Turnbull Government Signals New Approach To Climate Policy

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor Political Editor

Staff at the Australian Renewable Energy Agency were told on Monday they were being transferred from industry department to department of the environment

Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull (right) speaks to Australian environment minister Greg Hunt in Parliament House, Canberra. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The Turnbull government is signalling a new approach to climate policy despite its pledge to stick with the “Direct Action” climate plan, abandoning Tony Abbott’s attempt to abolish two key renewable energy agencies and considering tougher “safeguards” to ensure the policy actually reduces emissions.
Staff at the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena), a body set up by the former Labor government to increase the use of renewable energy, were told on Monday they were being transferred from the industry department to the department of the environment.
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which finances clean energy projects on a commercial basis and which Abbott had ridiculed as the “Bob Brown bank” and sought to abolish or ban from investing in wind or small scale solar, is also being transferred to environment minister Greg Hunt’s portfolio. It previously answered to the treasurer and the finance minister.
Sources said the transfer of the agencies was a clear signal they were no longer slated for abolition. The Senate twice voted down the Abbott government’s attempts to abolish the CEFC. Legislation to abolish Arena has been before the Senate for a year.
Hunt told Sky news on Monday that “obviously under Malcolm Turnbull there is a history of a deep long support for renewable energy.”
It is also likely the government will drop or amend the ban on the CEFC investing in wind or small scale solar. The government has been in negotiation with the CEFC over its investment instructions for several months after the investment bank got legal advice that suggested the Abbott government order could contradict its legislated duties. An agreed way forward was set to be announced any day.
Hunt said the CEFC was “coming back to the government with proposals that might be flexible and we will look at that in time.”
The government will also be presented with an immediate chance to improve the effectiveness of Direct Action by toughening the so-called “safeguards mechanism”, which is supposed to make sure rising industrial emissions do not undo any emission reductions purchased through the $2.5bn emissions reduction fund (ERF).
The government had released a draft safeguard mechanism and the deadline for responses was Monday, the same day the new ministry was sworn in.
The government could be forced to toughen the rules in negotiations to make sure they are not disallowed by the Senate. Independent senator Nick Xenophon has accused the coalition of reneging on a promise of “credible” safeguards made to secure his critical vote for the Direct Action legislation. He has proposed amendments to give the scheme “teeth”.
Market analyst Reputex says the new rules, as proposed, leave major industry “largely free to grow their emissions” because the “baselines” have been set too high to make any difference and industry has been given even more ways to avoid penalties if they are exceeded.
Reputex says the detailed rules confirm none of Australia’s top 20 emitting facilities – including brown coal-fired power stations Loy Yang A and B and Hazelwood, and new liquefied natural gas processing facilities such as Wheatstone, Gorgon, Itchys and Pluto – will be forced to reduce emissions.
But Reputex has also suggested a change that could give the rules “baby teeth” – and the amendment is likely to be backed by some of the Senate crossbench.
Most analysts believe the current policy has little chance of meeting the long term targets adopted by the Abbott government and reaffirmed by Malcolm Turnbull – to reduce Australia’s emissions by 26-28% by 2030.
The government has promised to review the safeguards mechanism in 2017, to allow for changes to ensure it meets the 2030 target.
The suggestion is it promise the “baselines” set for industrial emissions will begin to decline from that time – a move that would over time turn the mechanism into a baseline and credit emission trading scheme.
The safeguards mechanism applies to facilities with more than 100,000 tonnes of emissions a year.
Asked about the safeguards mechanism last week, Hunt said “that’s always been designed as a flexible, long-term mechanism – not to 2020 but to 2030, and I hope beyond. So, by definition, it’s been designed in a flexible way.”
Turnbull lost the Liberal leadership in 2009 over his backing for then prime minister Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. Since becoming prime minister he has emphasised the important thing is to reduce emissions, rather than being “ideological” about the mechanism used to do so.

Sir David Attenborough Backs Plan To Make Clean Energy Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels

The (UK) Telegraph - Sophie Jamieson

TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough joins scientists and politicians in urging nations to adopt the Global Apollo Programme

Sir David Attenborough has backed the plan to make renewable energy cheaper than coal Photo: Rex

Sir David Attenborough has given his backing to a ten-year project to develop clean energy technology.
The naturalist and TV presenter put his name to a letter arguing for countries to adopt the Global Apollo Programme (GAP) before the UN Climate Change Conference in December.
The programme is designed to make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels through public investment in research and development to the tune of $15bn a year globally.
Sir David said making clean energy cheaper than coal, gas or oil would be “enough to halt climate change”.


Science broadcaster Professor Brian Cox, former energy secretary Ed Davey and former FSA chairman Lord Turner are also among the signatories to the letter.
They join scientists, politicians and energy experts in arguing that: “A sensible approach to tackling climate change will not only pay for itself but provide economic benefits to the nations of the world.”
The group compare the scale of investment required to the Apollo space missions of the 1960s, which put a man on the moon.
They argue that a co-ordinated research and development plan would save governments money in the future and would also bring down the cost of bills for consumers.


Sir David said: “Now some of the finest minds must again unite in the face of an even bigger challenge. We need an international programme to discover breakthrough clean technologies.
“Most of the great advances of the last 100 years have come from publicly-funded research: computers, satellites, the internet, smartphones.
“All the electricity we now require is available from limitless sources like wind and solar. The sun delivers 5,000 times more energy to the earth’s surface than humanity needs.

Sir David Attenborough joins fellow TV presenter Professor Brian Cox in signing the letter  Photo: EDDIE MULHOLLAND

"But renewable energy is intermittent. The sun doesn’t always shine. The wind sometimes drops.
“So we must find even better ways of storing the energy and carrying it long distances to where it’s needed.”
The GAP report was written by former Government Chief Scientist Sir David King, former head of the civil service Lord Gus O’Donnell, former FSA chair Lord Adair Turner, former Royal Society president Lord Martin Rees and Lord Richard Layard and Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics.

Study Predicts Antarctica Ice Melt if All Fossil Fuels Are Burned

The New York Times - Justin Gillis

Calving ice near Paradise Harbor in Antarctica in Jan. 2015. The continent's ice sheet and the rest of the world's land ice would melt if all the world's fossil fuels were burned, a new climate study found. Credit Ralph Lee Hopkins/National Geographic Creative

Calving ice near Paradise Harbor in Antarctica in Jan. 2015. The continent's ice sheet and the rest of the world's land ice would melt if all the world's fossil fuels were burned, a new climate study found. Credit Ralph Lee Hopkins/National Geographic Creative

Burning all the world’s deposits of coal, oil and natural gas would raise the temperature enough to melt the entire ice sheet covering Antarctica, driving the level of the sea up by more than 160 feet, scientists reported Friday.

In a major surprise to the scientists, they found that half the melting could occur in as little as a thousand years, causing the ocean to rise by something on the order of a foot per decade, roughly 10 times the rate at which it is rising now. Such a pace would almost certainly throw human society into chaos, forcing a rapid retreat from the world’s coastal cities.

The rest of the earth’s land ice would melt along with Antarctica, and warming ocean waters would expand, so that the total rise of the sea would likely exceed 200 feet, the scientists said.

“To be blunt: If we burn it all, we melt it all,” said Ricarda Winkelmann, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and the lead author of a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

Ricarda Winkelmann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Antarctica. "If we burn it all, we melt it all," she said. Credit Maria Martin/Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

A sea level rise of 200 feet would put almost all of Florida, much of Louisiana and Texas, the entire East Coast of the United States, large parts of Britain, much of the European Plain, and huge parts of coastal Asia under water. The cities lost would include Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Washington, New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm, London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney, Rome and Tokyo.

Nobody alive today, nor even their grandchildren, would live to see such a calamity unfold, given the time the melting would take. Yet the new study gives a sense of the risks that future generations face if emissions of greenhouse gases are not brought under control.

“This is humanity as a geologic force,” said Ken Caldeira, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., and another author of the paper. “We’re not a subtle influence on the climate system – we are really hitting it with a hammer.”

Climate scientists have long assumed that countries would recognize the dangers of continuing to dig up and burn the world’s fossil fuels. Yet they have been saying that for 30 years, and political efforts in that time to limit the burning have been ineffectual.

With a major push from President Obama, the nations of the world will convene in Paris in December in another attempt to reach an ambitious deal for reducing emissions. Yet Mr. Obama faces fierce opposition from the Republican Party in putting limits into effect in the United States, which uses more fossil fuels per person than any other large country.

The long-running political gridlock has prompted scientists to start thinking about worst-case scenarios. And recently, major advances have been made in the computerized analysis of the huge ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland.

The researchers involved in Friday’s paper decided to use one of these ice-sheet models to attempt the most detailed analysis yet of the potential consequences of burning all fossil fuels. As the first of its kind, the paper is likely to undergo intense scientific scrutiny.

In certain ways, the findings are reassuring. They offer no reason, for instance, to revise the sea-level forecast for the coming century.

A United Nations panel has said that the rise of the sea would not likely exceed three feet in that period, and would probably be less. While some island nations may be wiped out by a rise of that magnitude, experts believe most major cities could be protected from it, though at a likely cost in the trillions of dollars.

The ice sheets respond slowly enough to changes in the climate that it simply takes longer than a century for large-scale melting to begin. But from that point, the paper found, about half the Antarctic ice sheet would melt or fall into the sea in the first thousand years.

“I didn’t expect it would go so fast,” Dr. Caldeira said. “To melt all of Antarctica, I thought it would take something like 10,000 years.”

The more basic finding that the whole ice sheet could eventually melt is less surprising, at least to scientists who specialize in studying the history of the earth. “As a paleoclimate person, I don’t feel like this is necessarily a shock to me,” said Robert E. Kopp, a professor of earth system history at Rutgers University, who studies sea level but was not involved in the new research.

Paleoclimatologists have established that Antarctica was once a lush, green continent, icing over only in the past 35 million years, amid a general cooling of the world’s climate. Moreover, rates of sea level rise like those outlined in the paper have occurred in the past.

Human civilization is built on the premise that the level of the sea is stable, as indeed it has been for several thousand years. But the deeper history of the earth reveals enormous shifts, on the order of a hundred feet or more within a few thousand years.

Sea levels far higher than those of today have been documented at more than a thousand sites around the world. Along the East Coast, seashells from just 3 million years ago can be dug up by the shovel-full a hundred miles inland from the current shore.

Studying this evidence, scientists concluded long ago that the great ice sheets are sensitive to small changes in the earth’s average temperature, caused by wobbles in its orbit around the sun. They believe that human emissions are about to produce a large change.

Though the climate is still in the earliest stages of this shift, the ice sheets in both Greenland and the low-lying, western part of Antarctica are already showing serious signs of instability.

The higher, colder ice sheet in eastern Antarctica, by far the largest chunk of land ice on the planet, had long been assumed to be more stable. But for several years, evidence has been accumulating that at least large parts of that ice sheet are vulnerable, too.

The new study confirms previous findings that how much of the world’s ice will melt is closely linked to how much total fossil fuel humans burn. These studies suggest that a rapid shift away from those fuels over coming decades would preserve much of the ice, or at least slow the melting drastically.

On the other hand, if the use of fossil fuels were to continue rising at the same rate it rose over the past century, the estimated deposits would be burned by about the middle of the 22nd century, Dr. Caldeira said, and complete destruction of the world’s land ice would be well underway.

The exact timing is open to question, he said, but “the idea that most of it would melt, I believe, is a robust result.”

Scientists focus on melting ice in part because the consequences are relatively easy to visualize. But if anything like the scenario in the paper were to play out in the real world, the problems would go far beyond a rise of the sea and a retreat from the coasts.

In a rough calculation, the scientists found that burning all fossil fuels might raise the average temperature of the planet by something like 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Past research suggests that an increase that enormous would likely render vast stretches of the earth too hot and humid for human habitation, cause food production to collapse, and drive much of the plant and animal life of the planet to extinction.

In interviews, scientists said that such long-term risks raise profound moral questions for people of today.

“What right do we have to do things that, even if they don’t affect us, are going to be someone else’s problem a thousand years from now?” asked Ian Joughin, an ice sheet expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new research. “Is it fair to do that so we can go on burning fuel as fast as we can?”

Why Climate Change Is Australia's Greatest National Security Issue

Fairfax - Clive Williams

Most people in Australia may not think of climate change as a national security issue but the US has been issuing reports about the national security impact of climate change since 2008. Photo: Jessica Shapiro

I recently gave my "National Security and Counterterrorism" Masters students a syndicate exercise at the end of their course requiring them to prioritise the most serious threats to Australia's national security (with national security being defined as safeguarding the "wellbeing" rather than "survival" of Australia – "survival" being more relevant to the Cold War era).
They were given 13 threats or potential threats to consider: adverse global trends and challenges to the international system; terrorism and piracy; instability and failed or failing states; poverty, inequality, and poor governance; serious and organised crime; WMD proliferation; climate change; civil emergencies, including natural disasters and pandemics; state-led threats (such as rising powers and balance of power issues); competition for energy and resources; social cohesion; sovereignty issues (including illegal fishing and illegal entry to Australian waters and airspace) and; cyber threats.
They then had to rank them by scale of impact, geographic proximity and urgency in time, and come up with a 1-13 list in order of priority. I don't have the space here to go through the list of outcomes, but the students' calculations based on current intelligence projections indicated that climate change should be our top national security concern.
Most people in Australia may not think of climate change as a national security issue, but the US has been issuing reports about the national security impact of climate change since 2008.
In June 2014 the US Department of Defense went further and produced a Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan focusing on the need for resilience while adapting to the impacts of climate change. It notes "Sustainability and adaptation to climate change go hand in hand". Similar reports have been produced by the EU, NATO and Britain.
Among the sustainability aspects covered in the US plan are the need for US Defense to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, make use of sustainable buildings, have better fleet management, improve water-use efficiency and management, improve pollution prevention and waste reduction, engage in sustainable procurement, have better electronic stewardship (to reduce energy use), make more use of renewable energy, and have energy efficiency-based contracts.
The plan notes that "climate change is a clear national security concern. It affects us today and is forecast to affect us more significantly in the future. The Department is taking sensible, measured steps to mitigate the mission risk posed by climate change, managing the unavoidable and preparing for the possible."
Climate change is predicted to affect national security interests in many ways, particularly in deteriorating regions of the world already prone to conflict. Climate change can also directly influence military activity by changing areas available for training exercises and operations, reducing available water supplies, increasing flood and fire hazards, and increasing severe weather risks. The latter aspects underline the need for defence forces to be able to engage in disaster relief as a primary task.
The British Ministry of Defence's Strategic Trends Program: Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2045 notes that "climate change, a rise in sea levels, desertification and reducing biodiversity are all issues that could affect us even more over the next 30 years. They are likely to impact on agricultural production and fishing, and could exacerbate humanitarian crises. National security impacts of climate change include major population movements, changes in disease patterns, and climate-affected changes in economic development.
In June 2015 a report released by the Australian Centre for Policy Development, The Longest Conflict: Australia's Climate Security Challenge, warned that Australia faces a significant national security threat if defence and security policies do not urgently start to address climate change. It found that "Australia will struggle to deal with climate vulnerabilities domestically and within our region. Interviews with experts from our closest allies, the United Kingdom and United States, reveal Australia has become a laggard in taking necessary action to prepare our defence force."
On April 4, 2014, Tony Abbott  and then Defence Minister David Johnston announced that Defence would produce a new Defence White Paper to be released in 2015. The press release noted "The White Paper will include a comprehensive review of Australia's strategic environment, including the changes underway in our region and across the globe and the implications of these changes for Australia."
It is to be hoped that the new White Paper will recognise the importance of climate change and provide comprehensive coverage of what Australian Defence will be doing to address climate change-related challenges. It should include:  improving the energy-efficiency of defence systems and facilities, preparing the Australian Defence Force for the operational impacts of climate change, and requiring all future procurements and contracts to be energy-efficient.

Clive Williams is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University's Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism and a visiting professor at the ANU's Centre for Military and Security Law.