Climate Change: John Hewson Accuses Coalition Of 'National Disgrace'

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Former Liberal leader says climate should be dominant issue of election campaign rather than ‘short-term politicking’ 

The former Liberal leader and Wentworth MP John Hewson says the wider community is ‘way ahead’ of political and business leaders on climate change. Photograph: Michael Slezak for the Guardian

The former Liberal leader John Hewson addressed an estimated 2000 people protesting in the Sydney suburb of Double Bay – minutes from Malcolm Turnbull’s harbourside mansion – calling on the prime minister to take stronger action on climate change.
Speaking at the same time as Turnbull addressed the party faithful at the Coalition’s campaign launch, Hewson told protesters the Coalition’s lack of action on climate change was a “national disgrace”.
“I think climate change should be the dominant issue of this campaign – it should have been for quite some time,” said Hewson, who was once the local member for the seat of Wentworth, which includes Double Bay.
He said “short-term politicking” from both sides left targets that were inadequate and policies that were not going to meet those targets.
“The one thing that hasn’t failed is people like yourselves,” he said. “The community is way ahead of the political leaders and the business leaders on this issue.”
He urged the crowd to push political leaders for a bipartisan approach to climate change. “Enough is enough, it’s time to act,” Hewson said.
A spokesperson from GetUp, which organised the protest in coalition with three other environment groups, estimated there were about 2000 people in the crowd.
Protesters were given placards in the shape of coral, which were coloured on one side, and white on the other, which symbolised the devastating bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. They turned them around for the cameras, while chanting “Choose the reef, not coal”.

Protestors in fancy dress at the #climatefizza rally. Photograph: Michael Slezak for the Guardian

Robert Shelly, who lives in Vaucluse, attended the protest with his two-year-old daughter, Ariella, and her dog. “We come from a family with a big environmental conscience. It’s a very important issue and it’s been completely ignored by the mainstream,” he said.
Paula Brook, who lives in Woollahra, said she was motivated to come to the protest after seeing the Australian Conservation Foundation’s scorecard, which said the Coalition’s environmental policies were “woefully inadequate”.
“The Coalition was really far down, and this is Malcolm Turnbull’s electorate and so it was important to show him that people care about environmental issues,” she said.

A sizeable crowd in Malcolm Turnbull's electorate calling for stronger action on climate change. Photograph: Michael Slezak for the Guardian

The crowd was also addressed by Dr Kate Charlesworth, who was until recently a Wentworth resident and previously worked at the sustainable development unit at the National Health Service in the UK. She said although climate change was a great risk to human health, and a health emergency, actions that would mitigate climate change had the potential to be a great boost to human health.
“Things like active transport – walking and cycling – improved diets with more plant based foods; looking at the causes of air pollution; reducing traffic congestion; healthier cities with more green space and tree cover. All these things will have tremendous benefits to human health,” she said.
Michael Borgas, a climate scientist at the CSIRO also addressed the crowd, calling on the government to fund climate science, following the news that the CSIRO was making significant cuts to its climate research.

Message to Malcolm Turnbull at rally in Wentworth. Photograph: Michael Slezak for the Guardian

Tony Fontes, a Great Barrier Reef diving instructor, also spoke, calling for stronger climate action to protect the reef. “We’ve just seen the greatest, most devastating bleaching event in the history of the reef and we’re going to see more.”
Lyndon Schneiders, the national director for the Wilderness Society, which helped organise the protest, said: “Malcolm Turnbull must do more to address climate change. The Great Barrier Reef is dying on Mr Turnbull’s watch and yet his government sticks to its inadequate Direct Action policy.”
Nikola Casule from Greenpeace – another organiser of the protest – said Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions were growing and forecast to increase until 2030. “The science is clear – the world needs to stop emitting greenhouse gases but our emissions are going in the other direction.”

Protesters turn their coral around to symbolize its bleaching.  Photograph: Michael Slezak for the Guardian

The protest caps three days of protesting in Turnbull’s electorate.
On Friday Greenpeace activists hung a banner from Turnbull’s electorate office in Edgecliff, saying: “Turnbull’s Legacy: bleaching – brought to you by Malcolm’s mates in the coal industry.”
And on Saturday, a group of 50 pacific islanders kayaked from Blues Point to Lady Martin’s beach, mere metres from Turnbull’s harbourside mansion, raising awareness of climate change and sea level rise.

Links

• Business and academic leaders urge new conversation about coal-free future
• How the Coalition is using clean energy financing as an election slush fund
• Climate change: Australia's big banks urged to reject new loans for coal projects
• Saving Great Barrier Reef from climate change should be central election issue, says Tim Flannery
• Labor proposes two emissions trading schemes costing $355.9m

Coalition's 'War On Solar' Has Sector Cutting Back, Industry Groups Say

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Australia's solar energy sector is facing further job losses amid falling numbers of new rooftop installations amid a lack of support during the Abbott-Turnbull governments, industry representatives say.
New investment in household and small businesses installing systems with less than 100-kilowatt capacity has dropped to a seven-year low, with Coalition policies largely to blame, John Grimes, chief executive of the Australian Solar Council, said.

Setting sun on solar?: Industry highlights drop in new installations. Photo: Justin McManus

"The sunburnt country has burnt its solar industry," Mr Grimes said. "Thousands of jobs have been lost and hundreds of small businesses have closed their doors."
Mr Grimes cited a range of policies during the past three years, such as the failed bids by the Abbott government to eliminate the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), and the broken promise to support 1 million additional solar-powered homes, that amounted to a "ideological war on solar".
Even after September's change in prime minister to Malcolm Turnbull, the Coalition still had no solar target, no target for renewable energy beyond 2020, and had "not provided one supportive policy" for the industry, Mr Grimes said.
(See chart below of new installations according to the Clean Energy Regulator, including figures for the first four months of 2016.)
Darren Gladman, solar policy manager at the Clean Energy Council, attributed the drop of solar installations in part to the winding back of generous state schemes.
He noted, though, that unease among investors over the Abbott government's handling of the review of the 2020 Renewable Energy Target had also dented demand for small-scale solar.
While solar panel penetration had reached saturation point in some parts of the country, Labor and the Greens were both offering policies worth about $100 million to open up new areas of demand such as among renters and low-income houses, Mr Gladman said.
"If you're not able to access solar, you're paying more for electricity than you otherwise could," he said.
According to the Clean Energy Council's Annual Report, the drop in installations has occurred in most states and territories since the peak year of 2011. (See chart below.)
Kobad Bhavnagri, head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance in Australia, said "the government has basically not touched the rooftop sector".
While ditching the pre-2013 election pledge of 1 million additional solar homes amounted to a broken promise by the Coalition, "it was pretty rational to not introduce further subsidies to a well-supported sector which is already economical", Mr Bhavnagri said.
Under the existing renewable energy target, households get a reduction in the up-front capital costs of a new system of about 30 per cent.
According to Bloomberg NEF data, last year a typical household could expect savings on their electricity bills to pay off the cost of their systems in six years. By 2030, further advances in technology should lower that to five years.
The cost of batteries, which have the potential to bolster solar panels' appeal, now have a payoff period of about 19 years but that should drop to eight years by 2030, Bloomberg predicts.
(See Bloomberg chart below showing solar module costs in US dollars diving 80 per cent since 2008.)
While the residential market is struggling, the industry is increasingly turning to commercial customers, Mr Gladwell said. These now account for about 30 per cent of sales by capacity.
The industry is also looking to large-scale solar farms as a growth area as uncertainty over the 2020 Renewable Energy Target recedes. Earlier this month, the NSW government gave planning approval for four new plants that would double the state's existing solar farm capacity.

Links

• UNSW researchers break world record for solar cell efficiency
• NSW to double existing solar farm capacity with four new plants approved
• Solar surge to leave large power companies in the shade
• Australia 10th In Global Solar Capacity As Industry Looks Ahead To Sunnier Times

This Chart Perfectly Explains What’s At Stake In The Quest To Stop Climate Change

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

This image provided by NASA shows Arctic sea ice at it maximum, the lowest on record. The winter maximum level of Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest on record, thanks to extraordinarily warm temperatures, federal scientists said. The National Snow and Ice Data Center says sea ice spread to a maximum of 5.607 million square miles in 2016. That's 5,000 square miles less than the old record set in 2015, a difference slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut. (NASA via AP)

Here at the Energy and Environment blog, we cover, regularly, the tipping points of climate change — how, for instance, the glaciers of West Antarctica may already have passed a key threshold that leads to unstoppable melt.
We cover the history of the Earth's climate — including why the Holocene era, which began some 11,700 years ago and we lived in up until fairly recently (when many researchers believe an "Anthropocene" began), was so stable and conducive to human civilization.
And of course we cover the quest to keep warming below the Paris climate targets, 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees Celsius, and the scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions that might be capable of doing that — and also those that can't.
But these are all complicated, nuanced stories, and the idea that they can all be pulled together into one analysis — much less one figure — is hard to believe.
Nonetheless, I think three researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have done precisely that with the image below, which is part of an optimistic essay they just published in Nature Climate Change, suggesting that the recently negotiated Paris climate agreement has what it takes to stabilize climate change. In the process, the researchers deliver the sort of rare big picture analysis that we mortals need now and again to understand why scientists are generally so freaked about a warming climate, and also why, in this case, they're feeling a shard of hope.
Here's the image, with unpacking to follow:

Schellnhuber et al., Nature Climate Change. The figure shows, according to the authors, the "global mean surface temperature evolution from the Last Glacial maximum through the Holocene," combined with the temperature range aspired to in the Paris climate agreement, possible temperature rises for different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP8.5, and so on), and the tipping point thresholds for various major planetary changes.

"Earth system science has come of age and can provide robust evidence for the intuitive assumption that it is not a good idea to leave the 'safe operating space' of humanity, and that this space is well within the Paris confines," Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Stefan Rahmstorf and Ricarda Winkelmann of the Potsdam Institute write in the study that contains the image. "The sustenance of Holocene climate conditions under which Homo sapiens thrived while the Neolithic Revolution established human civilization was an early key argument in favour of the 2 °C guardrail," they further note. Both quotations summarize the key point of the image: The Paris agreement, if implemented successfully with its targets respected — and especially the lower boundary, 1.5 degrees C —  gives hope of keeping us from exceeding tipping points that would erase the key climatic parameters that sustained our very development.
That's a pretty big deal.
To show this, the graphic blends together four key elements — where current temperatures are in the context of the last 22,000 years, including the stable period that fostered modern humanity; where the Paris climate agreement aspires to hold temperatures and how that fits into this context; how high temperatures could rise under various greenhouse gas emissions scenarios; and which major parts of the climate system could be "tipped" at different temperature ranges.
"This graphic is really based basically on the advances made by the entire climate research community over I would say the last two decades," Winkelmann said in an interview. It "sort of summarizes what we know right now about tipping elements, and how the risk increases with increasing global warming to tip one of these major, major parts of the climate system. And you can really see the tipping elements as the major Achilles heel of the climate system."
The authors' argument is not, of course, that we'll be perfectly safe if the Paris agreement is successfully implemented. We're already seeing devastating losses to coral reefs — which, the image suggests, are the single most vulnerable element in the entire system — a plunge in Arctic sea ice, and, many scientists think, a tipping point for West Antarctica.
These are among the most sensitive elements of the Earth's climate system, and as the figure shows, we start fiddling with them even before we enter the Paris temperature range between 1.5 and 2 degrees C.
Nonetheless, if we exceed the Paris boundaries, we appear increasingly likely to commit to irreversible changes in these areas. "Beyond 2 °C the course would be set for a complete deglaciation of the Northern Hemisphere, threatening the survival of many coastal cities and island nations," they write.
And blundering further, we could subject ourselves to many other risks. Those include, in the figure above, shutting down the ocean's "thermohaline" or overturning circulation (THC), changing the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in favor of more dominant El Nino conditions, and also tipping the gigantic ice mass of East Antarctica (EAIS). (For a full description of these tipping points or "elements," see here.)
"There are some that could possibly already be switched within the Paris range, and then there's another cluster of tipping elements, where we have the chance to avoid tipping those for even higher temperatures," Winkelmann said. She notes that many of the tipping elements involve a feedback process: Greenland's ice sheet, for instance, will lose elevation as it melts, subjecting it to warmer temperatures in the lower atmosphere, which will cause more melt. And so on.
Granted, in any given case, some scientists might fear or suspect that some of these tipping points are closer to us than the diagram above suggests. The Amazon, the boreal or northern forest, the Atlantic ocean's circulation, northern permafrost and East Antarctica are already showing signs of changes. But the researchers think these systems might nonetheless be more resilient.
Energy and Environment newsletter The science and policy of environmental issues. They go on to argue a more difficult point — that we just might see an "exponential" growth of wind and solar that is sufficient to, in turn, trigger an "implosion" of the fossil fuel industry and thus help keep within the Paris targets. Something at least this dynamic would be needed to get the world to stop emitting fast enough to stay within the temperature "guardrail" above, without relying on pie-in-the-sky technological fixes like so-called negative carbon emissions.
The truth is that renewables are growing very rapidly right now, but from a low level of penetration, and the precise technological evolution of our energy system remains unclear.
Still, nobody can claim that scientists haven't made clear what's at stake.
"One could basically say that what we're doing today with greenhouse gas emissions — which is just basically in a moment when you look at the geophysical timescales — that has consequences for decades, centuries, millennia," Winkelmann said.

Links

• The math the planet relies on isn't adding up right now
• As Greenland melts, one of its most famous glaciers is creating terrifying tsunamis
• Virgin Atlantic just used behavioral science to 'nudge' its pilots into using less fuel. It worked
• Obama's advisers just dismantled a key myth about the future of clean energy