The Climate Council has called on all of Australia’s state and
territory leaders to follow the lead of the ACT and commit to a target
of 100 per cent renewable energy within a decade.
The call follows an online campaign, conducted in partnership with
change.org, which gathered nearly 25,000 signatures in support of the
ACT’s ambitious renewables targets; which has already led to the
development of 440MW of of new capacity through three reverse auctions,
and is on track to provide 80 per cent of the ACT’s electricity needs by
2018.
ACT chief minister Andrew Barr said the petition showed there was no
political reason why every state in Australia could not do something
similar.
“I’m pleased to see that 24,207 supporters have signed the petition,
presenting a strong message that will be hard for other Premiers and
Chief Ministers to ignore,” Barr said in a media release on Friday.
ACT energy minister, and architect of the highly successful reverse
auctions, Simon Corbell said Canberra was proud to have shown other
jurisdictions that moving to renewables was achievable and affordable.
“The Climate Council was keen to identify the enabling factors that
opened up the way for the ACT government to make such a strong
commitment and any insights into what would need to occur for this to be
replicated elsewhere,” Corbell said.
“The ACT’s pioneering reverse auction process ensures that Canberrans
pay low prices for electricity while receiving maximum local investment
benefits.
The government said the total cost of the renewables projects to the
capital’s consumers would peak at an average of less than $5 a household
per week by 2020. This would be offset by similar savings to households
from mandated energy efficiency schemes, it said.
Land clearing surge in Queensland since 2012 could create emissions
roughly equal to those saved by the federal government's emissions
reduction scheme
A government report says greenhouse gas emissions from land clearing
have fallen to record lows, but this is being disputed by the Wilderness
Society.
Photograph: WWF Australia
The latest federal government carbon emissions inventory shows
Australia has increased its emissions and has come under fire for
allegedly vastly underestimating the amount of land clearing that has
occurred, and its associated emissions.
The Quarterly Update of the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report,
which counts emissions in Australia up to September 2015,says
greenhouse gas emissions from land clearing have fallen to record lows.
But Guardian Australia reported last month
that a report commissioned by the Wilderness Society showed a land
clearing surge in Queensland since 2012 has been so big that it would
create emissions roughly equal to those saved by the federal
government's emissions reduction scheme, where they paid other farmers
more than $670m to stop cutting down trees.
The amount the Queensland government said was cleared in that state
alone was almost twice what the federal government said was cleared
nationwide in 2014. Queensland
reported that almost 300,000ha were cleared in the 2013-14 financial
year, while the federal government says less than 170,000ha were cleared
nationwide.
Looking at the emissions arising from land clearing, the federal
government's report says there have been only 10.8m tonnes of C02
emitted in 2014 and 2015, and just slightly more in 2013. But the
Queensland figures say that state alone produced 38m tonnes of CO2 from
land clearing in 2015, up from 25m tonnes in 2013.
In response to those alleged discrepancies reported by Guardian
Australia, the Department of Environment added a new explanatory section
to the quarterly report.
It raised seven differences in the ways Queensland and the federal
government measure land clearing, and concluded that "it is not
appropriate to compare the two data sets directly without adjusting the
data for these differences".
But the report does not explain how those differences could explain such a vastly contrasting result.
"It defies logic. This is a major discrepancy that can't be brushed
off with the same inadequate explanations used so far," the Wilderness
Society's climate campaign manager, Glenn Walker, said.
"The government "is either using very creative arithmetic or expects
us to believe that the rest of Australia has planted enough trees to
suck up the equivalent of about 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere," he said. "That's more than the emissions from
Australia's dirtiest coal power station Hazelwood."
Senator Larissa Waters, the Australian Greens climate change
spokeswoman, said: "The Turnbull government is using dodgy numbers so it
can allow its big fossil fuel donors to keep polluting while claiming
to be meeting its woefully inadequate reduction targets set by Tony
Abbott."
Even with the contested drops in emissions from land clearing, the report shows that emissions have risen.
"In a sign of just how dodgy the accounting behind their climate
targets is, the government is claiming to be meeting its 2020 target
even though climate pollution is up," Waters said.
The report does not include any projections to 2020 or beyond, and so
is unable to back up the government's claims that Australia's emissions
peaked in 2005. And the government's own projections from 2015 found they would be much higher by 2035.
"We continue to see emissions steadily growing all the way to 2030,
despite current policy," said Hugh Grossman, the chief executive of the
environmental consulting company RepuTex.
"That's cause for concern, in that current policy – even the
[Emissions Reduction Fund] – is not curbing our national emissions
growth. If the argument is about how much emissions are growing, we're a
long way from seeing emissions reductions."
A spokeswoman for Hunt said: "The emissions projections already fully
take into account the Queensland government's land clearing laws and
practice."
"The advice from the Department of the Environment is clear,
categorical and absolute," she said, alleging that the Wilderness
Society "wilfully misinterpreted data".
She said Australia's accounting system was subject to external
scrutiny by a panel of international experts appointed by the UN
framework convention on climate change.
"Is the Wilderness Society now questioning the authority of the UNFCCC?" she asked.
If our transition to renewable energy is successful, we will achieve
savings in the ongoing energy expenditures needed for economic
production. We will be rewarded with a quality of life that is
acceptable—and, perhaps, preferable to our current one (even though, for
most Americans, material consumption will be scaled back from its
current unsustainable level). We will have a much more stable climate
than would otherwise be the case. And we will see greatly reduced health
and environmental impacts from energy production activities.
But the transition will entail costs—not just money and regulation,
but also changes in our behavior and expectations. It will probably take
at least three or four decades, and will fundamentally change the way
we live.
Nobody knows how to accomplish the transition in detail, because this
has never been done before. Most previous energy transitions were
driven by opportunity, not policy. And they were usually additive, with
new energy resources piling onto old ones (we still use firewood, even
though we’ve added coal, hydro, oil, natural gas, and nuclear to the
mix).
Since the renewable energy revolution will require trading our
currently dominant energy sources (fossil fuels) for alternative ones
(mostly wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass) that have different
characteristics, there are likely to be some hefty challenges along the
way.
Therefore, it makes sense to start with the low-hanging fruit and
with a plan in place, then revise our plan frequently as we gain
practical experience. Several organizations have already formulated
plans for transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. David Fridley,
staff scientist of the energy analysis program at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, and I have been working for the past few months to
analyze and assess those plans and have a book in the works titled Our Renewable Future. Here’s a very short summary, tailored mostly to the United States, of what we’ve found.
Level One: The Easy Stuff
Nearly everyone agrees that the easiest way to kick-start the
transition would be to replace coal with solar and wind power for
electricity generation. That would require building lots of panels and
turbines while regulating coal out of existence. Distributed generation
and storage (rooftop solar panels with home- or business-scale battery
packs) will help. Replacing natural gas will be harder, because
gas-fired “peaking” plants are often used to buffer the intermittency of
industrial-scale wind and solar inputs to the grid (see Level Two).
Electricity accounts for less than a quarter of all final energy used
in the United States. What about the rest of the energy we depend on?
Since solar and wind produce electricity, it makes sense to electrify as
much of our energy usage as we can. For example, we could heat and cool
most buildings with electric air-source heat pumps, replacing natural
gas- or oil-fueled furnaces. We could also begin switching out all our
gas cooking stoves for electric stoves.
Nearly everyone agrees that the easiest way to kick-start the transition would be to replace coal with solar and wind power.
Transportation represents a large swath of energy consumption, and
personal automobiles account for most of that. We could reduce oil
consumption substantially if we all drove electric cars (replacing 250
million gasoline-fueled automobiles will take time and money, but will
eventually result in energy and financial savings). Promoting walking,
bicycling, and public transit will take much less time and investment.
Buildings will require substantial retrofitting for energy efficiency
(this will again take time and investment, but will offer still more
opportunities for savings). Building codes should be strengthened to
require net-zero-energy or near-net-zero-energy performance for new
construction. More energy-efficient appliances will also help.
The food system is a big energy consumer, with fossil fuels used in
the manufacture of fertilizers, food processing, and transportation. We
could reduce a lot of that fuel consumption by increasing the market
share of organic local foods. While we’re at it, we could begin
sequestering enormous amounts of atmospheric carbon in topsoil by
promoting farming practices that build soil rather than deplete it—as is
being done, for example, in the Marin Carbon Project.
If we got a good start in all these areas, we could achieve at least a
40 percent reduction in carbon emissions in 10 to 20 years.
Level Two: The Harder Stuff
Solar and wind technologies have a drawback: They provide energy
intermittently. When they become dominant in our overall energy mix, we
will have to accommodate that intermittency in various ways. We’ll need
substantial amounts of grid-level energy storage as well as a major grid
overhaul to get the electricity sector close to 100 percent renewables
(replacing natural gas in electricity generation). We’ll also need to
start timing our energy usage to coincide with the availability of
sunlight and wind energy. That in itself will present both technological
and behavioral hurdles.
We could achieve at least a 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions in 10 to 20 years.
After we switch to electric cars, the rest of the transport sector
will require longer-term and sometimes more expensive substitutions. We
could reduce our need for cars (which require a lot of energy for their
manufacture and decommissioning) by increasing the density of our cities
and suburbs and reorienting them to public transit, bicycling, and
walking. We could electrify all motorized human transport by building
more electrified public transit and intercity passenger rail lines.
Heavy trucks could run on fuel cells, but it would be better to minimize
trucking by expanding freight rail. Transport by ship could employ
sails to increase fuel efficiency (this is already being done on a tiny
scale by the MS Beluga Skysails, a commercial container cargo ship
partially powered by a 1,700-square-foot, computer-controlled kite), but
relocalization or deglobalization of manufacturing would be a necessary
co-strategy to reduce the need for shipping.
Much of the manufacturing sector already runs on electricity, but
there are exceptions—and some of these will offer significant
challenges. Many raw materials for manufacturing processes either are
fossil fuels (feedstocks for plastics and other petrochemical-based
materials) or require fossil fuels for mining or transformation (e.g.,
most metals). Considerable effort will be needed to replace
fossil-fuel-based industrial materials and to recycle non-renewable
materials more completely, significantly reducing the need for mining.
If we did all these things, while also building far, far more solar
panels and wind turbines, we could achieve roughly an 80 percent
reduction in emissions compared to our current level.
World per capita primary energy consumption
Sources: Research from Peter Kalmus and Post Carbon Institute YES! Magazine infographic, 2016
Level Three: The Really Hard Stuff
Doing away with the last 20 percent of our current fossil-fuel
consumption is going to take still more time, research, and
investment—as well as much more behavioral adaptation.
Just one example: We currently use enormous amounts of concrete for
all kinds of construction. The crucial ingredient in concrete is cement.
Cement-making requires high heat, which could theoretically be supplied
by sunlight, electricity, or hydrogen—but that will entail a nearly
complete redesign of the process.
While with Level One we began a shift in food systems by promoting
local organic food, driving carbon emissions down further will require
finishing that job by making all food production organic, and requiring
all agriculture to build topsoil rather than deplete it. Eliminating all
fossil fuels in food systems will also entail a substantial redesign of
those systems to minimize processing, packaging, and transport.
The communications sector—which uses mining and high-heat processes
for the production of phones, computers, servers, wires, photo-optic
cables, cell towers, and more—presents some really knotty problems. The
only good long-term solution in this sector is to make devices that are
built to last a very long time and then to repair them and fully recycle
and remanufacture them when absolutely needed. The Internet could be
maintained via the kinds of low-tech, asynchronous networks now being
pioneered in poor nations, using relatively little power. An example
might be the AirJaldi networks in India, which provide Internet access
to about 20,000 remote users in six states, using mostly solar power.
Back in the transport sector: We’ve already made shipping more
efficient with sails, but doing away with petroleum altogether will
require costly substitutes (fuel cells or biofuels). One way or another,
global trade will have to shrink.
We may have to write off aviation as anything but a specialty transport mode.
There is no good drop-in substitute for aviation fuels; we may have
to write off aviation as anything but a specialty transport mode. Planes
running on hydrogen or biofuels are an expensive possibility, as are
dirigibles filled with (non-renewable) helium, any of which could help
us maintain vestiges of air travel. Paving and repairing roads without
oil-based asphalt is possible, but will require an almost complete
redesign of processes and equipment.
Great attention will have to be given to the interdependent linkages
and supply chains connecting various sectors (communications, mining,
and transport knit together most of what we do in industrial societies).
Some links in supply chains will be hard to substitute, and chains can
be brittle: A problem with even one link can imperil the entire chain.
The good news is that if we do all these things, we can get beyond
zero carbon emissions; that is, with sequestration of carbon in soils
and forests, we could actually reduce atmospheric carbon with each
passing year.
Doing Our Level Best
This plan features “levels”; the more obvious word choice would have
been “stages.” The latter implies a sequence—starting with Stage One,
ending with Stage Three—yet accomplishing the energy transition quickly
will require accelerating research and development to address many Level
Two and Three issues at the same time we’re moving rapidly forward on
Level One tasks. For planning purposes, it’s useful to know what can be
done relatively quickly and cheaply, and what will take long, expensive,
sustained effort.
How much energy will be available to us at the end of the transition?
It’s hard to say, as there are many variables, including rates of
investment and the capabilities of renewable energy technology without
fossil fuels to back them up and to power their manufacture, at least in
the early stages. This “how much” question reflects the understandable
concern to maintain current levels of comfort and convenience as we
switch energy sources. But in this regard, it is good to keep ecological
footprint analysis in mind.
According to the Global Footprint Network’s Living Planet Report
2014, the amount of productive land and sea available to each person on
Earth in order to live in a way that’s ecologically sustainable is 1.7
global hectares. The current per capita ecological footprint in the
United States is 6.8 global hectares. Asking whether renewable energy
could enable Americans to maintain their current lifestyle is therefore
equivalent to asking whether renewable energy can keep us living
unsustainably. The clear answer is: only temporarily, if at all. So why
bother trying? We should aim for a sustainable level of energy and
material consumption, which on average is significantly lower than at
present.
One way or another, the energy transition will represent an enormous
societal shift. During past shifts, there were winners and losers. In
the current instance, if we don’t pay great attention to equity issues,
it is entirely possible that only the rich will have access to renewable
energy, and therefore, ultimately, to any substantial amounts of energy
at all.
A truly all-renewable economy may be very different from the American economy we know today.
The collective weight of these challenges and opportunities suggests
that a truly all-renewable economy may be very different from the
American economy we know today. The renewable economy will likely be
slower and more local; it will probably be a conserver economy rather
than a consumer economy. It will also likely feature far less economic
inequality. Economic growth may reverse itself as per capita consumption
shrinks; if we are to avert a financial crash and perhaps a revolution
as well, we may need a different economic organizing principle. In her
recent book on climate change, This Changes Everything, Naomi
Klein asks whether capitalism can be preserved in the era of climate
change. While it probably can (capitalism needs profit more than
growth), that may not be a good idea because, in the absence of overall
growth, profits for some will have to come at a cost to everyone else.
This short article only addresses the energy transition in the United
States; other nations will face different challenges and opportunities.
Poor nations will have to find ways to provide all their energy from
renewable sources while advancing in terms of the U.N. Human Development
Index. Nations especially vulnerable to sea level rise may have other
immediate priorities to deal with. And nations with low populations but
very large solar or wind resources may find themselves in an
advantageous position if they are able to obtain foreign investment
capital without too many strings attached.
The most important thing to understand about the energy transition is
that it’s not optional. Delay would be fatal. It’s time to make a
plan—however sketchy, however challenging—and run with it, revising it
as we go.
Ice covered fjord on Baffin Island with Davis Strait in the background. (Michael Studinger/NASA)
We all know that Greenland is losing a lot of ice. If you take NASA’s
word for it, it’s currently losing ice mass to the tune of 287 billion tons per year,
enough to raise sea levels the better part of a millimeter annually.
Overall, it contains enough ice to potentially raise sea levels by as
much as 20 feet.
No wonder, then, when it comes to glacial loss
and sea level rise, Greenland gets all of the attention (in the Northern
Hemisphere, anyway). But as new research suggests, it’s far from the only major ice loser in the region.
We pay far too little attention to two others: the northern and southern glaciers of the Canadian Arctic archipelago.
The northern region, centered on Ellesmere Island, contains more
glacier mass than any other region in the world (outside of Greenland
and Antarctica, that is), and the southern region, centered on the vast
Baffin Island, also holds a very large amount of ice.
And they’re
both fast losing ice. “If you do an entire inventory of all the
glaciers, they actually are changing more than Greenland and Antarctica
at the moment, or have been,” says Princeton geoscientist Christopher
Harig, who conducted the new study in Geophysical Research Letters along with Princeton’s Frederik Simons.
Baffin Island is one of the five biggest islands in the entire world, according to the
U.S. Geological Survey. Its two largest ice caps, named Barnes and
Penny, are “thought to be the last remnants of the Laurentide Ice Sheet”
that once extended across much of North America, the survey says.
Ellesmere
Island is arguably even more spectacular — like Antarctica (but on a
considerably smaller scale), it is actually the home to significant ice
shelves, or sheets of ice that extend over the ocean and hold back
glaciers behind them as they flow into the sea. These are all located on
the northern side of Ellesmere Island, facing the North Pole. According to Environment
and Climate Change Canada, these ice shelves have already been severely
damaged as warming advances. In August 2005, the “entire Ayles Ice
Shelf broke away,” says the agency, leaving just five remaining. When
Ayles broke up, fully 7.5 percent of all of Ellesmere Island’s ice shelf
area was lost in the space of an hour, a 2007 study found. And many of the remaining shelves have also lost major portions since then.
So what does it all add up to?
Harig
and Simons used gravity data from NASA’s twin GRACE satellites to
measure the ice mass loss from Greenland, these island-based Canadian
glaciers (treating Ellesmere and Baffin as regions made up of multiple
surrounding islands, not just single islands), and the Alaska region
between 2003 and 2013.
You won’t be shocked to learn that
Greenland is losing the most ice — they put the total at 244 billion
tons per year, with an acceleration of 28 billion tons annually. That’s
pretty close to NASA’s overall figure. And the acceleration, if it were
to continue, would mean that Greenland’s current rate of ice loss would
double in 10 years.
However, what’s striking is just how much
mass is also vanishing from the Ellesmere and Baffin regions. Ellesmere,
the study suggests, is losing 38 billion tons per year, and Baffin is
losing 22 billion tons per year. Both are also seeing accelerating
losses. The Gulf of Alaska region, the study found, is losing another 40
billion tons per year (other recent research put this higher, at 75 billion tons, for all of Alaska).
Thus,
if you add up Alaska and the two Canadian regions, you get around 100
billion tons of ice loss per year, which is nothing to sniff at. No,
it’s not Greenland. But then again, it’s actually not far from current
estimates for total loss from Antarctica, which NASA puts at 134 billion tons per year.
Harig
explains that overall, glaciers around the world contain about 412
millimeters — or roughly 16 inches — of potential sea level rise. Of
this, 92 millimeters’ worth is to be found in the Ellesmere or northern
Canadian glacier region, which makes it the single largest repository of
land-based ice outside of Greenland or Antarctica. Baffin, Harig says,
contains about 21 millimeters’ worth.
The key difference, and the
reason why Greenland and Antarctica get all of the attention, is that
their loss in the future is feared to grow further — and that they
simply have so much to give. So far, they’re still only losing a trickle
of their potential. By contrast, with these Canadian and Alaskan
glaciers, the concern is that they will continue to lose ice, but become
less significant contributors to sea level rise as the 21st century
advances — and the two giants take over.
“There
are a lot of different glacier areas, and they’re all very different,”
says Harig. “Their number isn’t really large compared to Greenland and
Antarctica until you add them up together.”
The pressure is on renewable energy jobs. Photo: Supplied
The number of Australians working in renewable energy has fallen 3 per cent in the past financial year.
The
decline caps off a 27 per cent collapse (about 5100 jobs) since
2010-11, when subsidies and other government support for the industry
were at their most generous, and comes after investments in new projects
cooled and the national renewable energy target sputtered.
The data,
released by the Australia Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday, showed 470
full-time equivalent jobs were lost in renewable energy across 2014-15,
compared with the previous 12 months.
The Australian trend sits amid a backdrop of growing global renewable energy employment. The International Renewable Energy Agency previously found 7.7 million people worked worldwide in the industry in 2014, up 18 per cent from the previous year.
Large-scale solar jobs up, but rooftop and wind roles fall
In
Australia, large-scale solar was the only technology to register a
meaningful employment rise in 2014-15, albeit coming from a low base of
370 in 2013-14 up to 830.
Most of the fall in employment across 2014-15 was among those working in rooftop solar and wind energy.
The
number of people employed installing rooftop solar has collapsed from a
high of 14,300 four years ago to about 7500 this last financial year.
In
recent years, state and federal governments have reduced and axed
subsidies for rooftop solar. The subsidies had helped create an
installation boom but also attracted criticism for being overly
generous.
Australia has one of the highest penetrations of rooftop
solar in the world. The bureau found 19 per cent of suitable households
had solar systems installed up to December.
In wind energy, the
investment and construction in new projects largely stalled over the
last two years after former prime minister Tony Abbott's push to cut the
national renewable energy target, which was, ultimately, successful.
The target aims to have about 23 per cent of Australian electricity generated by clean technologies by the end of the decade.
There were 1230 jobs in wind energy last financial year, down from a high the previous year of 1720.
The Turnbull government has sought to assure investors it does not intend to change the renewable energy target again. However, some market observers say new projects may still not be built fast enough to avoid triggering target penalties that energy consumers will, ultimately, have to pay.
Industry expects turnaround
Recently, big energy firms, such as AGL and Origin, have declared they are again looking to invest in renewable power projects. Australia is also attracting increasing overseas investment interest in its clean energy sector.
Some state governments, including Victoria and Queensland, have also said they will ramp up support for clean energy.
Clean
Energy Council chief executive Kane Thornton said it was no surprise
job numbers had fallen in 2014-15, reflecting a difficult period for the
industry.
However, he said things were set to improve.
"A lot has changed since then, and confidence is growing across the sector after a challenging few years," Mr Thornton said.
"We
are gearing up for an intense period of delivering large-scale projects
such as wind and solar power plants between now and the end of the
decade, which will create more jobs and investment in regional areas of
the country."
Australian Conservation Foundation head Kelly
O'Shanassy used the bureau data to attack the federal government's
record on clean power, saying it had set the tone for the fall in jobs
by dragging out negotiations over cutting the target, and pushing to
axe clean energy agencies.
Direct full-time equivalent employment in renewable energy activities in Australia 2009-10 11,520 2010-11 17,010 2011-12 19,120 2012-13 16,930 2013-14 14,490 2014-15 14,020 Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics
