’t share this view. Covering nearly 4,000 sq km of Gippsland’s prime coastal and tourism region, the lease, which includes the mining of brown coal, covers the spectacular 90 Mile Beach, continues then all the way to Wilson's Promontory up to part of the Gippsland Lakes and surrounds the towns of Bairnsdale, Sale and Traralgon. Have a good look at the map below:

The Baillieu Government’s support of the sunset coal and gas extraction industries in Gippsland includes tacit support for the beleaguered HRL Dual Gas Plant currently mired in legal action at VCAT. The $50 million of State funds earmarked for the HRL Plant has not been withdrawn and is thought likely to be directed to Mantle Mining to support their proposed export oriented brown coal mining and dewatering venture at Bacchus Marsh should the HRL Dual Gas Gippsland project fail. At Bacchus Marsh, Mantle Mining is sitting on as much as two billion tonnes of brown coal. The environmental impact of burning this is enormous.

At Anglesea the Baillieu government despite the obvious environmental impact on nearby environmentally significant heath land, and without consideration of the greenhouse gas burden of combustion of the more than fifty million tonnes of brown coal that are expected to be extracted from the open cut mine have simply signed off on a pre-existing option to extend Alcoa’s mining activity by fifty years.

Apart from this State government's obvious intent to repay supporters in the mining industry and the notorious Landscape Guardians it is difficult to understand their extraordinary environmental vandalism. The only sense I can make of it is that they actually do not believe the warnings from the climate scientists. Our only hope is to remove them from power as quickly as possible.
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Update
For more on the Landscape Guardians, their phony health claims, their links to the mining industry and the climate skeptics in the Liberal Party, read here.
See also Trouble in the Wind?

As well as brown coal mining exploration leases coal seam gas exploration leases have been issued in Victoria. For more on the negative environmental effects of coal seam gas read here.
For more on the negative impact of gas combustion generally on the climate crisis see:
Gasland downunder or ……?
Natural gas bombshell: switching from Coal to Gas increases Warming for decades. Has minimal benefit, even in 2100.
Gas is not the solution
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Ted Baillieu. Get rid of him!

It's now or never.

2011-11-09T16:18:00.000-08:00

On top of dire warnings from the US Department of Energy that global greenhouse gas emissions jumped by an alarming 6% in the previous year Joe Romm at Climate Progress has reported on a study that shows the current rate of global warming to be unprecedented in the last twenty thousand years. Now Climate Progress summarizes a chilling report from the International Energy Agency, not exactly a bunch of climate radicals. The IEA warns that the window of opportunity to halt global warming at or around 2ºC is rapidly closing and the world is headed for irreversible climate change in five years. "If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change."

Meanwhile on Planet Canberra, which apparently is not subject to the laws of physics, the Nationals have taken aim at Labor and Independent MP Tony Windsor as the party vowed to overturn the carbon tax. Nationals leader Warren Truss declared the vote "Labor's betrayal of the Australian people".

"The Australian people willing, the Coalition will not allow the carbon tax to dog future generations," he said. "We have given ironclad notice to all Australians that should the Coalition form the next government we will repeal this destructive tax."

A fired-up Barnaby Joyce described the Senate vote as an "adjournment", not a defeat. "Australians cannot afford it," he said, vowing to use "every sinew of our body" to overturn the tax. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says the federal government has confirmed in law its "betrayal" of the Australian people after its controversial carbon tax passed through parliament. The stupidity of these people borders on criminal.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update
Giles Parkinson at Climate Spectator has picked up on the IEA report also.

The climate stupidity of Joyce, Boswell and other National Party fools is criminal!.

Gasland down under or …?

2011-11-06T01:14:00.000-07:00

Coming to a farm near you get ready

Previous posts have highlighted the growing doubts that gas has a role to play as an acceptable transitional fuel on the inevitable journey from fossil fuel to renewable energy. First came peer reviewed published research from Cornell University academics Howarth, Santoro and Ingraffea indicating that life cycle emissions from gas were little if any better than those for coal. Then came a cross post from Climate Progress where Joe Romm reported on damning new research carried out by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research showing that switching from Coal to Gas increases warming for decades and has minimal benefit even in 2100. Now comes an industry commissioned report which contradicts industry claims of the emissions benefits of transitioning to gas and finds that the life-cycle emissions of CSG may be higher than those of black coal used in the most modern coal plants currently being built in China. No surprise then that the industry tried to hush it up. This short report by Giles Parkinson is cross posted from Climate Spectator.

GREEN DEALS: Is CSG cleaner than coal?

Giles Parkinson

A new report commissioned by the peak body of the oil and gas industry suggests that claims coal seam gas exports are up to 70 per cent cleaner than coal exports over their life cycle may not actually be valid. The report by Worley Parsons finds that this is true when compared to coal technologies that are no longer deployed, but it also finds that the life-cycle emissions of CSG may be higher than those of black coal used in the most modern coal plants currently being built in China.

Accounting for the life-cycle emissions of CSG has become a highly contentious point in the debate about the industry, and resistance to it, in particular, from the farming community. The Worley Parsons report, commissioned by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, analyses a range of scenarios comparing CSG used in baseload and peaking plants, with a range of coal-fired technologies used in China.

While in the best case scenario, CSG does match the claims of the industry that it can be up to 70 per cent cleaner than coal, particularly when replacing the dirtier subcritical coal technology that the Chinese no longer build, the report notes that gas-fired power is likely to add to capacity in China, rather than compete against coal. “An existing coal-fired plant will not be taken off line and replaced by a gas fired plant," it says. "And, in general, large supercritical and ultra-supercritical plants of up to 1000MW are being built to replace redundant small, inefficient coal plants.”

In practice, then, the best comparisons lie between CSG and the ultra-supercritical coal plants, which has a base-case emissions of 0.78t/Co2e for every MWh produced. Combined-cycle baseload plants with CSG have a base case of 0.55t/Co2e for every MWh, while open cycle peaking plants have a base case of 0.75t/Co2e for every MWh. The graphs below show the ranges – the first is based on different scenarios on all emissions sources, while the second is just on power plant efficiencies, which can vary widely.

The report notes that, under the worst-case scenarios, supercritical and ultra supercritical coal-fired generation on a life-cycle basis would be superior, with CSG/LNG being 2 per cent and 6 per cent more GHG intensive than best-performing coal.

The issue for Australia is that, because of extraction and compressing processes, around 22 per cent of these emissions occur in Australia, with the rest at the point of consumption, whereas only 2 per cent of coal emissions occur in Australia when black coal is exported. Another issue is that Australia is building more open-cycle gas plants than combined cycle, principally because of increases in peak demand, and because of the ongoing uncertainty around carbon prices.

Matthew Wright, the head of Beyond Zero Emissions, which promotes a 100 per cent renewable grid in Australia and is critical of the rollout of gas, says the report makes it clear that gas exported to China will not be replacing coal. “And the examples show that – with the majority of gas-fired plants in Australia being old and outdated open cycle plants and running at lower efficiencies – in most scenarios compared to new-build coal there would be a substantial increase in emissions.”

Update
This report from Giles

Old King Coal is a needy old soul

2011-11-02T16:19:00.000-07:00


Age cartoonist John Spooner's constant childish climate change denialism shows that he has bought this load of rubbish. Check Gillard's computer screen and the headline on the paper in her hand.

The idiot right, including ignorant but assertive cartoonist for The Age John Spooner, constantly refers to the cost of subsidies to renewable energy implying that without these they can't compete economically with fossil fuels.
The idea that massive public subsidy is necessary for renewable energy to compete with fossil fuels is a myth that ignores the massive public subsidies to fossil fuel based energy in Australian society. Subsidies to fossil fuel were exposed by Richard Denniss and Andrew Macintosh from the Australia Institute in a Policy Brief that was also summarized in Climate Spectator. The size of the fossil fuel subsidy is revealed by this table taken from Macintosh & Denniss' Paper. This shows that over four years the public subsidies to fossil fuels totals a staggering $39.1 billion.

Australian Fossil Fuel subsidies (AUS$ billion)

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	Total
Concessional FBT Treatment of company cars	$1.11	$1.22	$1.29	$1.34	$4.96
Exemption from Fuel tax for Aircraft	$1.00	$1.05	$1.10	$1.15	$4.30
Concessional Tax treatment of oil from NW shelf	$0.58	$0.58	$0.58	$0.59	$2.33
Accelerated depreciation for planes, oil & gas assets and commercial vehicles	$0.92	$1.00	$1.03	$1.06	$4.00
Exemption from excise for LPG, LNG, and CNG	$0.55	$0.32	$0.35	$0.37	$1.59
Fuel tax Credits scheme for vehicles used in mining, agriculture and other non-road purposes	$5.16	$5.29	$5.68	$5.80	$21.93
Total	$9.31	$9,46	$10.03	$10.31	$39.11

So, whatever subsidy is necessary to drive the shift from fossil fuel to renewables must be viewed against the huge sum of public money still flowing to fossil fuels. The myth that renewable energy is dependent on massive public subsidy to compete has been attacked by Richard Denniss Executive Director of The Australia Institute in various publications over the last couple of years. Most recently in 'Carbon Price and the truth about truthiness' a piece picked up by Crikey. Here Denniss addresses the concept of 'truthiness' as a central characteristic of the lamentable climate change debate in Australia:

"Truthiness is the phrase now widely used in the US to describe “concepts or facts that one wishes or believes to be true rather than concepts or facts known to be true”. In the words of Stephen Colbert, “I don’t trust books. They are all fact no heart”.
Truthiness is at the heart of the climate policy debate in Australia, and it is embraced by all sides of that debate."

The supposed costs of implementing a shift to renewable energy sources is one of the most 'truthy' myths about climate change. Denniss writes:

"…for those determined to keep polluting is that the costs of tackling climate change are much greater than the benefits. The fact that every major effort to determine the macroeconomic costs of reducing emissions finds trivially small costs in the order of a 0.1% reduction in the rate at which we will get richer is easily ignored. It is far truthier to simply add up all of the costs to the industries that are supposed to bear the brunt, multiply the number by 10, 20 or 50 to provide an “insight” into the long run cost of action, and then express the end result in tens of billions of dollars rather than as a percentage of our $1.3 trillion economy."

Now Giles Parkinson from Climate Spectator has shone a light on massive global subsidies to fossil fuels and the reflection of this state of affairs in New South Wales.

"If there is a single mechanism that stands in the way of clean energy development across the globe it is fossil fuel subsidies, which amount to around half a trillion dollar worldwide, each year. That much has been recognised by the International Energy Agency and by the G20, who have promised to remove them. The IEA says that by doing that, more money can be freed up to invest in the technologies of the future. Given the course of the debate in the US and Australia, don’t expect that to happen any time soon."

The unbelievable profits currently enjoyed by the world's biggest oil and gas producers might be seen as justifying the removal of these subsidies but don't hold your breath. In the US Congress the Republicans have rejected this suggestion outright:

“Of course not,” shouted the Republicans. Florida Congressman Cliff Stearns is the chairman of a House sub-committee that has been investigating (and railing against) loan guarantees being offered to clean technologies. Stearns has voted multiple times to extend oil company subsidies but says clean energy incentives pick “winners and losers” (guess which Australian energy minister uses the same language in the same context). Stearns says it is much more fun just picking winners. “When somebody is successful, then you give them the subsidies and the tax credit,” he told Climate Progress, when asked if the oil companies should maintain their subsidies."

Of course we're not that stupid are we?

"That kind of logic is being repeated in Australia, where the Coalition and other established business figures have also been railing against clean energy incentives – it’s like putting money on the horses, said Opposition finance minister Andrew Robb last week – and all the while extending support and protection for the status quo."

Parkinson refers to the Tamberlin Inquiry into energy privatization in New South Wales which found that the privatized power generator:

"would not have attracted any buyers were it not for a massively subsidised and heavily discounted coal supply. It also found that NSW coal-fired power stations depend on those subsidies to maintain their place in the merit order of the National Electricity Market."

The Tamberlin Inquiry tells us that:

"the coal-fired power stations in NSW are unable to compete with other power sources unless their coal is supplied at around one quarter of the cost of export coal."

Parkinson continues:

"The similarities between Australia (the world’s largest coal exporter) and the Gulf oil states (the world’s largest crude exporters), are uncanny. Neither can afford to consume their own fossil fuels at export prices."

He further notes that:

"the Gulf States are now looking to invest massively in solar so they can reduce their domestic oil consumption and recoup the billion of dollars in lost revenue. So here’s a crazy idea. Maybe the NSW government should take the same approach, and invest heavily in solar, freeing up coal for export and having an established and ultimately lower cost solar industry to fall back on when the world finally gets really serious about cutting greenhouse emissions."

Parkinson concludes:

"We know… the plants can’t be sold at all without the subsidized cost of coal. But at its capacity of 30 million tonnes, at the current export price of $100-$120 a tonne, the state could generate $3-$3.6 billion a year in export revenue, compared to the $900 million it will receive from the state-owned coal generators at the current price.
That should be enough to build a few solar power stations, but we'd better make sure the NSW government understands that this is an idea from the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Omanis and the Emirates, and not some sort of subversive green plot. But you may want to ask them this: will the government’s criteria on solar incentives, that it not cost a single dollar to either consumers or the government, now be applied to coal-fired generators?

The environmental basis for building our own renewable energy generating capacity on the royalties accruing from coal exports might be open to question but surely the point is well made that it is increasingly fossil fuel dependent power generation rather than emissions-free renewable energy that relies on public subsidy for its cost competitiveness. Perhaps this could be drawn to the attention of John Spooner at The Age?

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Update
Of course, having just posted I immediately discovered that Tim Lambert at Deltoid had commented on Spooner's climate change ignorance as long ago as July. I thought readers might like to see what Lambert has to say.

Doug Evans

Climate Activist's Song Book number 1

2011-10-27T01:14:00.000-07:00

Big Ted Baillieu

To the tune of Camptown Races (very politically incorrect)

Ohhhhh ………… Big Ted Baillieu sings this song

Brown coal, brown coal

Big Ted sings it all day long

Libs love brown coal

Ohhhhh ………… Big Ted Baillieu sings this song

Brown coal, brown coal

Big Ted sings it all day long

Libs love brown coal

Gonna dig all night,

Gonna dig all day

We’ll make a mint for our big end mates.

And a bit for ourselves on the way!

Ohhhh………… Big Ted Baillieu sings this song

Global warming

Big Ted sings it all day long

Global warming’s crap!

Tony’s had his say

So that must be the way

With Libs in charge the world won’t warm

Except for our holidays!

Ohhhh ………… Big Ted Baillieu don’t like wind.

No to turbines

His country chums would rather not

Spoil their lovely view!

The windmills make them feel so sick

No to turbines

But new coalmines are just the trick

To hell with Anglesea!

Doctor’s can have their say

But coal is here to stay

Ted don’t give a stuff

About Anglesea’s kids

ALCOA must get its way

Ohhhh ………… Big Ted Baillieu loves brown coal

Mantle Mining

Poisoned groundwater but EXPORT BUCKS!

What would Doctors know?

Bacchus Marsh must pay

Who would miss it anyway?

Werribee too (except for the zoo)

They’re all bogans anyway.

Ohhhhh………… Big Ted Baillieu’s got no brain

Big Ted Baillieu

And we’ll be the one’s to feel the pain

While Baillieu’s mates clean up

The miners see a way

To clean up big today

Baillieu’s mates are lining up

To screw us all the way

My head is spinning

2011-10-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

My head is spinning. On the one hand warnings about the urgency of the climate crisis are cascading down on us. On the other Australia's conservative politicians are flat out trying to unwind what little progress has been made on moving from fossil fuel use to renewable energy here in Oz.

NASA's top climate scientist James Hansen has a new paper out and he warns that:

"It is time for us to get Tea-Party angry about what our political system has become and about the inter-generational injustice being perpetrated on young people"

Writing on Climate Progress Joe Romm comments:
The most interesting part of the paper is his critique of the media coverage (“Silent Summer”), his discussion of the intimidation of climate scientists, and a tantalizing introduction to a forthcoming analysis on extreme weather and attribution to human emissions.

Silent Summer
There is ample evidence of growing climate disruption. But despite record or near-record heat and drought in the United States this past summer with simultaneous extreme flooding, and despite comparable extremes in China and elsewhere, there has been little public discussion of the connection of these climate extremes with human-made climate forcing.
The media are partly responsible for the silent summer, as they have mainly chosen not to examine connections between climate anomalies and human-made causes. A cynic may ask whether their silent summer is related to increasing right-wing control of media and large advertising revenues from fossil fuel companies. Regardless of reasons for media silence, should scientists be making more effort to draw public attention to the human role in climate anomalies?
Scientists face one long-standing obstacle to public communication and one new factor. The old difficulty arises from limits on our ability to detect expected change in a chaotic climate system, especially concerning the significance of specific regional events. The new factor is the likelihood of being pilloried for reporting evidence of a human role in climate change.

His comments about the media resonate strongly with what is happening in Australia. Speaking to a 350º.org event in New York Hansen warned:

“Climate change — human-made global warming — is happening. It is already having noticeable impacts…. If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”

That is his prediction for the United States at the end of this century under Business as usual growth in greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly 'Business as Usual'seems to be what we will get.

Similar warnings are emerging everywhere in the informed scientific community at the moment. The two degree threshold for global warming is commonly regarded as the dividing line between dangerous and very dangerous climate change. Tom Arup in The Age and Giles Parkinson at Climate Spectator report on research to be published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, by an international team of researchers, including some from the University of Melbourne. The scientists find the two-degree goal is still achievable but is slipping out of reach. Not news to anyone likely to read this blog but depressing nevertheless. The research confirms that to have greater than 66 per cent - chance of staying below two degrees requires global emissions peak between 2010 and 2020 (probably around 2015) and thereafter decline steeply. This crisis previously thought likely to affect our grandchildren has now become our crisis. Parkinson writes:

"A collection of new studies from leading climate scientists has thrown up a devilish challenge for the world’s political leaders: Not only do current climate change policies fall well short of stated targets (which we, and they, already knew), but the impacts may now be felt by the current generation, rather than the next. At least that removes the question of equity and discount rates for future generations."

Setting out the necessary emissions targets and when we need to achieve them Parkinson continues:

"According to the scientists – from the Zurich's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the UK's Met Office Hadley Centre, and Melbourne University, among others – the world needs to reach a peak in emissions between now and 2020. But it also needs to reduce its current level of 48 gigatonnes a year to 44 gigatonnes by the end of the decade and then keep falling."

Contrasting what we must do with what we seem likely to achieve he continues:

"At the current rate of growth, the world will be emitting somewhere between 53 and 57 gigatonnes by 2020. The weaker range of pledges under the Cancun agreement makes a barely discernible difference and puts the world at 53 billion tonnes, while the top-end Cancun pledges (which include a commitment by Australia to cut its emissions by 25 per cent by 2020), takes the figure to around 48 gigatonnes. Another four billion needs to come from somewhere – much of it from the largest emitters."

Note the Australian commitment that this assumes and compare it with what is actually happening.

Another study by scientists from Reading and Oxford Universities, the Met Office Hadley Centre, and New Zealand’s Victoria University was also released in the journal Nature this week. It finds that global warming is no longer a problem that will impact future generations. The 2°C limit – and its consequences – could be reached within two decades. According to this study large parts of the world would experience five-year average rises of 2°C by 2030 – this included Europe, north Asia and Canada, as well as North Africa.

The studies find that unless the world develops technologies that can deliver “net negative emissions” – such as using biomass combined with carbon capture and storage, the 2020 target might have to be even tighter – at around 42 gigatonnes.

This is a big ask but achievable if we act now. However climate change action is currently especially problematic in Australia. At a time when the scientists are warning us that we have around five years to halt growth in Greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid Climate Armageddon, Tony Abbott the ignorant, irresponsible leader of the Federal Opposition, and in his own mind Prime Minister in waiting, vows to repeal the Gillard government's Carbon Tax - ETS proposal at any cost when he gains power. This still seems to be working well, with opposition to this essential reform in the electorate increasing to 59%. Despite Abbott's extravagant pledges to repeal the Clean Energy legislation however, delivering this may be slower, more difficult and more expensive than he would like the electorate to know. At the State level we have the idiotic and somewhat childish Premier Baillieu doing whatever he can to frustrate the growth of renewable energy in Victoria and presiding over a massive expansion in brown coal mining.See here, here and here.

Around five years ahead of the date at which global emissions must cease to grow and commence rapidly shrinking Australia's conservative politicians, whose star is apparently rising are still in a state of childish denial. Denying the science, denying common sense they live in a make believe world of their own. So while the electorate continues to doze a hundred or so distressingly familiar faces turned up outside The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in Melbourne yesterday. They came to support a legal challenge by a coalition of environmental groups and individuals to the proposed HRL-Dual Gas coal fired power station intended for the Latrobe Valley. Currently this project has been granted a total of $150 million by both our conservative Victorian State government and our nominally centre–left Federal Labor Government.

The scientists tell us time is up. We must act now or suffer the most severe consequences. The Federal Government says it accepts the science but is giving $100 million to a new brown coal power plant. The idiotic State Government simply denies that it is all happening. As I started by saying. My head is spinning.

'Direct Action' vs Less Action than we thought we were getting.

2011-10-09T06:10:00.000-07:00

Sorry to have let so long pass without posting. Other stuff has intervened but now I'm picking up the thread again. Given the likelihood that the Gillard government's Carbon Tax – ETS proposal will pass through the House of Rep's next week and become law before Christmas and the likelihood of a ruinous change of government at the next election, I thought it would be good to round up recent pronouncements on this and aspects of the Coalition's promised response.

Director of the Australia Institute Richard Denniss and Matt Grudnoff co-authored a Policy Brief for The Australia Institute entitled 'The Real cost of Direct Action : An analysis of the Coalition's Direct action Plan'. It's conclusions destroy the credibility of the Coalition's climate change policy but does the electorate care?

Where will the money for the Emissions Reduction Fund come from?
The Coalition has committed to not creating any new taxes or increasing any old taxes to fund the Emissions Reduction Fund. All funding would therefore have to come from consolidated revenue. For this not to reduce the budget bottom line the Coalition would need to implement spending cuts in other areas.

What will the Coalition do if it becomes more expensive?
If abatement became more expensive the Coalition would need to either spend more (and hence introduce larger budget cuts in other areas) or fail to meet the emissions reduction target. This would see emissions rising by up to 22 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020 rather than falling by five per cent.

Has direct action been tried anywhere else in the world?
Direct action has been tried in Australia on many occasions. A review of other competitive grant programs show that on average abatement is achieved at a cost of $140 per tonne of CO2e. This compares very unfavourably with any proposed carbon price. Competitive grant programs have also been unable to achieve the amount of abatement originally intended.
Part of the Direct Action Plan is to convert brown coal to gas. This will increase electricity prices.

Will the Coalition compensate electricity consumers? If they do where will this money come from? Will it be part of the Emissions Reduction Fund?
The Coalition has committed to ensuring that there is no increase in prices to consumers so any electricity price increase would need to be compensated for. It is not clear where this money would come from. If it came from the Emissions Reduction Fund then this would reduce the amount of money available to buy other abatement.

Direct action includes planting trees. Where will they be planted? How much land will be needed for tree planting? Where will the water come from for the new trees?
265,600 square kilometres would need to be planted if all of the Co2e was to be offset by trees. That quantity of planted trees would require 96,944 gigalitres of water per year. About 25,000 square kilometres land would need to be planted with trees if the 15 million tonnes of CO2e is to be offset as spelt out in their Direct Action Plan. The trees would use about 9,100 GL of water per year. Planting trees can be an important way of reducing emissions but they cannot reduce emissions on the scale that the Coalition is suggesting without large scale changes to land use in Australia.

How many public servants will be required to implement the Coalition’s Direct Action Plan? Which department will have responsibility for the Direct Action Plan?
This is a difficult question to answer. We can say that it would require a large number of public servants to assess the quantity of tenders that the Coalition would require in order to achieve its emissions reduction target. This at a time when Joe Hockey is claiming he wants to cut public servant numbers in order to save money.

Given the state of the polls and a likely victory for the current opposition at the next Federal election I have previously been pretty depressed about Tony Abbott's continually stated determination to repeal the Gillard government's Clean Energy legislation. A commentary by Matt Grudnoff (senior economist at The Australia Institute) examining the likely timelines for an elected Abbott government to roll back the carbon tax - ETS legislation that the government is about to shepherd through Parliament.

However Grudnoff's piece makes it clear that, even in the worst case scenario of the Abbott-led opposition winning in a landslide it would probably take at least two years to repeal the legislation and another two to get its Direct Action Plan in place. Assuming no election before mid 2012 this means 2016 before Abbott's Direct Action Plan could begin to operate. Four years of uncertainty pushing up electricity prices reducing the competitiveness of the same businesses the Coalition claims to fear for.

Research commissioned by the Investor Group on Climate Change suggests that this process would add an additional $2 billion in costs and increase electricity prices by 20%. Further it would virtually remove any possibility of Australia achieving its target of 5% emissions reduction by 2020. This is unlikely to concern Abbott and the gang however as they does not regard this as a serious commitment anyway. The Coalition, which has deliberately shaped its strategies in opposition in line with those of the U S Republican Party, and contains many climate change deniers among its parliamentary group, regards climate change as no more than a device for gaining power.

Grudnoff's report for The Australia Institute entitled 'The Direct Costs of waiting for Direct Action' is well worth a read.

Grudnoff has also authored another piece 'Abbott out of step on carbon' picked up by Online Opinion.

This highlights the dwindling support for the Coalition's Direct Action Climate Policy.

The list of friends for Tony Abbott's Direct Action Plan continues to shrink. The Australian Industry Greenhouse Network (AIGN) which co-ordinates, among others, the mining and manufacturing industry's response to climate change issues has rejected the Opposition's plan saying it would cost far more than the Coalition has claimed. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott responded by saying that the amount of money they would spend on direct action was capped. Read the rest here.

It is probably not news to anyone that that the Opposition's climate change policy is rubbish. Hopefully though it is useful to have some of the shortcomings spelled out. Likewise it is not news that the Gillard government's Clean Energy package is nothing more than a small step in the right direction. However, with the exception of the trusty Giles Parkinson, no-one in our dozy media has picked up just how small and tenuous a step this is. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation bill and Australian Renewable Energy Agency bill are not included among the bills currently before the Federal Parliament. These bills provide substantial support for the renewable sector. To many they are the main reason for supporting this package and the fact that they are missing from the bills about to be debated by the Parliament is really disturbing. Parkinson notes:

The $10 billion CEFC, which is what interests the renewables industry most, is the most vulnerable part of the package. Its legislation will not go through parliament until next year, and will barely begin to operate before the next election in 2013. A victorious Coalition government could find this the easiest to dispatch, or at least severely nobble.

Addressing a conference of representatives of the renewables sector recently Greens senator Christine Milne expressed great concern for the future of the 'renewables sector'.

Not just the CEFC, but the renewable energy target was also under threat, from the energy sector as well as the political arena. “It’s no longer possible to be an advocate of renewable energy and be apolitical,” she said. “This is a rearguard action we are now fighting. You must understand the forces that are ranged against you.”

A couple of days ago I received this response to yet another request for the status of the all-important complementary measures to the Carbon Tax - ETS package from the office of Greens MP Adam Bandt.

The Greens are doing all we can to ensure that the renewable energy funds we negotiated as part of the Clean Energy Future package are legislated this year alongside the price on pollution.

Reflecting Milne's sense of urgency the email from Bandt's office concluded:

Anything you can do to help us bring them on sooner, by pushing the government to move faster in appointing trustworthy boards and drafting the legislation, will be very helpful.

If the progress on climate change that has been dangled before us is not to be snatched away from us again it seems we must continue to fight.

A dangerous, short flight of pure fantasy - gas as a transitional fuel

2011-09-10T01:22:00.000-07:00

A dangerous, short flight of pure fantasy - gas as a transitional fuel. Original image Flying Machine by Laurie Lipton

Previous Earthsign blog posts have supported the view that gas has no serious role to play as a transitional fuel on the path to an environmentally sustainable future.The evidence supporting this point of view is beginning to pile up. This Earthsign post is cross posted from Climate Progress where Joe Romm has posted this report on damning new research carried out by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. Politicians must take careful note of the rapidly strengthening warnings on reliance on natural gas as a transitional fossil fuel. We can't afford to get this wrong.

Doug Evans

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ThinkProgress - Climate Progress

Natural Gas Bombshell: Switching From Coal to Gas Increases Warming for Decades, Has Minimal Benefit Even in 2100

By Joe Romm on Sep 9, 2011 at 5:01 pm

A BRIDGE FUEL TO NOWHERE

A stunning new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) concludes:

In summary, our results show that the substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades….

Coal, natural gas, and climate: Shifting from coal to natural gas would have limited impacts on climate, new research indicates. If methane leaks from natural gas operations could be kept to 2.5% or less, the increase in global temperatures would be reduced by about 0.1 degree Celsius by 2100. Note this is a figure of temperature change relative to baseline warming of roughly 3°C (5.4°F) in 2100.

The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was first shown by the International Energy Agency in its big June report on gas — see I EA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. That study — which had both coal and oil consumption peaking in 2020 — made abundantly clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels.

But what NCAR’s new study adds is more detailed modeling of all contributors to climate change from fossil fuel combustion — positive and negative. The study is here, an early version is here, the news release is here. It’s by senior research associate Tom Wigley, one of the country’s leading experts on climate modeling.

“Relying more on natural gas would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, but it would do little to help solve the climate problem,” says Wigley, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “It would be many decades before it would slow down global warming at all, and even then it would just be making a difference around the edges.”

Wigley’s analysis is the first to include all of the relevant climate factors:

We consider a scenario where a fraction of coal usage is replaced by natural gas (i.e., methane, CH4) over a given time period, and where a percentage of the gas production is assumed to leak into the atmosphere. The additional CH4 from leakage adds to the radiative forcing of the climate system, offsetting the reduction in CO2 forcing that accompanies the transition from coal to gas. We also consider the effects of methane leakage from coal mining; changes in radiative forcing due to changes in the emissions of sulfur dioxide and carbonaceous aerosols; and differences in the efficiency of electricity production between coal- and gas-fired power generation. On balance, these factors more than offset the reduction in warming due to reduced CO2 emissions.

In the main scenario in the paper, natural gas use soars and coal use drops from 2010 to 2050 before rising again slowly. In the “Supplementary Material,” Wigley runs a sensitivity analysis where natural gas actually replaces coal entirely by 2050. The results are virtually identical — there’s extra warming through 2050 and by 2100 the total reduction in warming is slightly under 0.1°C.

Wigley’s warming in 2100 is “only” 3°C (though it just keeps warming and hits 4°C a few decades later). Other models show 2100 warming closer to 4°C or 5°C (see M .I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F). Either way, the switch to gas accomplishes little or nothing.

A key finding of the NCAR study is:

In summary, our results show that the substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades — out to the mid 22nd century for the 10% leakage case. This is in accord with Hayhoe et al. (2002) and with the less well established claims of Howarth et al. (2011) who base their analysis on Global Warming Potentials rather than direct modeling of the climate….
The most important result, however, in accord with the above authors, is that, unless leakage rates for new methane can be kept below 2%, substituting gas for coal is not an effective means for reducing the magnitude of future climate change.

What is the leakage rate for methane? Well, as I’ve written, we don’t know exactly because the gas companies won’t release all of their data. We do know that total life-cycle leakage and fugitive emissions from extraction, production, transport, and consumption is higher for shale gas than conventional gas.

The controversial — but peer-reviewed — paper by Cornell’s Robert Howarth, which I wrote about here, seeks to quantify the impact of the leakage from the best available data. It concluded:

Natural gas is composed largely of methane, and 3.6% to 7.9% of the methane from shale-gas production escapes to the atmosphere in venting and leaks over the life-time of a well. These methane emissions are at least 30% more than and perhaps more than twice as great as those from conventional gas. The higher emissions from shale gas occur at the time wells are hydraulically fractured — as methane escapes from flow-back return fluids — and during drill out following the fracturing. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential that is far greater than that of carbon dioxide, particularly over the time horizon of the first few decades following emission.

I wrote about the “response” by the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the DOE’s premier fossil fuel lab, here. NETL throws dozens of numbers at the reader — and averages in shale gas with conventional gas — to obfuscate the issue. But even NETL concedes that fugitive emissions comprise 1.7% of all natural gas extracted — and point source losses (vented or flared) comprised 2.4% of gas extracted. Shale gas, in their analysis, appears to have 30% higher global warming potential for extraction and delivery, so clearly total losses are higher — much higher than 2%.

I would note that legitimate claims are being made now that the lifetimes of many new shale gas wells have been overstated considerably — see “Analysis: U.S. Shale Gas Industry Reserves Are Over Stated at Least 100 Percent.” If so, this would again suggest that total life-cycle emissions relative to total production may be higher than people have suspected for unconventional gas. ClimateWire quotes Howarth, who is a professor of ecology and environmental biology, that the switch from coal to gas has been “overhyped”:

It’s time to move on truly green energy technologies — solar, wind — and to place a much greater emphasis on energy efficiency.

Can’t argue with that.

Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition is quoted saying:

Certainly the carbon benefit was a major consideration in wanting to consider a switch from coal to gas. The Wigley analysis makes it clear that simply switching from coal to gas is not going to get the job done.”

Detchon calls for developing carbon capture mechanisms for natural gas, which should be a priority for the industry, but don’t hold your breath.

Since this is an NCAR study, let me end by pointing out that last year NCAR published a complete literature review of “Drought under global warming” (see here). That study makes clear that Dust-Bowlification may be the impact of human-caused climate change that hits the most people by mid-century, as the figure below suggests (click to enlarge, “a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought”):

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

The large-scale pattern shown in Figure 11 [of which the figure above is part] appears to be a robust response to increased GHGs. This is very alarming because if the drying is anything resembling Figure 11, a very large population will be severely affected in the coming decades over the whole United States, southern Europe, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Chile, Australia, and most of Africa.

Texas is currently at a PDSI of -7.75, close to its record of -7.8 in September 1956 – see Hell and High Water Stoke Texas Blaze: “No One on the Face of This Earth has Ever Fought Fires in These Extreme Conditions”

Renewable Energy - Do we want it or not?

2011-09-01T16:46:00.000-07:00

What world do Australia's idiotic conservative politicians think they live in? The cost of solar power in parts of New South Wales (NSW) has reached parity with fossil fuel generated power and the boom in solar panel installations coupled with higher electricity prices and energy efficiency measures has pushed back the likely need for new baseload electricity generation capacity in NSW until near the end of the decade. That sounds like good news to me but apparently the NSW State conservative Coalition government thinks otherwise. In their wisdom these clowns removed the State solar feed-in tariff. This has sounded the death knell for Australia's only remaining manufacturer of Solar cells. 'Silex' and decimated (again) the burgeoning small scale solar industry. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

"New data shows solar power is edging towards ''grid parity'', after which it becomes cheaper than fossil fuel-generated energy such as coal and gas, even taking into account the upfront cost of buying rooftop solar panels. … Andrew Blakers, the director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems at the Australian National University, said: ''If you look at the prices being paid today, we have already reached grid parity in a lot of places except Melbourne and Hobart.' … The Australian Photovoltaic Association said that while some areas had reached grid parity, it could be several years before solar electricity was worth more than coal-fired electricity in most of NSW, and that depended on state and federal policy."

On the closure of the Silex solar cell manufacturing division Giles Parkinson wrote for Climate Spectator:

"The Solar Energy Society estimates that more than 400 jobs have been lost and one quarter of the solar installations businesses in the state closed since the NSW government shut down the solar bonus scheme. Those losses are bad enough, but it seems that the 30 lost at Silex Solar (some for the second time, because they had gone elsewhere after the previous closure by BP Solar and then returned) has galvanised attention.

It may be because these particular workers have union support, in the form of the AMWU. NSW Secretary Tim Ayres says he had expected a more conservative approach from the new government, but also a more thoughtful one. 'It seems like the politics have taken over… there is a relentless hostility to anything that looks like a green scheme from some of the media, and the politics just follows.'

But it’s also grabbed attention because Silex is one of the few businesses that can propose a genuine “value add” to the local industry. It is the last commercial producer of technology that was developed at the University of NSW. When the French government-controlled nuclear giant Areva was announced as the winner of the Solar Flagships program in June, using technology that had been developed at the University of Sydney, governments – both state and federal – made appropriate noises about how important it was that the new wave of local technologies – for they are emerging from our excellent research facilities at a rapid rate – not be lost overseas."

The suspicion that the conservatives have decided the green economy is just another partisan political issue is supported by the actions of the Baillieu government in Victoria. The Baillieu government first signaled that it would back away from the target of generating 20% of electricity from renewables by 2020. Then it implemented its pre-election promise to impose draconian new restrictions on the siting of wind power facilities. Right after that it slashed the feed in tariff with which the growth of the small scale rooftop solar industry had been promoted. The combination of these measures will cost Victoria dearly in terms of investment and jobs. Further, the approach of the Baillieu government signals that it is more interested in supporting the interests of its corporate backers than in responding to the wishes of the electorate. Writing in 'The Age' Andrew Bray points out that what Baillieu is doing runs counter to the wishes of the Australian electorate:

"…Renewable energy is also clearly popular in the electorate. Groups associated with the 100% Renewable Energy campaign recently polled more than 14,000 Australians and found 91 per cent of respondents think we should be building more renewable energy to help create jobs."

Sensing a Victorian regime more sympathetic to their interests a medley of miners is clamoring to press their claims to destroy valuable farm land in pursuit of profit. Mantle Mining's plans to extract dry and export brown coal from a mine near Bacchus Marsh is in the balance. One financial backer, encouraged by a barrage of emails threatening direct action has withdrawn but another has directly stepped into the breach. The HRL proposal to generate electricity using gassified brown coal has suffered some setbacks but is still on track. Contact Environment Victoria here and Stop HRL here to find out more about this issue and how you can help stem the rush of carbon pigs to the feeding trough.

Event Horizon: The Black Hole in The Australian's Climate Change coverage

2011-08-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

Sorry for another cross posting so soon. I am working on my next post on renewable energy but I thought this post from 'The Conversation' was simply too good to let it slip by.

The Australian’s coverage of climate changed is seriously warped. AFP PHOTO/ NASA - CXC/ A. HOBART

MEDIA & DEMOCRACY – Michael Ashley investigates the national paper’s op-ed policy.

The “event horizon” of a black hole is one of the most mind-boggling concepts in astrophysics. The black hole’s stupendous gravity causes time itself to be warped — an astronaut falling inwards sufficiently slowly would see arbitrarily far into the future history of the universe during their final minutes and seconds before crossing the event horizon.

There is no other place in time or space where our normal perception of reality is so completely overturned. That is, apart from a meeting room deep within the News Limited bunker at 2 Holt Street, Surry Hills. It is in this room that Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian, holds editorial meetings.

And it is in this room that reality becomes so distorted that The Australian was able to state earlier this month, “it is in keeping with this newspaper’s rationalist pedigree that we have long accepted the peer-reviewed science on anthropogenic climate change,” while at the same time engaging in a campaign to misrepresent and distort climate science.Other editorials have made it clear that The Australian believes it is treating its readers as mature adults who should be able to make up their own minds based on arguments from “both sides” of the debate.

The problem is that on one side of the debate you have 97% of the world’s published climate scientists and the world’s major scientific organisations, and on the other side you have fools. Excuse my bluntness, but it is past time to acknowledge that the science underpinning anthropogenic climate change is rock solid. The sceptics have had the time and opportunity to come with up a convincing case, but their best efforts read like arguments that NASA faked the moon landing.

My colleagues working in the climate sciences have largely given up trying to correct the constant stream of misinformation from The Australian, in frustration. The Australian’s anti-science campaign takes many forms. One is the inflation of the credentials of their fake experts. For example, OpEd writer and member of the Outdoor Recreation Party Jon Jenkins was referred to as an “Adjunct Professor”. Bond University wrote to The Australian informing them that this was not true.

Howard Brady was called a “climate change researcher from Macquarie University”; in fact, Brady is a 70 year-old retiree who has published just seven scientific papers (on Antarctic sediments, not climate), the most recent one in 1983, following which he worked for 17 years in the oil industry. Macquarie University contacted The Australian to set the record straight. In neither of these cases did The Australian publish a retraction or clarification.

Another tactic is to accept opinion pieces on science from unqualified sources. When I contacted The Australian’s opinion editor late last year to express dismay at their bias, I was given the example of Michael Asten, a part-time professorial fellow in the school of geosciences at Monash University, Melbourne, as someone who was well-qualified to comment. So I did some investigation into Asten and his four OpEds in The Australian over the past two years. A quick check of Asten’s peer-reviewed publications shows that while he appears to be your go-to guy if you have electromagnetic interference problems with your fluxgate magnetometer, he hasn’t published anything remotely related to climate science. He is, however, well-connected with the mining and coal industries.

In his first OpEd (“Climate claims fail science test”, December 9, 2009), Asten wrote “recent results published by top scientists cast doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s theory” and he showcased the work that Pearson et al published in the top journal Nature. But Asten misrepresented the findings in the Nature paper. Don’t just take my word for it— Paul Pearson and his co-authors wrote to The Australian saying “Professor Michael Asten has misrepresented our recent research by suggesting that it casts doubt on the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming”.

They added, “We would like to take this opportunity to add our voices to the strong and steady message that the world scientific community is delivering to the Copenhagen negotiators — the greenhouse problem is real, imminent and potentially devastating for the planet, its life, and human civilization. Fortunately it is still not too late to avert the catastrophe.”

You would think you couldn’t ask for a clearer statement than that, but Asten went on to argue in his second opinion piece (“More evidence CO₂ not culprit”, December 29, 2009) that he used data in Pearson’s paper to arrive at a different conclusion from Pearson himself. So, Asten, with no expertise in the field, is using a paper published in Nature to argue the opposite of what the paper actually says. He then spins this as “top scientists cast doubt” on the IPCC. Gobsmacking.

In Asten’s third article (“CSIRO should establish if there was medieval warming Down-Under”, 13 May 2010) he asserts that if the medieval warm period was a global phenomenon, then “warming during the past century should be seen as predominantly natural climate change rather than driven by man-made carbon emissions.” This is bunkum. The effect of man-made carbon dioxide is clear from multiple independent lines of evidence.

In his fourth OpEd (“Political interference will cripple climate debate”, 17 Dec 2010), Asten compares models of sea-level rise from a peer-reviewed paper by Jevrejeva et al, with observations of the sea-level by Riva et al, finding a factor of five difference.

Asten interprets this as a serious discrepancy in climate predictions that the CSIRO was withholding from the Government. He also describes how compliant scientists were intimately involved in the formulation of Nazi racial policy, and outspoken academics were removed by the Gestapo. But once again, Asten misunderstands the science. The Riva et al paper wasn’t an observation of the total sea-level rise at all, just an estimate of the contribution from melting ice. The Nazi stuff is simply bizarre.

You would think The Australian, if it had any editorial integrity, would have called a halt to Asten’s ready access to the opinion pages after serious flaws were found with each of his contributions. But the lure of publishing an opinion supporting their editorial bias, from an apparently reputable source, was just too strong to resist.

I have singled out Asten in this article, but the same applies to every one of the climate contrarians that are repeatedly given exposure in The Australian. For example, Bob Carter has claimed “temperature records confirm that cooling is under way” – no they don’t. Ian Plimer says “To argue that human additions to atmospheric CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere, changes climate requires an abandonment of all we know about history, archaeology, geology, solar physics, chemistry and astronomy” – this statement is just absurd.

Christopher Monckton has repeatedly misinterpreted scientific papers; and William Kininmonth states “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide is less than 1°C” – this is a factor of three below our best estimates.

None of these people has made any impact whatsoever with their arguments in the peer-reviewed literature — they just aren’t contributing to any real scientific debate. The only place that they can publish their junk science is in outlets such as The Australian, where they are welcomed with open arms. And if you think the bias in The Australian only affects its choice of OpEd pieces, wait till you read Tim Lambert’s examination of news reporting in his article later in this series for The Conversation.

So, when The Australian claims in its editorials to support the peer-reviewed science, it is really just an insurance clause for when the tide inevitably turns against their campaign of misinformation. The Murdoch media empire has cost humanity perhaps one or two decades of time in the battle against climate change. Each lost decade greatly increases the eventual economic costs, the devastation to our ecosystems, and the suffering of future generations.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Read the real science, ask the real experts. The editors sitting around the table in that meeting room in Surry Hills need to reflect on their culpability.

This is the sixth part of our Media and Democracy series. To read the other instalments, follow the links here:.

Part One: Selling climate uncertainty: misinformation in the media
Part Two: Forget the fantasy politics – advertising is no substitute for debate
Part Three: Democracy is dead, long live political marketing
Part Four: Selling the political message: what makes a good advert?
Part Five: Drowning out the truth about the Great Barrier Reef
Part Six: Event Horizon: the black hole in The Australian’s climate change coverage
Part Seven: Spinning it: the power and influence of the government advisor

This article is about the media’s representation of climate change – we’d love to hear your opinions on that topic. If you would rather discuss the existence of climate change, there are many other articles on the site covering that issue: please take your comments to one of those discussions.




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

What's the best strategy for dealing with deniers?

2011-08-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

Cross posted from Climate Progress

David Roberts

The other day, I wrote about a study that attempted to explain why conservative white men (CWM) are so loathe to accept the threat of climate change. It has to do with system justification and identity-protective cognition. Go read it!

The question remains: What should we do about it? The denialism or indifference of CWM toward climate is a huge barrier to getting anything done. In this post, I’m going to argue that the typical strategies are doomed to failure. It may be that the simplest, least clever strategy — kick their [metaphorical] asses — is still the way to go.

Repeat it

The original and still most popular approach to dealing with climate deniers is reasoned persuasion: facts and figures and reports and literature reviews and slideshows and whitepapers. This hasn’t ever really worked, but climate types keep trying, like American tourists in a foreign country who try to overcome the language barrier by talking louder and more slowly.

While the study postulated a lot of interesting things about CWM, one thing it didn’t ascribe to them is ignorance. In fact, the CWM who know the most about climate science are the most likely to reject the consensus account. And this isn’t a new finding. Yale’s “Six Americas” report found that the highly skeptical are more informed about climate change science than those who report a high degree of concern about it (the latter of whom still regularly confuse climate with the ozone hole, etc.).

A large number of CWM have taken pains to seek out information on climate change so that they can dispute it. You’ve no doubt encountered them in comment sections online. This is called motivated reasoning: reasoning aimed at justifying a pre-existing conclusion or social identity, gathering supporting facts and ignoring disconfirming evidence.

Motivated reasoning is something all human beings do; we all defend and justify our social identities. In fact, some interesting new social science argues that motivated reasoning is not a bug but a feature — what reason evolved to do. Nevertheless, there’s a difference between motivated reasoning and complete epistemic closure, which is what the right has achieved on climate (and other issues as well).

Which suggests that giving CWM still more facts and arguments is not going to achieve anything.

Drop it

One sentiment, lately growing in popularity, is that the best way around the CWM climate conundrum is just to stop talking about it. If climate has become divisive and partisan, then drop it; there’s plenty of good policy that doesn’t require climate as a premise. That’s the thrust of the recent “Climate Pragmatism” report and the idea seems to be catching on. I addressed that notion in a post last week and said most of what I need to say there. I’ll just add that there’s an implicit premise in the “pragmatism” argument. It assumes that climate is a unique barrier to cooperation with CWM in positions of power and that there are other areas where CWM can be brought around to support clean energy. But what if climate isn’t unique? What if CWM reject it because it came from a tribe they see as their enemies and they’ll reject anything that comes from that tribe? Then dropping climate has won nothing and sacrificed moral authority and simple honesty.

Finesse it

A somewhat more sophisticated take says that we should talk about climate differently, in a way that does not trigger CWM defenses. David Ropeik (whose work on risk perception everyone should be reading) has a post on the CWM study in which he says:

We have stop making climate change a zero sum if-you-win-I-lose battle. We have to frame the issue in ways that work within everybody’s underlying cultural/tribal perspectives. We have to realize that answers are more likely to be found, and solutions are more likely to be reached, if the goal is finding common ground …

In the abstract, this makes plenty of sense, though it’s rarely spelled out in any detail. Offer CWM an entree into the issue that doesn’t require them to give up their tribal affiliations and commitments. Find common ground. Who could argue?

Notice the gigantic underlying assumption, though: that climate change can be rendered benign to the current cultural/tribal perspectives of CWM. Is that so? It’s often claimed that if climate is discussed as a national security issue, an economic opportunity, or a religious/moral imperative, it will bring skeptics over. But those claims have not born out in practice, despite years of attempts. CWM grow steadily more skeptical even as the military, the private sector, and religious institutions grapple with the truth.

The fact is that climate change triggers system justification among privileged classes because it really does carry a threat to the system! It implies an argument for global governance when CWM are nationalistic, an argument for egalitarianism when they are hierarchical, an argument for conservation when they love capitalism, an argument for investment and regulation when they hate government. It also implies that hippies have been right and the conservative movement wrong, for decades.

In communications among individuals, the psychology of communication can be helpful. But framing — which is where lots of wonks and academics seem to begin and end — is not a sufficient political solution. There’s a reason CWM have the cultural/tribal perspectives they do. They are heavily influenced by people and institutes whose interests are threatened by the solutions to climate change.

Denialism in context

Where climate scientists, energy wonks, academics, and eco-journalists go wrong is in abstracting climate change from the larger political situation. They approach it in isolation, wondering what characteristics of this particular phenomenon invoke this particular reaction in these particular people. That distorts their reactions.

The fact is, as I’ve written before, climate denialism is part of something much larger. The most significant driving force behind climate change denial among CWM is not any ineffable psychological mystery but simply the increasing intensity and radicalization of the American conservative movement. The same dynamic afflicting climate change is afflicting the debate over fiscal policy, the economy, jobs, and health care. The right is rejecting empirical reality and adopting a stance of unshakeable ideological opposition to anything the non-right does, even policies they have supported in the past (see: individual mandate in health care, cap-and-trade in environmental policy). The core of the CWM tribal perspective is loyalty to the tribe and hostility to outsiders.

There is a serious asymmetry between the left and right in America that lots and lots and lots of people, for whatever reason, don’t want to acknowledge. The left remains a broad, fractious coalition composed of all sorts of competing interests. The right, by contrast, has become increasingly clarified. Since Reagan, but accelerating since Gingrich, the right has become more and more homogenous, composed of CWM who share a visceral sense of being besieged, of “losing their country,” of seeing their privileged normative place in U.S. culture slip away. They view liberals not as fellow Americans with differing policy views but as a threat to the moral fiber and even the existence of the country. Manicheanism has always been part of the conservative temperament, but that propensity has been hugely accelerated by the construction of a self-contained media machine that runs on fear. They need everything divided into two buckets: good and evil.

In those circumstances, the chances of luring CWM into the climate hawk coalition seem exceedingly slim, no matter how clever and psychologically adept the messaging.

Winning

Let’s remember the goal. The goal is action. The support of CWM is a means to that end, but not necessarily the only means to that end. Perhaps instead of hiding from the fight, or transcending the fight by finding common ground, climate hawks could win the fight. A crazy notion, I know.

CWM are blocking the entire, diverse climate coalition from taking action by virtue of intensity (not to mention a broken and utterly dysfunctional political system). The poll numbers are consistently on climate hawks’ side, but their support is shallow and fickle. The Tea Party, on the other hand, views even efficient lightbulbs as incipient tyranny. As I’ve said many times, intensity wins in politics.

If that’s true, perhaps the answer is not to reduce intensity in hopes of attracting CWM. Perhaps the answer is to increase intensity in order to overcome CWM. Intensity is increased first and foremost through organizing, but also through clear, inspiring messages that draw sharp lines between those fighting for progress and those fighting against it.

The implicit premise of climate “pragmatism” and similar efforts is that CWM are stronger, that climate hawks can’t win a direct clash. And for now, that seems to be true. Beating back the radical conservative resurgence is something that nobody on the left has figured out yet. But the alternative, attempting to win over CWM by soft-pedaling climate, doesn’t exactly have a record of success either.

In the end, everyone has to make their own bet. Do you make progress by attempting to please the Very Serious People running the system or by speaking truth to power and subverting the system? For my part, when I see people denying facts and bullying scientists in order perpetuate the dominance of fossil fuel interests that are killing people and threatening my children’s futures, I am inclined to tell them to go f*ck themselves. That won’t resonate with their social/tribal perspectives, but that’s because I find their social/tribal perspectives repugnant and worthy of social censure. I want to beat them.

– David Roberts

Related Post:

Stuff White People Like: Denying Climate Change

Quarry Vision

2011-08-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

Guy Pearse's seminal essay Quarry Vision is about the mindset that sees Australia’s greatest asset as its mineral and energy resources – coal especially. How has this distorted our national politics and our response to climate change? The clash between the long term interests of the Australian community and the assumed right of the mining industry to make a profit anywhere and any time it can is more and more apparent. So far our politicians, both Federal and State have seemed unable to balance the competing demands of industry and community. Michelle Grattan, writing in The Age for example describes the row over coal seam gas (as) "a depressing example of political posturing triumphing over sensible policy discussion."

All around the country the miners are rushing to profit from remaining fossil fuel reserves before their social license evaporates. In Victoria, close to Melbourne, it seems Bacchus Marsh will have its own coal hole if there is money to be made from it. Mantle Mining, having previously withdrawn from an attempt to mine in the Otway mountains near Deans Marsh intends to establish a coal mine at Parwan near Bacchus Marsh if it can make a profit.

Mantle managing director Ian Kraemer told Parwan residents that most exploration would be on roadside sites, but the company had the right to drill on private land if the owner was compensated. He also indicated that, unlike at Deans Marsh, he planned to proceed with an application for a full mining licence despite local opposition if it proved economically viable.

Mantle is planning to use energy and greenhouse gas intensive technology with a high water consumption to dry Bacchus Marsh's brown coal to make it viable to export to India. This piece of environmental vandalism utilizes the same technology as another proposal that briefly surfaced last year until community outrage made it too hot to handle. Fortunately the volatile economic times have shaken the confidence of the scheme's international backers Intersuisse and Switch off Coal Switch on Renewables campaign has asked anyone who cares about this to email Intersuisse at suisse@intersuisse.com.au emphasizing the following points.

I understand that Intersuisse is currently underwriting Mantle Mining’s equity raising for the Bacchus Marsh coal mining and export project.
I also understand that recent events have triggered an exit clause for Intersuisse to cancel its support for this project.
I urge Intersuisse to utilise this opportunity to withdraw from this controversial project, as there is strong community opposition both locally and across Victoria to the prospect of an open cut coal mine in a key agricultural area, as well as to the initiation of a coal export industry in Victoria.
I will personally consider undertaking peaceful direct action to stop this project from proceeding, and know many others who will do likewise.

The Bacchus Marsh example is not isolated. While conservationists, Traditional Owners and parts of the Queensland Government have been working towards a World Heritage listing for stunning Cape York Peninsula, mining companies want to turn the region into a giant dirty coal mine. In the north west, areas of pristine beauty and enormous environmental value are under threat quite unnecessarily. The end is coming for fossil fuels. The mining industry knows it but, irrespective of the damage their activities will cause it is grimly determined to extract every last cent before the door is slammed in its face. Somehow our politicians must be persuaded to represent our interests before it is too late.

The courage to lead: Gillard, Abbott and the climate change conundrum

2011-08-17T00:35:00.000-07:00

Robyn Eckersley

Cross posted from The Conversation

Spoilt for choice: neither Tony Abbott nor Julia Gillard are inspiring climate leaders.AAP

Both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have staked their political futures on their climate policies. So perhaps they should also be asking what the hallmarks are of a climate leader? The German political scientist Max Weber once asked what kind of leaders should be allowed to put their hands on the wheel of history. For Weber, political leaders must be able to unite an ethic of conviction with an ethic of responsibility. Power for power’s sake without a passionate commitment to a broader purpose is vulgar and vain, while acting with a right intention cannot suffice if the practical consequences of policies are at odds with political convictions. Put simply, both Abbott and Gillard fail the Weber test.

Abbott now concedes the climate science and the need for a policy response, but his conviction is weak. And while his “direct action” policies are in keeping with his convictions, they are unlikely to achieve even the modest policy targets that he nominally shares with the government.

The Prime Minister is also in trouble. She has struggled to convince the electorate of her climate conviction or her policies, having previously ruled out a carbon tax in her election campaign. Under Gillard, “the greatest moral challenge of our generation” has shrivelled in response to the fear campaign mounted by the opposition. Instead, Julia has announced that Australia does not wish to be a leader, but nor does it wish to be left behind. Her government accepts the climate science, and acknowledges the narrow window available for effective action, yet its targets bear little relationship to what is required to reduce the risks of climate dangerous change. Its primary message is one of reassurance and appeasement.

No wonder, then, that “a great big tax on everything” seems like an adequate counterargument. And if the government is talking up a compensation package, the public has reason to believe that this big tax on everything must be going to bite. Weber also argued that political leadership is not a vocation for saints, dreamers, the faint-hearted, or those who are primarily preoccupied with their “impression” on the public. He recognised that political leaders of consequence must be courageous, honest and cool-headed but that these virtues will not get the leader very far without good communication skills. Leaders (even perverse ones) are nothing without followers, and it is here that Tony Abbott has excelled. Climate leaders need three aptitudes if they are to prevail over this opposition.

First, a climate leader must be able to communicate the risks of failing to take timely action. If citizens cannot understand the seriousness of the problem, they cannot be mobilised to support early, concerted action. But the tone should be measured, rather than shrill. Constant reference to ever more spectacular climate disasters has been criticised as a form of “climate porn” – it is secretly thrilling but ultimately distancing and debilitating because it reduces the audience to a passive spectator overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. Talking up climate catastrophe is similarly unproductive when it is linked with small-action repertoires such as planting a tree or changing light bulbs. The point is not to play on people’s fear or sense of guilt but rather explain how individual actions are collectively useful if supported by public policies and infrastructural investments that make sustainable behaviour easy rather than heroic.

Second, scientific and technical language doesn’t inspire people to action. Martin Luther King did not preach that he had a series of targets for reducing the percentage of racism over the next 50 years. He inspired others with a vision of the future. Science and politics are quite distinct realms. A political leader must construct a bridge from the former to the latter. Laypeople are more interested in grasping the meaning of such knowledge for social action, including how it measures up against their own beliefs, values, identities and everyday lives.

Third, a political fixation with technological solutions carries with it certain moral hazards. It avoids questions of distributive justice (who gets what, when and how?) as well as communicative justice (who decides?). Technology is a means, not an end, so the push for technological innovation must be woven into a broader narrative about human flourishing.

So what kind of narrative should climate leaders be giving us? The dominant political ideology of our age – neoliberalism – understands strong mitigation targets as a constraint on economic and political autonomy. This constraint frame contains a deep-seated anti-ecological and anti-social bias because it privileges those among our existing generations who benefit from, yet deny, the unelected risks they impose on others. A new narrative must be able to show that increasingly ambitious mitigation commitments are a necessary condition for freedom and mutual flourishing.

The answer to the meaning of life is not “less carbon”. Rather, reducing carbon emissions is something that is necessary so we can all achieve other and better ends. The sooner we start hearing that from our leaders, the better our grip will be on the wheel of history.

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

Tiny Tim's latest excellent adventure

2011-08-16T18:47:00.000-07:00

Who stands behind the opinions and activities of the IPA? Original image Laurie Lipton

This blog primarily addresses climate change and the battle for hearts and minds this crisis has prompted. However some of you seem to share my concern (expressed in a previous post) over the potential for the ABC to become a platform for politically partisan groups to spruik their viewpoints without disclosing whose interests they are representing. That this is already occurring to some extent is illustrated by the very frequent appearance of the representatives of my favorite band of right wing deceivers The Institute for Public Affairs, on ABC platforms. The relevance of this obsession of mine to the climate change battle is illustrated by the article by Adam Morton in 'The Age' (16/8/11) 'Think Tank warned over Freedom of information requests'. Tim Wilson Director of Climate Change Policy and the Intellectual Property and Free Trade Unit at The Institute of Public Affairs has been officially warned by the Department of Climate Change over the avalanche of Freedom of Information requests he has submitted requesting information on various aspects of the minority Labor Government's Carbon Tax - ETS legislation. Wilson submitted 750 requests in four months and as many as 440 in one day in July. Wilson is unrepentant. He says:

" People need to know the truth about the carbon tax." … ''I'm sorry the government doesn't like scrutiny, but it needs to be honest with the Australian people.''

What is the 'truth about the carbon tax' that Wilson's FOI requests has uncovered? The results of all this activity (so far) seems to be contained in a single media release by Wilson claiming that Climate Change minister Greg Combet 'misled Australians' by overstating the size of the Chinese price on carbon. Combet has not bothered to respond to this world-shaking revelation. 'The Australian', always keen for opportunities to attack the carbon tax picked up Wilson's 'scoop' on August 15.

Is it really Wilson's intention to uncover 'the truth about the carbon tax' or does his fishing expedition perhaps have another agenda? According to the Department each FOI request takes about 39 hours to be processed. So 750 FOI requests require in total 30,000 man hours, or more than 570 working weeks for the Department of Climate Change to process. Put another way processing Wilson's FOI requests would take six people more than six months. Wilson has previously shown himself to be tireless in his efforts on behalf of the IPA's sponsors. Among these are (supposedly) as many as fifteen power generators who, as major producers of greenhouse gas pollution, are among the prime targets of the Carbon tax – ETS legislation. Could it be that his intentions here have more to do with serving the interests of the sponsors that the IPA is so concerned to conceal from public view than with seeking the truth about anything?

This sort of activity has long been favored by climate change deniers who are fond of flooding climate scientists with demands for information that they could (often) easily obtain for themselves. By this method they either interfere with the work of the climate scientist – who must devote time to dealing with the requests – or they provide themselves with the raw material for claims of with-holding important information strengthening the claims of a grand scientific conspiracy or cover up. Is Wilson indulging in something similar on behalf of this group of IPA sponsors or is it just my suspicious mind conjuring phantoms? Wilson is currently completing an on-line Graduate Diploma of Energy and the Environment (Climate Science and Global Warming) through Open Universities Australia. The program is offered by Perth’s Murdoch University. Perhaps it will bring about a moment of enlightenment and Wilson will recant from his wicked deceiving ways. Personally I think this hardened political warrior is seeking to enhance the credibility of his deceptions with a credible qualification and a few cherry picked 'factoids'.

A late update: The following comment by Sinclair Davidson who is a Senior Fellow at The IPA but has his Professorial wages paid by RMIT University speaks volumes about the nature of the IPA, its sources of funding and its disingenuous position on climate change. Responding to a comment about the article by Adam Morton referenced above Professor Davidson said:

Upset?? Are you out of your mind? That Age article is probably going to feature very heavily in fund raising activities. I reckon it’s worth at least $20,000 in the two weeks.

What sort of sponsor is likely to be so impressed by an article publicizing the fact that the IPA has been warned to desist from vexatious behavior aimed at disrupting the activity of the Department of Climate Change, damaging the attempt of the Gillard government to enact its climate change legislation and hastening the demise of a democratically elected government? Is that a faint whiff of coal dust, the merest hint of mining or power industry lobbyist or the faintest fragrance of the Liberal Party wafting on the breeze? Of course we'll never know because this cabal of deceivers will never tell.

Given the inability of this government to communicate effectively to the electorate its useful achievements and the increasingly bad smell surrounding the idiotic Labor 'Member' for Dobell, Craig Thompson, I'm increasingly prone to believe that this vital first step on the road to a carbon constrained future will never see the light of day. This is quite depressing so I was quite cheered to read Andrew Crook's Crikey piece today. This points out that incredibly, even if Thomson falls, there is still a Plan B available to the Gillard government with which to cling to power. Further; over at the Australia Institute economist Max Grudnoff has penned a piece pointing out that should Abbott win an election sometime after the Carbon Tax - ETS becomes law it will be far from easy and certainly not quick to undo. There is hope yet.

Soil carbon magic

2011-08-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

The Federal Opposition's direct action policy is intended to cut Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 5% - or so they say when pressed. The policy aims to achieve its target by purchasing 140 million tonnes of abatement annually for an average cost of $1.2 billion. Sixty percent of the abatement is supposed to come from so called soil carbon sequestration. Alan Marshall explains this process on the Skeptical Science blog as follows:

"Carbon stored in soil includes both short lived crop residues and long lived humus. The latter is of particular significance to the current debate on soil carbon transience, as it cannot be lost from soil during droughts or fires. Humus is a gel-like substance fixed in the soil by mycorrhizal fungi, which obtain dissolved organic carbon from the roots of plants. Once carbon is sequestered as humus it has high resistance to microbial and oxidative decomposition."

The Opposition calculates that abatement via soil carbon sequestration can be obtained at a cost of $8 -10 per tonne and soil carbon is by far the cheapest component of its Direct Action Policy. Any blow out in the costs of soil carbon abatement would mean a major blowout in the cost of delivering the abatement promised by this policy. The policy is already under attack for the far higher costs of achieving abatement via this path compared to the minority Labor government's carbon tax - ETS. Opposition climate change spokesman Greg Hunt's estimates of the cost of achieving abatement this way have already blown out from $11 to $15 per tonne. Now further doubts have been cast on the strategy by a slip of the tongue from Hunt on July 22 while visiting the Terang district in rural Victoria to spruik the benefits of soil carbon abatement. Although he is now denying that he said this, he is reported to have said that only the first one or two million tonnes could be purchased at the $8 to $10 price which the Opposition has assumed for the purchase of soil carbon sequestration. Other experts have suggested that the actual cost of abatement in this manner is likely to be around $30 per tonne. If this is so the cost of the policy as a whole would blow out enormously. Read the whole report by Bernard Keane on Crikey here.

The report on Skeptical Science confirms that a realistic price for soil carbon abatement is in the range of $26 - 50 per tonne, from three to five times the price assumed in the Opposition policy. This means the cost of soil carbon abatement currently figured in the policy at around $0.9 billion per annum would blow out to between $2.5 billion and $4 billion annually. This would increase the actual annual costs of the entire policy by a factor of two or three to between $3 billion and $4.5 billion.

Of course this only matters if you assume that the Coalition ever intended to deliver this policy. Hunt's slip of the tongue indicates that they know perfectly well that it is astronomically expensive and the policy is no more than a fig leaf with which to cover their nakedness on climate change. A device to conceal their real intentions. Electing this government in two years time would mean the end of realistic attempts to address this crisis by Australia, probably for the rest of the decade at least. We can't afford that.

Cynicism and hysteria swamping reason in Oz Carbon shouting match

2011-08-12T17:07:00.000-07:00

As the global economy get the jitters Tony Abbott has returned from his European holiday vowing that if the Gillard government's Carbon Tax – ETS proposal becomes law he will (if elected next time) take all possible measures, up to and including calling a double dissolution election, to rescind the legislation. This will be the most important piece of environmental legislation the country has ever passed and the most significant economic reform this country has seen in a decade or so but Abbott will repeal it if he can 'just as the Rudd government repealed the Howard government's repressive and draconian Work Choices legislation when they came to power'. So determined is he to roll back the gillard governments modest but progressive mining super profits tax and the Carbon tax–ETS legislation (should it be passed) that he is prepared to sacrifice $38 billion to this end. The Federal Opposition's own laughable climate change policy still has not come under adequate media scrutiny but it is clear that if elected the Abbott government will bring to an end all meaningful action on climate change within Australia. Meanwhile the opponents of progressive action to confront the climate crisis are seizing on a new opportunity and urging postponement of the minority Gillard government's proposed Carbon tax–ETS legislation. In the midst of all the hysteria Giles Parkinson at Climate Spectator, ever the voice of calm reason is advising everyone to keep calm and cut carbon. He writes:

"But given the course of the global economy, it may be that Australia will never be better placed to introduce such a measure, and there maybe even a clearer imperative for it to do so. Delay, it seems pretty clear through any credible economic analysis, is merely to create an increasing cost and liability. And delay until what? Till the good times roll again and Doris Day returns on black and white TV?"

Sensible advice in increasingly desperate, hysterical, cynical times.