Lethal Heating: 2016

31/12/2016

India To Reach 57% Renewable Penetration By 2027, Forecasts Government

PV Magazine - Ian Clover

Bullish ten-year energy blueprint suggests India will surpass renewable targets outlined in Paris Agreement by more than 50% and three years ahead of schedule.

Solar power in India is surging towards its 100 GW by 2020 goal, but that pace is expected to continue beyond that date.

The Indian government is expecting the country to source 57% of its energy requirements from renewables by 2027 – three years and many percentage points ahead of the 2030 target of 40% agreed to in Paris at COP21 last year.
This bold statement by India’s Central Electricity Authority is outlined in a draft ten-year energy blueprint that projects private investment in India’s solar and wind industries to drastically increase over the next decade, propelling installations to new heights and smashing the already-ambitious targets.
According to the plan, India will have installed 275 GW of renewable energy by 2027 – with more than half of figure likely to come from solar.
Piyush Goyal, the Indian energy minister, has also confirmed that there will be no new coal-fired power plants built until at least 2027 as the country hedges its energy future on renewable energy and takes seriously its pledges made under the Paris Agreement.
Despite public government funding in solar and wind power still way short of the levels required to meet the 175 GW of renewable capacity by 2022 goal, an influx of overseas capital has arrived in 2016, with more of the same likely in the forthcoming years.
Around $20 billion has been committed to India’s soaring solar sector by Taiwan’s Foxconn and Japan’s Softbank, with domestic assistance arriving in the form of India’s Bharti Enterprises. Indian developers are also jostling for greater prominence, with Tata pledging to draw 40% of its energy from renewable source by 2025, and Adani and Azure Power stepping up their solar investments.
“India is moving beyond fossil fuels at a pace scarcely imagined only two years ago,” Tim Buckley, director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told the Guardian. “Goyal has put forward an energy plan that is commercially viable and commercially justified without subsidies, so you have big global corporations and utilities committing to it.”

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Climate Change Driving Birds To Migrate Early, Research Reveals

The Guardian - Nadia Khomami

A University of Edinburgh study finds birds are arriving at breeding grounds too soon, causing some to miss out on food

Birds with long migrations are expected to suffer most, as other species reach breeding grounds before them. Photograph: Gerry Penny/EPA

Migrating birds are responding to the effects of climate change by arriving at their breeding grounds earlier as global temperatures rise, research has found.
The University of Edinburgh study, which looked at hundreds of species across five continents, found that birds are reaching their summer breeding grounds on average about one day earlier per degree of increasing global temperature.
The main reason birds take flight is changing seasonal temperatures and food availability. The time they reach their summer breeding grounds is significant, because arriving at the wrong time, even by a few days, may cause them to miss out on vital resources such as food and nesting places. This in turn affects the timing of offspring hatching and their chances of survival.
The research included species that travel huge distances, such as the swallow and pied flycatcher, as well as those with shorter migrations, such as the lapwing and pied wagtail. British swallows fly through western France, across the Pyrenees, down eastern Spain into Morocco, and across the Sahara, to spend their winter in South Africa from around September or October.
Migrating swallows can cover 200 miles a day at speeds of 17-22 miles per hour, with a maximum flight speed of 35mph.
The pied flycatcher, a bird slightly smaller than a house sparrow, is a summer visitor to the UK and breeds mainly in western areas of the country, before spending the winter in west Africa.
The northern lapwing, which is about 30cm long from beak to tail, can be seen across the British Isles throughout the year, favouring farmland, wetland and meadows during the breeding season and pasture and ploughed fields during the winter months.
The University of Edinburgh researchers examined records of migrating bird species dating back almost 300 years. They drew upon records from amateur enthusiasts and scientists, including notes from 19th-century American naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
They hope their study, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology and supported by the Natural Environment Research Council, will help scientists better predict how different species will respond to environmental changes. Long-distance migrants, which are shown to be less responsive to rising temperatures, may suffer most as other birds gain advantage by arriving at breeding grounds ahead of them.
Takuji Usui, of the university’s school of biological sciences, said: “Many plant and animal species are altering the timing of activities associated with the start of spring, such as flowering and breeding.
“Now we have detailed insights into how the timing of migration is changing and how this change varies across species. These insights may help us predict how well migratory birds keep up with changing conditions on their breeding grounds.”

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The Great Barrier Reef Is Dying, And Global Warming Set The Scene

Washington Post - Editorial Board

Dead table corals killed by bleaching on Zenith Reef on the northern Great Barrier Reef in Australia. (Greg Torda/Courtesy of ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies via Reuters)

ALL YEAR, it has been a real-time environmental catastrophe. The Great Barrier Reef, an unparalleled ecological treasure that supports all sorts of sea life and a range of human needs, not to mention a huge tourist economy, has seen the largest coral die-off ever recorded. If this were a rare event, separated by many years from the next big die-off, the reef would rebound. But in the age of climate change, scientists say this and other tragedies are frighteningly likely to be compounded.

Experts have been tracking the destruction for months, announcing their final conclusions Nov. 29. They found that across a long stretch of the northern end of the reef, an average of 67 percent of the coral died, according to aerial and diver observations. In these zones, the reef’s lively colors have been replaced by antiseptic white of “bleached” coral. Though weather events helped spare other areas this degree of destruction, the reef’s northern portions had been the most pristine.
In this case, the problem appears to have been water temperature, which was up to two degrees warmer than the normal summer peak. This threw off the delicate balance between the coral organisms and the algae that provide them sustenance. Natural variability may have played some role in raising the temperature — it was an El Niño year, which means the Pacific Ocean was hotter. But global warming probably set the scene. Australian scientists concluded that this year’s coral crisis was rendered far more likely because of climate-change-related ocean warmth. As the planet continues to warm, human influence will be more and more likely to interact with natural variation in dangerous ways. Among other things, that means all that dead coral may not have a chance to rebound.
Rising ocean temperatures, sadly, are not the only threat human greenhouse-gas emissions pose to coral. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere translates into more acidic oceans, which erode coral structures. Then there are the more mundane threats that harm sea life, including coral. Fishermen use explosives to kill and capture ocean creatures. Urban and agricultural runoff makes water cloudy, inhibiting the photosynthesis on which reefs depend.
Scientists are racing to figure out how to help reefs survive the onslaught they are likely to face in coming years, examining corals that do better under stressful conditions and considering ways to preserve those that might struggle. But if human beings are to preserve crucial biodiversity — which comes with a range of benefits, from underpinning food chains to revealing lifesaving drugs — they have no choice but to curb the underlying problems. Greenhouse-gas emissions must come down, and countries that are not properly managing their runoff or their fishing industries must tighten their rules.

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30/12/2016

It's Official: Solar Is Becoming World's Cheapest Form Of New Electricity

EcoWatch - Nadia Prupis

iStock

For the first time, solar power is becoming the cheapest form of electricity production in the world, according to new statistics from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) released Thursday.
While unsubsidized solar has occasionally done better than coal and gas in individual projects, 2016 marked the first time that the renewable energy source has out-performed fossil fuels on a large scale—and new solar projects are also turning out to be cheaper than new wind power projects, BNEF reports in its new analysis, Climatescope.

IMAGE

The cost of solar in 58 developing nations dropped to about a third of 2010 levels, with China in particular adding a record number of solar projects. And as the Independent notes, solar "has proved a godsend for remote islands such as Ta'u, part of America Samoa, in the South Pacific."
In fact, Ta'u has been able to abandon the use of fossil fuels altogether and power itself almost entirely on renewable energy.
"Solar investment has gone from nothing—literally nothing—like five years ago to quite a lot," said Ethan Zindler, head of BNEF's U.S. policy analysis.

Disclosed capex for onshore wind and PV projects in 58 non-OECD countries. Bloomberg New Energy Finance

BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich also told investors this week that "[r]enewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting" fossil fuel prices.
Unsurprisingly, developing countries are at the forefront of this advancement, having invested in clean energy economies to stave off the catastrophic effects of climate change at a greater rate than wealthy nations.
"[F]or populations still relying on expensive kerosene generators, or who have no electricity at all, and for those living in the dangerous smog of thickly populated cities," Bloomberg reports, "the shift to renewables and increasingly to solar can't come soon enough."

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North America’s First 100% Electric Municipal Bus System

CleanTechnica - Roy L Hales

Porterville, California, is about to make transportation history.
The little Californian city only receives an average of 13 inches of rain a year, which makes it particularly vulnerable to atmospheric inversion, which holds in the exhausts from vehicles, agriculture, and other sources.
Thanks to a determined city hall, the number of Stage 1 smog alerts declined from over 100 per year, in the 1970s, to almost zero.
On December 7, the California Air Resources Board awarded $9.5-million to replace its entire bus fleet.
By January, 2018, Porterville should have North America’s first 100% electric municipal bus system.

The bus that will used for North America’s first 100% electric municipal bus system, GreenPower’s EV350 in Vancouver, BC Courtesy GreenPower Motor Company

GreenPower Motor Company Inc
“There are other cities moving towards 100% battery electric, like Lancaster and Palmdale, but Porterville will beat them,” said Brendan Riley, President of the Vancouver-based electric vehicle company that will install the system, in an interview with me for The ECOreport.

GreenPower Motor Company Inc. (TSXV: GPV) (OTCQB: GPVRF) is a Canadian company trading on the Toronto and US OTC stock markets.

Last October, GreenPower supplied the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority with North America’s first fully electric double-decker bus. It was also the company’s first delivery, an “EV550” that can travel up to 300 miles on a single charge (mpc). Victoria Buzz reported:

“The 45-foot-long EV550 has a capacity of 99 seats including 65 on the upper floor, plus standing room. Each seat comes with a USB charging port. The bus is fully accessible with low-floor design, kneeling capabilities, wheelchair lift and configuration with two spots for wheelchairs or mobility aids.”

“The best way to really see a city, and its transit, is to get on the top deck of a double decker. Passengers love it. I’ve always loved it. Even as a child, when I went to London my favorite thing was to get upstairs on a double decker. That was the product that brought me over the GreenPower,” said Riley.

He joined the company less than two weeks after the launch in Victoria.

Prior to that, he was the North American Vice President of Fleet Sales for BYD Motors.

“I was the first American employee of BYD motors, basically their start up guy. I started up the entire program. Even deciding what products to bring to market; hiring people and building the team; expanding into Canada and Mexico,” said Riley.

Map of Areas mentioned in the text. Roy L Hales

He is also a Southern California resident, which might explain how GreenPower received Letters of Intent for 25 GreenPower all-electric school buses from 9 different school districts in the State of California.

“GreenPower has the first purpose built and designed school buses," said Riley.

"This is not the standard body-on-chasis, like taking a truck chassis and throwing a body on it, that’s used ubiquitously in the United States and Canada. … GreenPower’s school bus are not limited to putting batteries between frame rails – because there aren’t any frame rails.

"I have a full chassis on the bottom that is strong enough that if I get into a side impact, my batteries are within the frame. It has a lot of flexibility: allowing us to put the weight where we want it, to go with bigger or smaller batteries and put the motor where we want.

"This is a full monocoque designed school bus, a truly game changing product.”

He added that, at the time of this writing, GreenPower has built a total of five buses.

“They are the finest battery electric products, bar none, that I have experienced and I am familiar with all the products being sold in North America.”

In 2017, the company will deliver an eBus to Twin Transit system, in Lewis County, Washington state.

North America’s First 100% Electric Municipal Bus System

In September, GreenPower purchased a 9.3 acre property in Porterville for an assembly plant. It plans to power it with renewable energy, “quite possibly even off the grid.”

Brendan Riley, President of GreenPower Motor Company (l) with Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations (r). Courtesy GreenPower Motor Company

“We’re working out those calculations right now, to see what we can do,” said Riley.

“We are thrilled by the commitment by GreenPower Motor Company to establish its manufacturing facility in Porterville and the hundreds of local jobs it will generate, in addition to the economic and technological benefit to the greater San Joaquin Valley,” said Mayor Milt Stowe.

Porterville Transit will acquire 10 EV350s, an eBus Christopher DeMorro of Gas2 calls “the Tesla of electric buses.”

“The real secret to the GreenPower EV350 is its clean-sheet, built-from-the-ground-up design that eschews conventional bus chassis in favor of a purpose-built EV setup. Like the Tesla Model S, the batteries have been placed low in the floor to give it a low center of gravity. The EV350 has also used lightweight materials like carbon fiber and aluminum to keep it as light as possible for such a large electric vehicle, though it still comes in at just over 31,000 pounds, making the 5,000 pound Model S seem svelte in comparison.”

“The EV350 an be shortened or lengthened very easily, you just take sections out or add them. It can be as small as 30 feet in length and as long as 45 feet. That’s not new in the bus world, but this is a clean sheet EV design. Everything was designed for electric propulsion and battery placement,” said Riley.

Porterville Transit serves about 100,000 people, 60,000 of whom are in the city of Porterville.

It will also install a charging infrastructure that includes 11 charging stations.

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Paul Hawken: 'Best Video Ever Made On Climate Change'

EcoWatch - Stefanie Spear

I couldn't agree more with Paul Hawken, renowned author and executive director of Project Drawdown, when he shared on Facebook today that the historic performance by acclaimed Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi is "without question, the best video ever made on climate change."
Einaudi performed one of his own compositions on a floating platform in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, against the backdrop of the Wahlenbergbreen glacier in Svalbard, Norway. He was taken there on Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise to add his voice to those of nearly 8 million people from across the world demanding protection for the Arctic.
"I've been about to see the purity and fragileness of this area with my own eyes and perform a song that I composed on the best stage in the world," Einaudi said in a statement from Greenpeace Spain, which posted the video on YouTube in June. "It is important that we understand the importance of the Arctic, [and] stop its process and protect it."

Through his music, acclaimed Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi has added his voice to those of eight million people from across the world demanding protection for the Arctic. Einaudi performed one of his own compositions on a floating platform in the middle of the Ocean, against the backdrop of the Wahlenbergbreen glacier (in Svalbard, Norway).

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29/12/2016

We Need To Accept That Oil Is A Dying Industry

Motherboard - Nafeez Ahmed

Skimming oil in the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Image: NOAA/Flickr

The future is not good for oil, no matter which way you look at it.
A new OPEC deal designed to return the global oil industry to profitability will fail to prevent its ongoing march toward trillion dollar debt defaults, according to a new report published by a Washington group of senior global banking executives.
But the report also warns that the rise of renewable energy and climate policy agreements will rapidly make oil obsolete, whatever OPEC does in efforts to prolong its market share.
The six-month supply deal brokered with non-OPEC members, including Russia, could slash global oil stockpiles by 139 million barrels. The move is a transparent effort to kick prices back up in a weakening oil market where low prices have led industry profits to haemorrhage.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), whose members include major producers from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela, have been hit particularly badly by the weak oil market. In 2014, OPEC had a collective surplus of $238 billion. By 2015, as prices continued to plummet, so did profits, and OPEC faced a deficit of $100 billion.
The immediate impact of the deal was a 4 percent price rally that saw Brent crude (the benchmark price for worldwide oil prices) rise to $56.64, its highest since mid-July. But according to Michael Bradshaw, Professor of Global Energy at Warwick Business School, a price hike would not solve OPEC’s deeper problems. In fact, it could speed up the transition away from oil.

As oil gets more expensive again, there is more incentive to use alternative, cheaper forms of energy.

“The current agreement is only for 6 months and decisions about investment in oil and gas are based on a 20 to 30 year view of future demand,” Bradshaw told me. “On that time scale, none of the uncertainties are addressed by the current agreement and oil exporting states need a strategy beyond achieving a short-term agreement on production—they need to start preparing for a world after fossil fuels.”
As oil gets more expensive again, there is more incentive to use alternative, cheaper forms of energy—like solar photovoltaics, which can now generate more energy than oil for every unit of energy invested.
“They will also incentivise more unconventional oil production that will challenge OPEC production. Clearly there is a balance to be struck and it is not a return to $100 a barrel,” Bradshaw said.
He warns that higher prices might kick-start US tight oil production, which would increase competition with OPEC, making the production cut agreement moot. They also might add “inflationary pressures in the economy” that could prolong sluggish economic growth. Both factors could end up keeping prices lower than OPEC wants.
“We are not in a business as usual world,” Bradshaw said. “Higher prices for oil and gas will drive investment in efficiency and demand reduction and also substitution, so they may actually promote structural demand destruction.”
It’s not just OPEC that needs to be prepared. A report published in October by the Group of 30 (G30), a Washington DC-based financial advisory group run by executives of the world’s biggest banks, warns investors that the entire global oil industry has expanded on the basis of an unsustainable debt bubble.

The oil industry’s long-term debts now total over $2 trillion.

G30’s leadership includes heads and former chiefs of the European Central Bank, JP Morgan Chase International, and the Bank for International Settlements.
The industry’s long-term debts now total over $2 trillion, the report concludes, half of which “will never be repaid because the issuing firms comprehend neither how dramatically their industry has changed nor how these changes threaten to soon engulf them.”
The report is authored by Philip Verleger, a former economic advisor to President Ford who went on to head up the US Treasury’s Office of Energy Policy under President Carter, and Abdalatif al-Hamad, Director General of the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.
Its main finding is that permanent shifts in global energy markets will inevitably overwhelm oil companies, along with all economies which depend primarily on fossil fuel production. The attempt to rally prices, the report confirms, is a somewhat futile effort to avoid a major debt crisis by lifting revenues.
But it won’t work because the global oil industry is in denial about the bigger trends disrupting energy markets as we know them. Oil majors, the report says, are holding on to a number of fatal delusions.
They believe that the oil price decline is “transitory”; that oil consumption will grow despite ongoing economic stagnation; that the industry will be magically immune to public and policy demands to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; that technological progress will never be able to “displace fossil fuels such as oil”; and, finally, that fracking will not produce enough supply to undermine OPEC’s market monopoly.

Oil majors, the report says, are holding on to a number of fatal delusions.

But if these assumptions are wrong: “They represent an ossified industry that will gradually fade away [and] hundreds of billions if not trillions in debt issued by these firms and countries may never be repaid.”
So what’s the alternative? Instead of tinkering with production quotas, Bradshaw said: “They [oil producing countries] should also be promoting greater energy efficiency and renewable energy in their domestic economies to preserve their exportable surplus as some will struggle otherwise due to rapidly increasing domestic demand.”
To its credit Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan is a step toward this. But a HSBC research note in May found that the plan would not do enough to avoid the kingdom entering “a protracted period of marked economic decline.”
In the meantime, a trillion dollar collapse in the oil market is coming because oil simply cannot compete with new energy technologies. If Bradshaw is right, then OPEC’s efforts to 'shock' the markets into boosting prices are only going to prolong the fossil fuel pain.

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Transforming Waste Into Fuel With Australian Innovations, From Tyres To Sugar Cane And Agave

The Guardian - Bianca Nogrady

The emerging biofuel industry is casting the net wide to find solutions to two environmental problems: reducing waste and increasing fuel production

A worker drives an excavator next to mountains of used tyres on a dump in Spain. An Australian company has developed technology to produce oil from disused tyres. Photograph: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

In a world of dwindling resources, waste is one thing in no danger of running out. Each Australian generates more than 2,000kg of waste per year, and around half of that ends up in landfill. But at least some of that waste could be turned into a resource that is both in demand and in decline: fuel.
The global waste-to-fuel industry is considering options as varied as agave, plastics and disused tyres to solve two environmental problems – reducing waste and increasing fuel production.
Landfill and agricultural wastes are already burned to generate heat and electricity, and methane is captured from landfill for the same purpose, but these technologies are both relatively low-hanging fruit.
A greater challenge is the production of liquid fuel that can be readily and reliably substituted for conventional petrol or diesel. The Queensland government’s recently appointed biofutures ambassador, Prof Ian O’Hara, says waste-to-fuel is a promising area.
“It is a new industry, so there are all the challenges associated with developing supply chains, building networks and developing technologies to convert products to fuels that meet quality standards and are cost-effective,” says O’Hara, also professor of biofuels and biorefining at Queensland University of Technology. “But fuel demand is growing in many industries and there is an opportunity to supply into that growing demand.”
There are three main categories of waste that have the potential to be converted to suitable fuels.
The first is crop wastes such as the fibrous sugar cane waste known as bagasse. Currently, bagasse is mostly burned to generate power, but it could be used to produce biofuel.
“The residues of existing crops offer a lot of opportunity because we’ve got very large-scale resources and the material is often already located at a facility which is operated maybe year-round,” O’Hara says.
Bagasse-based biofuel production could take place where the feedstock is found, which O’Hara says could be a significant contributor to regional and rural economies.
Recognising this, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency has just announced investment of $2.37m in an advanced biofuels laboratory being built near Gladstone in southern Queensland by Southern Oil Refining. The $16m pilot plant is scheduled to open next year and aims to transform bagasse and prickly acacia waste into one million litres of kerosene and diesel within three years.
The second category of waste-to-fuel isn’t so much about using waste as using wasteland to grow crops that can then be converted to biofuels. These tend to be crops that don’t have many other uses, but which are hardy enough to be grown on even the most marginal land.
One of these crops is agave – better known as the main ingredient in Mexican tequila. It’s a desert crop that can grow in low-rainfall conditions on land suitable for little else. University of Adelaide researchers have found it’s also energy-rich and could produce bioethanol at a rate that rivals existing bioethanol feedstocks such as sugar cane. And before tequila drinkers panic, this process would use the waste leaves of the plant, not the succulent core used to make the distilled liquor.
The third category of waste-to-fuel aims to make use of municipal and industrial waste – the stuff that clogs landfill sites.
Waste tyres are one environmental eyesore that the federal government recently targeted with its tyre product stewardship scheme, which promotes “the development of viable markets for end-of-life tyres”.
Australian startup Green Distillation Technologies has developed the means to produce around 3,000 litres of oil from a single seven-tonne mining truck tyre. Its recycling process involves heating the tyre rubber in a low-oxygen environment, which produces a vapour that is condensed into oil.
Prof Richard Brown, director of the QUT Biofuel Engine Research Facility, says tyres have a significant energy advantage over agricultural waste.
“Sugar cane waste or wheat stubble or what’s left over after cropping might have 10-15 megajoules per kilogram,” Brown says. “Tyres are probably double that, they’re quite high and so it’s much easier to make them into something like a diesel or petrol fuel.”
Tyre oil does have slightly less embedded energy than conventional diesel, but it also seems to have a better emissions profile, producing less nitrogen oxide and fine particulates. A single tyre processing plant is expected to deal with around 685,000 tyres per year and produce 7,360 tonnes of oil from those tyres, as well as 7,000 tonnes of carbon and 2,000 tonnes of steel.
Another global environment issue is waste plastic. Plastic bottles, wrappers, film and containers are an eyesore that blights every inhabited corner of the world, but they’re also a valuable feedstock.
“Wherever there’s people, there’s this plastic problem,” says Bevan Dooley, chief executive of Integrated Green Energy. “By converting it to fuel, we stop more oil being taken out of the ground.”
Integrated Green Energy has developed a method of processing all forms of waste plastic, excluding Teflon and PVC, to produce petrol and diesel that meets Australian and international fuel standards. The process itself isn’t unique – it involves heating the plastic to 400C in a low-oxygen environment – but Dooley says the innovation is in making a pure product that can be used in any engine.
“A lot of your engine manufacturers build their equipment based around certain fuel parameters and those fuel parameters are reflected in the diesel standard,” Dooley says. “The challenge we wanted to overcome was extraction of the minute amounts of impurities that means that we meet the standard all the time.”Having proven its technology in a demonstration facility in Berkley Vale, NSW, the company is now looking to build a full-scale commercial operation in Canberra. It is also partnering with a US company to build up to 10 commercial facilities in the United States.
A single plant is capable of processing around 50 tonnes of plastic per day and producing 50,000 litres of petrol and diesel combined. The waste plastic feedstock needs to be shredded and washed, but the plant is at least partly powered by the liquid petroleum gas that is a byproduct of the process. Dooley says with GST and excise added, the fuel would retail for slightly less than regular diesel, but he stresses this is without relying on any kind of government subsidies.
Brown says biofuels could be a valuable supplement to the existing petroleum industry and contribute to diversification of energy supply, but would benefit from government incentives and policies to encourage the nascent industry on the road to economic sustainability.
“We’ve had a petroleum industry for about 100 years and they’ve got an infrastructure, oil refineries, tankers – the whole thing is all set up so they are doing good on a large scale and their cost per unit of production is very low,” he says. “Biofuel companies are doing small volumes, and they have high overheads so it’s much harder to penetrate into the market.”

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What Role For The States On Climate And Energy Policy? NSW Enters The Fray

The Conversation - Anna Bruce | Graham Mills | Iain MacGill

Renewable energy targets were a controversial topic at a recent COAG meeting between the Prime Minister, State Premiers and Territory Chief Ministers. AAP Image/Lukas Coch

We’re currently having a national conversation about climate and energy, with reviews of climate policy and the National Electricity Market underway. Up for debate is how the states and federal government will share these responsibilities.
Following the recent statewide blackout in South Australia, the federal government pointed the finger at Labor states’ “aggressive”, “unrealistic” and “ideological” renewable energy targets.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews returned: “Rather than peddle mistruths, Malcolm Turnbull and Barnaby Joyce should start providing some national leadership and focus on developing a renewable vision beyond 2020.”
It might seem to be yet another partisan, ideological stoush between a Liberal federal government and three Labor state governments.
However, the Liberal-led New South Wales government has now also entered the fray, with a 2050 emissions target that will almost certainly require complete decarbonisation of the electricity sector within the next 25 years.
And to achieve this, renewables will have a key, many would argue overwhelming, role to play.

What are the states already doing?
NSW released its climate policy framework in November, joining Victoria, South Australia and the ACT with an aspirational target to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
While NSW didn’t announce a renewable target, the majority of states now have one. Queensland is seeking 50% renewable generation by 2030, Victoria 40% by 2025 and South Australia 50% by 2025.
Tasmania’s generation is already mostly renewable (albeit mostly conventional hydro generation). The Australian Capital Territory looks set to achieve 100% renewables by 2020 and the Northern Territory has announced a 50% target for 2030.
At present, the federal government has a renewable energy target of around 23.5% renewable electricity by 2020 and a 2030 target of 26-28% greenhouse emission reductions from 2005 levels. These ambitions fall way below those of the states.
And way below the almost complete electricity sector decarbonisation by 2040 that the International Energy Agency says is required globally to avoid dangerous global warming.

What does the law say?
Constitutionally, energy policy in Australia is a matter for state governments. The development and implementation of the National Electricity Market over the past two decades has been achieved through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), with harmonised legislation in each state.
State governments therefore have the constitutional scope to act both independently and in consort to achieve clean energy related goals.
Whether they should choose to do this, however, is another question. There is an obvious national context including Australia’s participation in international climate change processes such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
National policy coherence also has value in avoiding uncoordinated policies that can adversely impact investment incentives, increase compliance costs, and generally lead to less efficient outcomes.
While suitably ambitious, nationally consistent, legislation under federal government leadership may be ideal, it hardly seems realistic at present. The apparent divisions within the federal government seem likely to prevent useful progress, even with the two reviews.
It might well be a choice between state leadership or very little leadership over the next few years. And these years will be key to setting Australia on a clean energy path fit for the future.

New South Wales’ climate plan
The NSW climate change policy framework proposes to meet the net zero target through a number of policy “directions” to reduce emissions. It also proposes adaptation measures to cope with the warming that is already underway.
The emission reduction directions include: enhancing investment certainty for renewables; boosting energy productivity (energy efficiency); capturing other benefits of reducing emissions (such as improved health from reduced air pollution) and managing the risks; and growing new industries in NSW.
These are to be advanced through government policy, government operations, and advocacy. Specific initiatives are to be outlined in a set of action plans, including a climate change fund and an energy efficiency plan, which are currently under consultation.
A further advanced energy plan will be developed in 2017. This will include provisions for the future role of renewable energy. Clearly the government will not be able to achieve its aspirational emissions target in the absence of a transformation of the energy system, so how will renewable energy figure in the absence of a state target?
While we can’t preempt the plan, the policy framework defines advanced energy to not only cover renewable generation itself but also how it is integrated into industry structures and adopted by end users.
Given the importance of integration in transitioning the energy system, such a broad focus could usefully complement the activities of other states as well as NSW.
The policy also emphasises collaborating with the commonwealth and other states through COAG.

NSW: a climate advocate?
Combined state action has historically played a key role in federal climate policy. It was bottom up pressure from states that resulted in the Howard government’s initial emissions trading scheme (ETS) proposal in 2007.
The Garnaut review that formed the basis of Kevin Rudd’s ETS was originally commissioned by Labor state governments.
On this point SA Premier Jay Wetherill has taken the lead in calling for a national emissions trading scheme to be implemented through harmonised legislation at a state level.
While this seems unlikely to be a feature of NSW’s advocacy in 2017, continued failure by the federal government to advance climate and energy policy might require such types of coordinated state efforts.
In this light, state government efforts do not appear “ideological”. That would seem to better describe the federal government’s present opposition to even exploring promising emission reduction options.
And while it is too soon to know if NSW’s climate policy is fit for the future, it certainly represents welcome progress, and provides a basis that can be built upon.

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28/12/2016

Trump’s Threat On Climate Change Pledges Will Hit Africa Hard

The Conversation - John J Stremlau

President-elect Donald Trump’s stance on climate change is very different to Barack Obama’s. Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

US President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, publicly questions the existence of climate change. He, and presumably Trump himself, opposes President Barack Obama’s environmental initiatives to limit greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
US withdrawal from these agreements would imperil Africa. It is the region least responsible, most vulnerable, and least able to afford the cost of adapting to global climate change. Southern Africa is already suffering effects of global warming rates twice as high as the global average.
If Trump forsakes US support for the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, endorsed by 193 members of the United Nations (UN), as well as Obama’s bilateral climate agreement with China, the resultant rise of global warming and extreme weather events will wreak havoc throughout Africa. Global social media will amplify the human dramas and dangers of forced migrations, viral epidemics and related deadly conflicts as credible evidence of global warming’s impact continues to accumulate. China and the US are the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.
So it is incumbent on African governments, individually and with the African Union, the UN and civil society networks globally and in the US, to pressure the Trump administration to keep US commitments.

The outlook isn’t good
Trump’s personal convictions about the threat and causes of global warming remain obscure. Several of his key cabinet appointees’ views are less so. And the cabinet hasn’t had this concentration of representatives from the old Republican corporate and military establishment since Ronald Reagan governed in the 1980s.
Most are ideologically conservative, older, white, Christian men hostile to government regulation, including those related to the environment.
Reagan succeeded in overturning Jimmy Carter’s early attempts to promote clean energy and other environmental reforms.
Today, the consequences for Africa of such reversals could be catastrophic.
The nomination of Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil’s chairman and CEO, to become the next Secretary of State is of immediate concern to environmental scientists. This is particularly the case given ExxonMobil’s history of concealing the truth about global warming.
Governor Rick Perry of Texas, nominated to become Energy Secretary, is another proponent of reliance on fossil fuels. The climate effects of these have caused major disruptions to communities in Africa. The drought plagued and conflict prone weak states of the Sahel are especially vulnerable. Meanwhile the better known legacy of environmental damage by US and other oil companies in the Niger Delta continues to cause hardship and conflict.

Lessons from the past
Mobilising popular opposition to US actions that are hurtful to Africans is never easy. But here too an analogy to the Reagan years may be instructive. In 1986 bipartisan majorities in Congress overrode Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. This imposed sanctions on South Africa, with conditions requiring national liberation for their removal.
Curbing global warming for the benefit of Africa and humanity might seem less urgent than ending apartheid in the 1980s. And were international sanctions to punish the polluter they would be against the US. Yet in other ways comparing the global anti-apartheid movement to one seeking freedom of relief from global warming may be similar.
Popular and bipartisan opposition to apartheid took many years to coalesce. But a popular and powerful president was finally overpowered. Global warming already has 64% of the US public “worried/care a great deal” according to a recent Gallup poll.
Trump won the White House narrowly in America’s archaic electoral college and lost the popular vote by a greater margin – 2.8 million – than any US president.
Although Africa has never been among the US’s foreign policy priorities, public support development and humanitarian assistance have enjoyed broad public support, not only among liberals and those who voted for Trump’s opponent. Major programmes to benefit Africa’s people in public health, agriculture, clean energy, and education have been rare examples of bipartisan support in an otherwise mostly dysfunctional US Congress. A campaign to help Africans adapt to climate change could resonate publicly and politically in ways that would benefit America as well, as with the anti-apartheid movement.
Passing even popular legislation takes time. The 1986 anti-apartheid bill was first introduced in 1972. By contrast, global warming relief for Africa is on a fast track. In 2014, Barack Obama committed the US to make a major down payment of $US 3 billion as part of a special $100 billion programme for African and other low income countries seriously affected by climate change caused by the US and other global polluters.
Trump and his team appear poised to rescind this commitment. Successfully opposing such a decision would be an early big victory in what is shaping up to be a major test for Trump’s leadership at home and abroad.

African leadership
African leadership of this campaign is essential. South Africa is in a good position to speak with conviction. It is one of the countries most seriously affected by climate change and is also home to Africa’s leading climatologists.
But to stand up to the unilateral fact-free flailing of Trump and his climate change denialists will require more than evidence.
Global warming raises a moral imperative to help those of us who are most vulnerable, least responsible for contributing to it and most in need. For these reasons we should all draw inspiration and be driven by the “stubborn sense of fairness” that the late Nelson Mandela credits his father for instilling in him.

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Donald Trump And The Triumph of Climate-Change Denial

The Atlantic - Clare Foran

The science of man-made global warming has only grown more conclusive. So why have Republicans become less convinced it's real over the past decade and a half?

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Denial of the broad scientific consensus that human activity is the primary cause of global warming could become a guiding principle of Donald Trump's presidential administration. Though it's difficult to pin down exactly what Trump thinks about climate change, he has a well-established track record of skepticism and denial. He has called global warming a "hoax," insisted while campaigning for the Republican nomination that he's "not a big believer in man-made climate change," and recently suggested that "nobody really knows" if climate change exists.
Trump also plans to nominate Republicans to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department who have expressed skepticism toward the scientific agreement on human-caused global warming. Indeed, Trump's election is a triumph of climate denial, and will elevate him to the top of a Republican Party where prominent elected officials have publicly rejected the climate consensus. It's not that the presidential election was a referendum on global warming. Climate change barely came up during the presidential debates, and voters rated the environment as a far less pressing concern than issues like the economy, terrorism, and health care.
But that relative lack of concern signals that voters have not prioritized action on climate change, if they want any action taken at all. Trump's victory sends a message that failing to embrace climate science still isn't disqualifying for a presidential candidate, even as scientists warn that the devastating consequences of global warming are under way and expected to intensify in the years ahead. If Trump fails to take climate change seriously, the federal government may do little to address the threat of a warming planet in the next four years.
A presidential administration hostile to climate science also threatens to deepen, or at the very least prolong, the skepticism that already exists in American political life. "If the Trump administration continues to push the false claim that global warming is a hoax, not happening, not human caused, or not a serious problem, I'd expect many conservative Republican voters to follow their lead," said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of Yale University's Program on Climate Change Communication.

A presidential administration hostile to climate science also threatens to deepen the skepticism that already exists in American political life.

The entrenchment of climate-science denial is one of the ways the United States appears to be exceptional relative to the rest of the world. A comparative 2015 study of nine conservative political parties in countries such as Canada, Germany, and Spain concluded that "the U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change." Meanwhile, Americans were least likely to agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity in a 2014 survey of 20 countries, including China, India, Australia, and Great Britain.
Scientific reality does not seem to have escaped the distorting influence of political polarization in the United States. A paper published in Environment earlier this year suggests that as the Tea Party pushed the Republican Party further to the political right, it helped solidify skepticism of man-made climate change within the GOP. That happened as the Tea Party incorporated "anti-environmentalism and climate-change denial into its agenda," the authors write, and subsequently became part of a broader "denial countermovement" made up of fossil-fuel companies as well as conservative think tanks and media outlets.
As the ideological divide between Republicans and Democrats has widened, so has the partisan divide over climate change. Scientific evidence that human activity is the leading cause of global warming has continued to accumulate in recent years, and the evidence for man-made climate change is now overwhelming. In spite of that, Republicans are slightly less convinced than they were a decade and a half ago that the Earth is getting warmer as a result of human activity.
Democrats have moved in the opposite direction and become more likely to say that man-made climate change is real. This year, Gallup found that while 85 percent of Democrats believe human activity has lead to higher temperatures, only 38 percent of Republicans agree.In a deeply divided country, adopting views on climate change that conflict with scientific evidence can actually be a rational choice.
Liberals and conservatives frequently spend time with like-minded individuals, and people across the political spectrum may have a better chance of fitting in if they embrace shared partisan beliefs—regardless of whether those beliefs contradict scientific fact. This helps explain why highly educated Republicans are actually more likely to reject climate science. Yale University professor Dan Kahan put it this way in a 2012 Nature article:

For members of the public, being right or wrong about climate-change science will have no impact. Nothing they do as individual consumers or individual voters will meaningfully affect the risks posed by climate change. Yet the impact of taking a position that conflicts with their cultural group could be disastrous. … Positions on climate change have come to signify the kind of person one is. People whose beliefs are at odds with those of the people with whom they share their basic cultural commitments risk being labelled as weird and obnoxious in the eyes of those on whom they depend for social and financial support.

The complexity of climate science may have made it easier for global warming to get caught up in partisan politics as well. Voters look to the positions adopted by their political party as a kind of mental shortcut when deciding what to make of complicated subjects such as climate change, according to research from Cynthia Rugeley of the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and John David Gerlach of Western Carolina University.
That means that if Trump continues to voice climate skepticism after taking office, he could further cement skepticism among conservative voters. "I think it will reinforce climate denial among those who already doubt its existence. To that extent, yes, it will deepen denial," Rugeley said in an interview.
The power and influence of corporations relative to the government might also help explain why skepticism has thrived. An ideological preference for free markets may make some politicians and voters in the United States more sympathetic to arguments that environmental regulations will hurt the private sector—even if those arguments are used to dismiss climate science.
According to Matthew Paterson, a professor of international politics at the University of Manchester in England, skepticism over government intervention might help explain why climate skepticism also seems relatively entrenched in Anglo-Saxon countries such as Great Britain and Australia, though to lesser degrees there than in the United States.
Fossil-fuel interests, in particular, have managed to inject doubt into the climate debate in the United States, Paterson argues, by "funding deniers, and anti-climate politicians, and giving them a public voice."The more voters are skeptical of man-made climate change, the easier it may be for politicians to justify inaction.
It's impossible to predict what Trump will do in office, but he already appears poised to dismantle President Obama's agenda to combat climate change. He also seems willing to fill his administration with individuals who have cast doubt on the scientific consensus. Trump wants Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, to serve as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt recently co-wrote an article claiming that scientists "disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind."
Trump's choice to run the Energy Department, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, has claimed "the science is not settled" on climate change. And his pick to lead the Interior Department is Republican Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who has reportedly said that global warming is "not a hoax, but it's not proven science either."
Despite significant pockets of skepticism and denial, particularly among conservative Republicans, there are plenty of Americans across the political spectrum who believe that man-made climate change exists. Gallup recently found that a majority of Americans believe human activity is causing global warming, and feel worried about the rise in temperatures. Concern over climate change increased among Democrats and Republicans from 2015 to 2016 with 40 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats reporting concern this year. If that concern continues to increase, skepticism may decline over time among American voters.
Whether skepticism dissipates or intensifies may depend in part on the actions of the Trump administration over the next four years. If Trump makes climate science and policy a high-profile target, he might provoke a backlash among moderate Republicans who do believe global warming is a serious problem. But skepticism within the GOP could intensify if Trump's administration publicly misrepresents climate science and dismisses efforts to combat global warming as an expensive waste of time. If that happens, Democrats and liberal activists will counterattack, a dynamic that might cause partisan attitudes to harden further. That could leave the political debate over global warming more fractured than ever.

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5 Under-Reported Climate Change Stories Of 2016

Georgia Straight - Charlie Smith

2016 Arctic sea ice summer minimum. This map shows the reduction of Arctic sea ice since 1981. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

This is the time of year when some people talk about the news stories that didn't receive the attention they merited over the past year.
But with the threat of runaway climate change greater than ever before and a denier elected to the U.S. presidency, it seems appropriate to narrow the field to this area alone in 2016.
Here are my five picks for under-reported climate-change stories of the year.

1. Loss of global sea ice
Recent news has been bleak from the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center.
The extent of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice reached record lows this year for the month of November, each tracking two standard deviations from the norm for that time of year.
On December 22, the Washington Post reported that a weather buoy near the North Pole hit the melting point because of far warmer than expected weather.
"The entire Arctic north of 80 degrees, roughly the size of the Lower 48 states, has witnessed a sharp temperature spike reaching levels 30-35 degrees (nearly 20 Celsius) above normal. In reviewing historical records back to 1958, one cannot find a more intense anomaly – except following a similar spike just five weeks ago," wrote the Washington Post's Jason Samenow.

Donald Trump has named a climate-change denier, former Texas governor Rick Perry, as his secretary of energy. Michael Vadon

2. Republican Party's threat to humanity
Earlier this year in an interview with Truthout, U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky called the Republican Party "the most dangerous organization" in world history. That's due to the party's denial of human beings' impact on the climate and eagerness to burn fossil fuels.
According to Chomsky, the Republicans are "dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life".
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to "cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs". He's also pledged to rescind the Obama climate action plan, which aims to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels.
Despite Trump's radical plans to reverse course, only 82 seconds in three U.S. presidential debates were focused on climate change. This issue simply wasn't a priority for the U.S. mainstream media during the election campaign.
In light of this, it shouldn't come as a surprise that his nominee for energy secretary, former Texas governor Rick Perry, is a hard-core climate-change denier from an oil-producing state. And Trump's secretary of state nominee, Rex Tillerson, is the CEO of ExxonMobil.

The price of solar power has fallen sharply, making it much more viable than ever before.

3. Generating all electricity via renewable energy
In an April interview with the Georgia Straight, Harvard science historian Noami Oreskes offered a blueprint for how North America could generate all electricity from renewable sources. And it wasn't that complicated.
She said that researchers have already demonstrated this could happen if governments focused on three major areas: integration of electricity grids, feed-in tariffs, and demand-response pricing.
If grids were better integrated from Mexico to Canada, it would become easier to make use of solar power, which has seen sharply falling prices.
Feed-in tariffs offer payments to people who generate their own renewable electricity and feed it back into the grid.
And demand-response pricing involves adjusting the cost of electricity during peak and slow periods of consumption to flatten the load.
“They’ve done the modelling to show that there is enough power between hydro, wind, and solar to fully power North America so long as you have grid integration to solve the intermittency problem," Oreskes said. "That’s actually a very exciting result, because this technology already exists.”
The City of Vancouver's goal is to become 100 percent reliant on renewable energy by 2050.

350.org

4. Keep It in the Ground movement
Organizations like Greenpeace and 350.org routinely speak about keeping fossil fuels in the ground. But the reasons for this are rarely articulated in the mainstream media.
A 2015 study published in Nature pointed out that if 80 percent of proven reserves of fossil fuels were actually burned, it would lead to average global temperatures reaching 2° C above the level before the Industrial Revolution.
This would sharply increase the risk of runaway climate change.
The Keep It in the Ground movement is devoted to blocking every attempt to free up new fossil fuel reserves to be burned. It's manifested in the intense opposition to new North American pipeline projects, coal-export facilities, the divestment groups on university campuses, and in the fracking of natural gas.
This movement serves as a constant reminder that financial analysts are playing a game of charades by continuing to pretend that companies like ExxonMobil or Chevron are as valuable as their CEOs claim. The reality is that their proven assets on their balance sheets can never be burned.
Once that realization hits home, thanks in large part to the Keep It in the Ground movement, it could have serious implications on the stock market.

Watch the trailer for the 2014 documentary Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret.

5. Impact of eating meat on the climate
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, more greenhouse gases are emitted through livestock production than through transportation. Methane, which is a byproduct of livestock production, is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide for trapping heat in the atmosphere in the first 20 years after being released.
A study published several years ago showed that major changes in diet could have a huge impact on mitigating climate change. This could come not only from reduced consumption of meat but also from the amount of land that could be reclaimed from grazing. Despite this, the positive climate impact of curbing meat consumption was rarely covered in the mainstream media in 2016.
In 2014, filmmakers Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn completed a documentary called Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, which exposed the impacts of modern agricultural production on climate change and other environmental crises. The filmmakers also pointed out that major environmental organizations have not given this topic anywhere near the attention it deserves.
Cowspiracy came under criticism from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which disputed the film's claim from a Worldwatch Institute report that 51 percent of greenhouse gases are generated through animal agriculture. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the scientific consensus is that approximately 15 percent of greenhouse gases can be linked to animal agriculture, which is still a significant amount.
One journalist who's repeatedly blown the whistle on the links between meat eating and the climate is Chris Hedges. Below, you can watch an interview he conducted earlier this year with Anderson and Kuhn.

Journalist Chris Hedges discusses the impact of agriculture on the climate with Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn, codirectors of Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret.

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