Lethal Heating: 09/01/16

01/09/2016

Climate Change Authority Cops Out – Just When We Need It Most

Renew Economy - Christine Milne

Following his gutting of CSIRO and ARENA, Malcolm Turnbull has ransacked the Climate Change Authority. Once an institution at the heart of politics charged with prioritising science and depoliticising climate policy, it has been turned into an instrument which ducks its mandate, suppresses climate science and is politically partisan. Its latest report is a cop out.
It is a sad end. I am personally deeply distressed to see the era of credible science based advice from the Climate Change Authority come to an end and with it the respect that it had garnered from the wider community.
With its reputation in tatters, it will drag on as another impediment to the radical action that addressing climate change requires but its days as an agreed and respected arbiter of what the science requires is over. I pay tribute to Dr Clive Hamilton and Professor David Karoly for their passionate adherence to what the science requires and for having stayed the course.
The Climate Change Authority was an important new institution in determining climate policy on Australia. The Greens argued for its establishment during the negotiation of the Clean Energy Package with the Gillard Government.
We had observed the role the Climate Council had played in the UK in recommending targets to Government. It served two critical roles. First it recommended to Parliament greenhouse gas emission reduction targets consistent with what the science required to keep global warming to less than 2'degrees. Secondly, by doing so it depoliticised the targets allowing all parties on every side of politics to embrace them in the face of opposition from vested interests whether they be unions or big business.
In the Australian context, the Labor Party and the Australian Greens had not been able to agree on an appropriate emission reduction target. At the UNFCCC COP meeting in Bali in 2007, the world agreed developed countries should reduce their emissions by between 25-40% by 2020. Australia under the Rudd Government disagreed and forced the removal of the 25-40% target from the agreed text to a footnote.
PM Rudd then declared Australia's target to be 5%. The Australian Greens determined that Australia as a developed nation should adopt the 40% target and begin a serious transition to a low carbon economy arguing that this would be less costly or as disruptive as a forced rapid transition later.
In the Multi Party Climate Change Committee established under the Minority Gillard Government, both parties and independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, together with experts like Ross Garnaut, all agreed a mechanism was required to break the impasse between what the science required and what the politics would allow. The Climate Change Authority was that mechanism.
It was agreed that an emissions trading scheme would be legislated with a fixed price period of three years transitioning to a floating price by 2015. That would enable serious emissions reduction to begin while a new institution, The Climate Change Authority got on with the job of determining what that target should be and to recommend that to Government in time to be legislated to enable the transition to a floating price.
It was essential that the work of the Authority be scientifically credible and politically independent or else its recommendations and target would not depoliticise climate as is required for the parliament and nation to progress realistic, timely, climate policy.
By stacking the Climate Change Authority Board, Malcolm Turnbull has ransacked the independent arbiter and politicised the formal advice given to Parliament. He has destroyed yet another critical policy institution when we need it most. Who will now credibly advise the Australian Parliament on what action the science demands?

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Josh Frydenberg Plays Down Climate Change Authority Call For Tougher Emissions Limits

The Guardian - Paul Karp

Environment minister says government has no plans to introduce emissions trading schemes and claims Australia is on track to meet target

Josh Frydenberg, right, and the finance minister, Mathias Cormann. Frydenberg has attacked a Climate Change Authority report calling for tougher climate policies. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

The Coalition's energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, has hit back at a report from the Climate Change Authority calling for Australia to toughen its climate policies.
Frydenberg said the government had no plans to tighten limits on emissions by the biggest polluters and the Climate Change Authority's advice to introduce two emissions trading schemes was a "report to, not by, government" and committed only to a review of its policies in 2017.
On Wednesday the Climate Change Authority advised the Australian government to institute two emissions trading schemes and strengthen regulations in order to meet Australia's 2030 emission reduction targets and to allow it to lift those targets in line with international climate change obligations.
The review, commissioned by the former environment minister Greg Hunt, recommended the government strengthen its "safeguards" policy, which sets limits on how much greenhouse gas Australia's biggest polluters can emit but is now so generous it doesn't act to reduce emissions.
Speaking with Radio National on Thursday, Frydenberg noted the report was commissioned as part of a deal with the Palmer United party to scrap the carbon tax.
"This report does underline the fact the world needs to work together to reduce emissions to meet the challenge of climate change," he said.
Frydenberg said Australia was on track to beat its 2020 emissions target by 78m tonnes. He said the government would review its climate policies in 2017.
Although Australia is on track to meet its 2020 target of a 5% cut by 2000, the government's emissions reduction fund has been criticised as insufficient to the task of cutting emissions by between 26% and 28% by 2030.
Asked how Australia would achieve the "hard work" of more dramatic cuts to emissions after 2020, Frydenberg said: "The hard work is going on now, to be honest, and there will continue to be hard work going forward."
On Sky News, asked about the CCA's recommendation for an intensity-based emissions trading scheme for the electricity sector, Frydenberg said electricity generation was one third of Australia's emissions.
He said the government had "no plans to change the baselines on the safeguard mechanism".
"We'll see where the [2017] review goes, we're a long way from that, it's next year."
On Radio National he said his job as environment and energy minister required him to get "affordable energy, because households and businesses are very vulnerable to higher electricity prices".
He noted that coal is falling as a proportion of Australia's electricity mix, being replaced by gas and renewables.
Frydenberg defended the government's decision to cut $1.3bn from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. The move is supported by Labor but opposed by the Greens.
"We'll continue to support Arena and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation," Frydenberg said.
He said, "We have transitioned the grant program to a loan program", although he conceded this included a $1.3bn saving to the budget bottom line.

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Adani Should Bow Out Gracefully From Its Carmichael Coal Mine

The Conversation - John Quiggin

It may not be coal for Christmas for Adani, unless it gets its foot in the ground. Coal image from www.shutterstock.com

The rejection by the Federal Court of the most serious remaining legal challenges to the proposed Carmichael mine in Queensland's Galilee Basin means it is finally time for the project's proponent, Adani Mining, to put its money where its mouth has been.
For several years, Adani has been blaming its failure to proceed with the mine on legal obstacles. Most of these obstacles were cleared by 2015. A report in February cited a "top Adani Group executive" saying that operations should start in August 2016.
By the time of the final approval from the Queensland government in April, the group was talking about unspecified "secondary approvals" and saying "we hope that construction would start any time in 2017".
This timetable was repeated after the most recent court decisions. While some court challenges to government approvals remain, it does not appear that any of these would prevent a start to construction, given that the approvals are now in place.

Coal price waning
At the same time, the incentives for an early start are stronger than they have been for some time. The price of thermal coal has risen by 30%, primarily as a result of action by the Chinese government to close uneconomic mines and support the profitability of those that remain.
Few analysts expect this rise to be sustained indefinitely. China has signalled its intention to limit its reliance on coal-fired electricity. This is both because of its contribution to global warming and because of the health effects of burning coal in urban areas, which causes tens of thousands of deaths every year.
The same is true of the Indian market, for which Adani's exports are supposed to be destined. India's coal imports have grown rapidly but are now being squeezed on both the supply and demand sides of the market.
On the supply side, the publicly owned monopoly Coal India is expanding production and private firms are being allowed access to coal reserves.
On the demand side, coal-fired electricity is facing increasingly stiff competition from renewables, most notably solar PV.
Adani Enterprises, from which Adani Mining was spun off last year, is among the major investors in renewables. And, a little later than in China, the Indian government and people are waking up to the disastrous health effects of burning coal. Several "ultra mega power projects" (massive coal-fired power plants) were cancelled recently. More are likely to follow.
So the long-term trend for coal demand and coal prices can only be down from the current peak, itself far below the A$120 per tonne that prevailed when the Galilee Basin project was first put forward in 2010. It follows that there is no time to lose in developing the Carmichael mine, if it is ever to be profitable.

Woes for Galilee coal
But before construction can begin, Adani needs to undertake substantial engineering design work, hire contractors and secure billions of dollars in financing. There is no sign that this is happening.
The engineering team from Worsley Parsons and the construction group from Korean steelmaker Posco (also a supposed equity partner) were sacked in 2015. A A$2 billion announcement of work for Downer EDI seems to have vanished into thin air.
The situation with finance is even worse. A long list of banks and other funding sources have announced they won't finance the project, or have pulled out of announced and existing finance arrangements.
The list includes the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (formerly a big lender to Adani), NAB, the Queensland Treasury and global banks, including Standard Chartered (another former big lender), Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Barclays, as well as BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole and Societe Generale. The US and Korean Export-Import banks and the State Bank of India have been touted as possible sources, but appear to have backed away.
It gets worse. The Carmichael mine is part of a larger plan to develop five megamines in the Galilee Basin. The economics of the rail line and port expansion needed to transport coal from Carmichael depend on the assumption that the costs will be shared across these mines.
But these projects are in far worse straits than Adani's. GVK, the Indian conglomerate that owns the Alpha, Kevin's Corner and Alpha West deposits, is in deep financial trouble. Its Australian partners, Aurizon (the privatised Queensland Rail) and Hancock Prospecting (owned by Gina Rinehart), have written off their investments. GVK's March 2016 financial statements did not even mention the Galilee Basin assets.
GVK looks healthy compared to the other major owner of Galilee Basin assets, Clive Palmer. In a desperate attempt to stave off the bankruptcy of his Queensland Nickel corporation, he tried to offload the coal deposits owned by his Waratah Coal company onto Adani, and use the mooted sale proceeds to secure credit from Aurizon. Neither party was interested.
Until now, Adani has blamed the endless delays in its project on legal challenges. But the time for excuses has run out. Adani should admit that this economically and environmentally disastrous project will never go ahead, and focus its attention completely on the renewable energy technologies in which it is already a major player.

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Can Humanity Survive The 21st Century?

Springer

Humanity's Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them

Humanity and our civilisation are facing the greatest challenge in the million-year ascent of our species. It consists of the coming-together of ten huge, man-made threats, which are now combining to imperil our future.
Surviving the 21st Century: humanity's ten great challenges and how we can overcome them (Springer 2017) is a powerful new book exploring these risks – ecological collapse, resource depletion, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, global poisoning, food crises, population and urban overexpansion, pandemic disease, dangerous new technologies and self-delusion – and what can and should be done to limit them.
Citing the world's latest and most authoritative science, author Julian Cribb explains clearly and in plain English the focal issue of human existence in our time – and what humanity as a whole and we, as individuals, can do about it.
"Over recent years I've encountered many well-educated, well-informed people – scientists, parents and grandparents and millennials especially – who expressed the fear that we may be entering the end game of human history. That civilisation, and maybe even our species, will not survive the compound dangers we are building for ourselves," the Australian science writer explains.
"Surviving the 21st Century assesses whether they are right or wrong. It surveys the objective evidence for these ten mega-issues – and what we can and should do as a species and as individual citizens to overcome them," he says.
"Existential risk is not a cheerful topic – but with ten or eleven billion people crowded onto a heating, resource-depleted and over-weaponised planet, it is something that all of us now face. Ignoring it will not make it go away."
The third volume in Cribb's scientific trilogy about the human future, Surviving the 21st Century explores in detail the scientific evidence for the ten intersecting existential threats, and the importance of developing cross-cutting solutions that do not make matters worse in other areas.
"To take one example, many of the solutions now being adopted by industry and governments to sustain the world food supply also involve making the climate worse for agriculture, create water scarcity, ruin more landscapes, extinguish more species, throw small farmers off their land and spawn a worldwide consumer health crisis. In other words, they mostly defeat their very purpose.
"However the good news is that there are ways to produce food that involve ameliorating the climate, repairing landscapes, saving water and endangered species, raising farmers' incomes and improving consumer health. It is these cross-cutting solutions the world needs to discuss and pursue."
The book also probes two controversial themes. The first is whether our cherished beliefs in areas such as money, politics, religion and the human narrative now hinder our recognising the real risks we face and prevent us solving them together – and how these powerful human artefacts can be reinvented to focus on our survival.
The second questions whether our species, Homo sapiens (wise man) is fit to bear the title and whether or not our collective behaviour can be described as 'wise'.
Surviving the 21st Century also identifies uplifting and positive solutions, being developed around the world, to our most pressing problems. And it explores two paradigm-shattering developments in society – the evolution of our ability to 'think as a species' through global connections made at lightspeed on the internet, and the emergence of women as world leaders to a safer, more sustainable future.
Finally, it sets out a 'report card' which will enable the whole world to judge how well we are progressing towards a safer, more sustainable future.

The author: Julian Cribb FTSE is an Australian science writer and former newspaper editor, with over thirty awards for journalism to his credit. The author of 9 books and 8000 media articles, his other works in this series include The Coming Famine (UCP 2010), chosen as a 'Book of the Times' by the NY Times, and Poisoned Planet (Allen&Unwin 2014).

The book: Surviving the 21st Century: humanity's ten great challenges and how we can overcome them by Julian Cribb is published by Springer NY, 2017. ISBN 978-3-319-41269-6. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41270-2 is available online in softback and e-book formats from the following suppliers and from quality book shops.

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