08/10/2016

A Dramatic New Plan To Fight Climate Change: Sue The Federal Government

Christian Science Monitor - Joseph Dussault

A new federal lawsuit alleges that the US government 'violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights' by enabling climate change.
Chris Pietsch/ The Register-Guard via AP
If  you want something done right, sometimes you have to do it yourself.
That’s the mindset behind a new federal lawsuit, filed by climatologist James Hansen and legal advocacy group Our Children’s Trust. The suit alleges that the US government “violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights” by enabling climate change. On Tuesday, Dr. Hansen published a new research paper offering scientific support for the case.
Political affiliation plays a major role in the way Americans perceive climate issues, recent studies find, and that polarization holds true among the country’s highest legislative powers. Could citizen litigation cut a valid path forward?
Hansen’s latest study, which is still under review by the journal Earth System Dynamics, isn’t particularly significant for its specific findings. Instead, the paper's value lies in its scope – it compiles various sources of existing research into a single document – and its clear, simple language.
“Jargon is a real problem that we scientists have in communicating with the public in general. We just aren't very good at it,” Hansen tells The Christian Science Monitor in an email. “When I was the director [of NASA’s Goddard Institute], I required the scientists to try to write a short summary of their published papers such that their mother would be able to understand it.”
“This was not always successful,” he adds. But when it is, scientific clarity can give a considerable boost to legal arguments for environmental action.
And litigation can be a powerful tool for environmentalists. In 2007’s Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court found that the EPA was responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The petitioners, which included 11 other states and several US cities, cited the 1963 Clean Air Act as the legal basis for their argument.
“The courts have been very important in implementing environmental policy – when Congress has passed a law they can apply,” Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law at Columbia University, tells the Monitor in an email. “The Supreme Court's 2007 decision … has been the foundation for most of the actions the Obama administration has taken on climate change.”
The approach wasn’t unique to the US court system, but its outcome was unusual. Only a handful of other cases, such as the 2015 Urgenda Foundation’s lawsuit against the Netherlands, have achieved similar success via the court system.
But a victory in court doesn't necessarily translate quickly into effective environmental results, says Justin Gundlach, a climate law fellow at Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, in a phone interview.
“Yes, the Bush administration EPA lost that case,” Mr. Gundlach says. “But what followed wasn’t a quick effort on the part of the EPA to go regulate greenhouse gas emissions. They promulgated an ‘Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking’ that sought input from stakeholders, and the administration left office before they got any further than that. There’s a lot of flexibility in government to hear what a court says and say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re working on it.’”
Meanwhile, Hansen and colleagues hinge their case on a lofty question: does the federal government have a constitutional responsibility to leave a “viable climate system” for future generations?
“It is the most fundamental concept in our Constitution and even our Declaration of Independence: all people have equal rights,” Hansen says. “They all have equal protection of the laws and cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property without ‘due process’ of law.”
Climate scientists have long warned that warming trends continue, general quality of life will drop on the global scale. Coastal communities are particularly vulnerable, facing certain property loss if sea levels continue to rise. And the youngest generation, Hansen says, will be footing the bill.
But with few clear legal precedents to draw from, the odds may be stacked against Hansen and Our Children’s Trust.
“The courts have been much less willing to act when there is no clear statutory basis,” Mr. Gerrard says. “No federal court has found a constitutional right to a clean environment. If this lawsuit succeeds and survives appeals, it would be a revolutionary development. But I wouldn't bet the farm on that happening.”
Regardless of the outcome, Hansen and colleagues acknowledge that litigation isn’t the only solution. Sometimes it’s the debate, rather than the outcome, which holds the power to create change.
“I think that it is essential, because our Congress and even the executive branch of government are so strongly under the influence of the fossil fuel industry,” Hansen says. “However, it is not enough. People concerned about climate change need to affect the political process.”
“I would hope that people would look at this and find that it’s something worth paying attention to,” Gundlach says. “My concern, of course, is that it’s a court case. It’s one side versus the other, and the way such things tend to be covered is like a sporting event. That’s always the risk when you litigate over anything, that the substance of the argument falls by the wayside and the attention is paid to who’s in the lead.”

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The Ghanaian Villages Destroyed By Climate Change – In Pictures

The Guardian - Nyani Quarmyne

Worsening coastal and riverine erosion is sweeping away homes and livelihoods on the Ghana coast. Photographer Nyani Quarmyne visited the small fishing village of Totope, which was once three miles from the sea but has now virtually disappeared

A seven-year-old boy looks through a window in the sand-filled remains of a house destroyed by the encroaching sea. Photograph: Nyani Quarmyne/Panos Pictures
Every morning the women of Totope sweep the beach and bury the rubbish that has been swept down the coast overnight from the cities of Accra and Tema. As the sea continues to advance on the village it periodically buries homes in sand and rubbish. Photograph: Nyani Quarmyne/Panos Pictures

Could Household Battery Storage Have Prevented SA Blackout?

Renew Economy

Energy experts are still scratching their heads about what they could have done to prevent the massive, state-wide blackout that occurred in the midst of a one-in-50-years storm last month. The answer may lay inside South Australian homes. Or at least, it should do. And it’s battery storage.
Dean Spaccavento, the CEO of Australian energy management software company Reposit Power, says battery storage placed in thousands of homes in Adelaide and the surrounding region – and linked through smart software – could have provided the emergency supply to help stabilise the network at its moment of crisis.
Image courtesy of Off-Grid Energy Australia: offgridenergy.com.au
In a matter of seconds, the interconnector became overloaded as it made up for lost power on the South Australia network following the catastrophic series of events that saw three of the main transmission lines disconnect as pylons crashed to the ground.
Battery storage, Spaccavento says, could have provided the emergency system back-up. “That would have stopped the cascading dominoes,” he says. And not a lot would have been required.
To provide 50MW, possibly enough to prevent the Heywood line from going over its overload capacity, the number of homes with linked battery storage would have to have been around 12,500. If the amount needed was 250MW, then it would have required 50,000 households. Around 200,000 households in the state already have rooftop solar.
Reposit Power’s comments are timely, given that the state and federal energy ministers are meeting tomorrow, and on their agenda is a report from the CSIRO about battery storage.
Hopefully, it will be a little more up to date than the AEMO chairman’s report at the last COAG meeting a few weeks ago, when he said that battery storage would not be competitive for up to two decades.
ACT energy minister Simon Corbell found those comments remarkable, and wrong. And as David Leitch writes in this analysis (and advice to federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg advisors) battery storage may already be commercial. Certainly, some networks think so.
Indeed, Reposit Power has written a letter to the ministers asking them to consider the role this aggregated clean energy system plays in keeping the grid balanced.
Reposit’s COO Luke Osborne said “Australian households can provide a cheap and bullet-proof solution to ensuring Australia’s future energy stability.”
The idea that storage could have helped avoid the crisis is not new. AGL, which operates the biggest gas generator in the state, said earlier this week that the best way to offer energy security was through distributed generation and storage and micro-grids, and this could only happen with renewable energy.
That’s the trick with battery storage, to unlock its value streams; no easy task in a grid designed to operate with decades old technology and even older thinking. AGL is having a go, by trialling a scheme that links household storage to make a  “virtual power plant”, and SA Power Networks is conducting trials of its own.
The attraction is that much of the investment for battery storage would come from the households themselves, although the government might want to consider subsidies to reduce the cost.
Providing these services – responding to peak demand and providing emergency back-up, can add to the revenue stream of the battery owner, over and above the time shifting they use for their rooftop solar.

In a briefing Reposit Power wrote for Senator Nick Xenophon, Spaccavento said system security would be increased with each added (linked) battery, and it would mean added value to households and increased private investment in the grid.
“Scaling of this business model will solve South Australia’s grid instability,” the briefing said. But it said initiatives, such as the ACT government’s “Next Gen” battery storage program, would accelerate the uptake and help overcome market barriers.
Osborne, who used to work for a wind energy developer and lives under a wind farm, says the interim reports into the outage from AEMO have shown that South Australia’s energy infrastructure was not strong enough for the force of the fierce storms of September 28.
Transmission lines fell, some wind farms lost output, more than half of the state’s gas capacity was offline or unavailable, or simply too slow to respond. And when the interconnector became overloaded, it too disconnected.
What an energy market operator needs most of all in a crisis is time. The interim AEMO report shows that the crisis played out in less than a minute, the most dramatic events occurring in the space of a few seconds, or even fractions of seconds.
That’s what makes battery storage so attractive. It can respond in milliseconds, providing network support, or outright power – sometimes for only short periods of time. But quite possibly enough for the operator to marshal its defences and get slow-moving gas generators online and other support.
Spaccavento points out that battery storage could not be expected to power the state for any lengthy period. It is designed to hold the system steady for a short period of time so the operator can look at other long-term solutions.
“On September 28, we don’t know what happens next. But storage could have given the operator time to find another option,” he told RenewEconomy.
One of those options could have been creating enough time for the unused gas generation to ramp up and provide more capacity, reducing the load on the interconnector. Although, frankly, there was no of knowing what the impact of the transmission lines would have been.
Spaccavento says, however, that the grid had held up remarkably well considering what was thrown at it.
“This was pretty much a power system apocalypse,” he said. “It’s amazing that it stayed (online) as long as it did. The state got torn apart.” And, he noted, it was interesting that no wind farms tripped, and most of their capacity was still there until the interconnector failed and all generators tripped at the last moment.
Osborne compares what happened in South Australia to the children’s book “Who sank the boat”. That’s when “a cow, a pig, a donkey, a sheep and a tiny mouse go for a row, but one of them sinks the boat.”
The mouse is blamed because it was the last one in. It was kind of what happened in South Australia – it was the last 50MW strain on the interconnector that eventually ended all resistance, and the system sank.

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