Lethal Heating: 05/06/16

06/05/2016

Labor Cites Climate, Solar And Storage In Budget Reply, Reopens Door For ARENA Funding

Renew Economy - Sophie Vorrath

Opposition leader Bill Shorten has put climate change and renewable energy firmly on federal Labor's economic agenda in his budget reply, while his party has re-opened the door to re-instating funds to the Australia Renewable Energy Agency, should it be elected.
Uttering those two words that were conspicuously absent from the Turnbull government's economic plan, Shorten told parliament on Thursday night that a Labor government would budget for "real action" on climate change, and help drive the new jobs and industries that would be created by renewable energy.

And he was quick to remind voters that his opposite number, Malcolm Turnbull, had seemingly abandoned his convictions on the issue, in accordance with the demands of the party's far right faction.
"Of course, advocating climate action is hard, and running a scare campaign against it is easy. Mr Turnbull should know – you've done both."
Beyond that, Labor's position on climate change and clean energy is shaping up to be in direct opposition to the Coalition's, which has consistently argued that too rapid a transition to renewables – and away from coal – would amount to economic suicide.
"Refusing to act on climate change will leave Australia isolated from the biggest economic opportunity of the next few decades," Shorten said in his speech.
"Taking real action on climate change will create new jobs, attract new international investment and power our industries and services.
"But delaying action will be a hit on Australians' cost of living, a drag on our nation's economic growth and an attack on our farmers' way of life.
"More than this – it would be a betrayal of the duty every generation owes the next – to hand down an environment in a better state than the one we inherited."
And on the subject of future funding for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency – the grant-based renewables support scheme that the Coalition wants to de-fund – the party appears to have had a rethink.
Labor, having helped set up ARENA, this week had a bizarre tantrum about continuing to support it, despite the fact that scrapping it would leave no avenue for government funding of the kind of early stage research that is vital to the development of better and cheaper renewable energy technology.
But the party has since clarified that it "will continue to support" ARENA, and was "committed to debt, equity and capital grant funding for the renewable energy sector" as crucial elements of its plan to reach 50 per cent renewable energy generation by 2030.
"ARENA's funding trajectory has been a political plaything of the Turnbull Government with the various changes over the term of this Government making it lumpy and sub optimal," shadow climate spokesman Mark Butler said in a statement.
"ARENA is fully funded for 2016/17 but we recognise that the balance of funds and programs needs further consideration to ensure that we have what is actually required to achieve our targets for the renewable revolution and deliver on the commitments in our Climate Change Action Plan.
"On winning government we will sit down with the ARENA board and work through exactly what is required.
Here is more of what Shorten said in his budget speech on climate and renewables:
"By 2030, there will be $2.5 trillion of investment in renewable energy in the Asia-Pacific. Australian workers should be collaborating with our universities and researchers to design, manufacture and export battery technology, solar panels and turbine parts.
"These are not niche markets or boutique industries. Embracing clean technology and renewable energy can revitalise advanced manufacturing in this country.
"In the last two years, the global economy added 2 million renewable energy jobs – but Australia lost 2,600. The world is powering ahead – and we are going in the wrong direction. It's time to turn things around. Which is why a Labor government will deliver 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030."

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Climate Change Authority Report Recommending 'A Mandatory Carbon Price' Held Back Until After Election

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

A report that recommends putting a price on emissions from the electricity sector has been held back by the Climate Change Authority until after the election, prompting calls from Labor and the Greens that it be made public to inform debate.
The independent authority, whose board is now dominated by appointments made last October by Environment Minister Greg Hunt, was to have released its policy options paper for the power industry by the end of April.
The board, though, decided to withhold the report - along with the large Special Review due out by June 30 - until after the election, "assuming it is called for early July," the authority said on its website.

Put a carbon price on the electricity sector, leaked report by the independent Climate Change Authority says. Photo: Michele Mossop

"Why would the authority not release something before the caretaker period?" a source said to Fairfax Media about the report on the power sector, which creates about one-third of Australia's carbon emissions.
Leaked details of the Climate Change Authority's electricity industry "policy options" report said "a mandatory carbon price of some form is desirable in the sector".
Mr Hunt, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other ministers have campaigned hard on Labor's plan to introduce a carbon price through an emissions trading scheme if election.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt during Question Time this week. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

That campaign stepped up a notch last week, after Labor revealed its climate policies, including setting up an emissions-intensity market to drive a shift to lower-polluting power stations.
Mr Hunt's first media release after Labor's policy was announced began: "Bill Shorten has announced a massive new electricity tax. It would have a devastating impact on the Australian economy, jobs, incomes and we would see power prices skyrocket."
Fairfax Media understands that board members - who number 10 in total and include Chief Scientist Alan Finkel - held a lengthy conference call on Thursday, April 29.
While Mr Hunt and his department did not intervene, his office was "very happy" that the electricity sector report's release was delayed, another source said.
A spokesman for Mr Hunt said his office had not seen the reports. He also dismissed the possibility that the government would have withheld a report favouring a wide-ranging carbon price on the eve of an election.
The CCA electricity report assessed the relative merits of different schemes, and found the emissions-intensive version (see "EI" in the following chart from the report) favoured by Labor to be among the cheaper options.

"The overall message is that an emissions trading scheme, even with serious caps or baselines, is not going to have big impacts on the economy, both immediately, and in the long term," one of the sources said.
A spokeswoman for the authority said: "The electricity modelling report has not been finalised and the authority will not be commenting on its internal deliberations."
However, it is understood some in the authority were wary that to release the reports so close to the election would inevitably expose the authority - and the validity of the carefully researched reports - to attacks.
Those wanting to scare voters about the cost of action would exaggerate the costs of any action, they said.
"A lot of people are very much in their bunkers [on this issue]," another source said. "There's a group of people who are still open to the issue", who might still be reached by carefully researched reports.
"Costs can be high but people have to remember that the costs of not doing something [to halt climate change] may be higher," the source said.
The authority was just trying to "give it the best opportunity for the report to be considered in a calmer environment", the source said.
Labor and the Greens, however, demand that the power sector report be released.
"If the government was confident that their Direct Action policy [to pay directly for carbon abatement] was effective, they wouldn't need to hide from this report," Mark Butler, Labor's environment spokesman, said.
"But Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull know their policy isn't the right policy and don't want that confirmed by the Climate Change Authority," he said.
"What else doesn't the government want the Australian public to know before going to the polls?"
Larissa Waters, the Greens deputy leader, said the authority should not "withhold information vital to Australians as they cast their votes during a climate crisis".
"It's crucial Australians have this information before the election, which falls at a tipping point for Australia to save our very way of life by embracing the clean energy revolution to create jobs and tackle global warming," Senator Waters said.
The Abbott government had tried to scrap the Climate Change Authority but was blocked in the Senate. The 2016 budget, released on Tuesday, does not include funding for the authority beyond next year.
Dr Finkel, the Chief Scientist, was not available for comment.

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Labor announces climate policy

Climate Change: United Nations' Ban Ki-Moon Says Time To Scale Up Climate Change Action

ABC News

Two weeks after the signing of the Paris climate deal, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki- moon has stressed the need for fast action against climate change. (AFP: Timothy A. Clary)

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned action on climate change must be faster and broader in order to turn the Paris deal promises to combat global warming into concrete measures. "It is time to take climate action to the next level," he told a gathering in Washington that included the mayors of New York and Paris, environmental campaigner Al Gore, business leaders and members of the US Congress.
"We need to accelerate the speed, scope and scale of our response, locally and globally."
The meeting, dubbed Climate Action 2016, came two weeks after 175 countries signed the Paris climate deal at the United Nations, raising hopes the landmark deal would be quickly ratified.
The Paris agreement will come into force when 55 countries responsible for 55 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases have ratified it.
"We cannot afford to lose momentum because with each passing day the climate challenge grows," World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said.
"It seems that every time we look it's worse than we thought," he added, citing record hot temperatures that have now "become the new norm".
Economic growth had already been affected, with some regions seeing a 6 per cent drop because of water scarcity alone, he said.
Agreed by 195 nations, the Paris deal sets the goal of limiting global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, by moving to clean energy.
French Environment Minister Segolene Royal sounded upbeat, saying there was a new awareness from many countries that were not fully committed to climate change.
Ms Royal said she wanted the Paris agreement to come into force before the end of this year.
China and the United States said they would ratify the Paris deal this year and are pushing for others to follow suit so the agreement becomes operational as early as the end of this year.
Mr Ban said he was convening a similar meeting to the Washington gathering in Beijing in September on the sidelines of the G20 summit to keep climate change high on the world agenda.

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Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change

The New Yorker - Elizabeth Kolbert

A helicopter flies past a wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, on Wednesday. The blaze has spread through an area covering more than three hundred square miles. Credit Photograph by Jason Franson / The Canadian Press / AP

The town of Fort McMurray, some four hundred miles north of Calgary, in Canada, grew up very quickly on both sides of the Athabasca River. During the nineteen-seventies, the population of the town tripled, and since then it has nearly tripled again. All this growth has been fuelled by a single activity: extracting oil from a Florida-sized formation known as the tar sands. When the price of oil was high, there was so much currency coursing through Fort McMurray's check-cashing joints that the town was dubbed "Fort McMoney." Now Fort McMurray is burning. A forest fire that began to the southwest of the town on Sunday has forced the entire population—almost ninety thousand people—to evacuate. On Wednesday, Alberta's provincial government declared a state of emergency. By yesterday, more than fifteen hundred buildings had been destroyed and the blaze had spread through an area covering more than three hundred square miles. It was burning so hot that that it was easily able to jump major rivers. One Canadian official described the fire as "catastrophic." Another called it a "multi-headed monster."
No one knows exactly how the fire began—whether it was started by a lightning strike or by a spark provided by a person—but it's clear why the blaze, once underway, raged out of control so quickly. Alberta experienced an unusually dry and warm winter. Precipitation was low, about half of the norm, and what snow there was melted early. April was exceptionally mild, with temperatures regularly in the seventies; two days ago, the thermometer hit ninety, which is about thirty degrees higher than the region's normal May maximum. "You hate to use the cliché, but it really was kind of a perfect storm," Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told the CBC.
Though it's tough to pin any particular disaster on climate change, in the case of Fort McMurray the link is pretty compelling. In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record. All of the top five years occurred in the last decade. In some areas, "we now have year-round fire seasons," Matt Jolly, a research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, recently told the Times.
"You can say it couldn't get worse," Jolly added, but based on its own projections, the forest service expects that it will get worse. According to a Forest Service report published last April, "Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970." Over the last three decades, the area destroyed each year by forest fires has doubled, and the service's scientists project that it's likely to "double again by midcentury." A group of scientists who analyzed lake cores from Alaska to obtain a record of forest fires over the last ten thousand years found that in recent decades, blazes were both unusually frequent and unusually severe. "This extreme combination suggests a transition to a unique regime of unprecedented fire activity," they concluded.
All of this brings us to what one commentator referred to as "the black irony" of the fire that has destroyed most of Fort McMurray.
The town exists to get at the tar sands, and the tar sands produce a particularly carbon-intensive form of fuel. (The fight over the Keystone XL pipeline is, at its heart, a fight over whether the U.S. should be encouraging —or, if you prefer, profiting from—the exploitation of the tar sands.) The more carbon that goes into the atmosphere, the warmer the world will get, and the more likely we are to see devastating fires like the one now raging.
To raise environmental concerns in the midst of human tragedy is to risk the charge of insensitivity. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alluded to this danger at a recent news conference: "Any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster, I think there's a bit of a shortcut that can sometimes not have the desired outcome." And certainly it would be wrong to blame the residents of Fort McMurray for the disaster that has befallen them. As Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist who is a Green Party member of British Columbia's provincial legislature, noted, "The reality is we are all consumers of products that come from oil."
But to fail to acknowledge the connection is to risk another kind of offense. We are all consumers of oil, not to mention coal and natural gas, which means that we've all contributed to the latest inferno. We need to own up to our responsibility and then we need to do something about it. The fire next time is one that we've been warned about, and that we've all had a hand in starting.

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