Lethal Heating: 10/10/16

10/10/2016

Finkel Power Review Should Look Into Climate Policies

Fairfax - Mark Ludlow

The Turnbull government's new power review should have been expanded into climate change, says energy experts. Phil Carrick

The Turnbull government's review of energy security is duplicating existing inquiries but missing a key piece of the puzzle – the nation's climate change policies, according to energy experts.
State and federal ministers on Friday agreed to establish the new independent review headed by chief scientist Alan Finkel – which will deliver its preliminary report before Christmas – in the wake of the disastrous blackouts in South Australia last month.
But experts said there were already multiple reviews on the National Electricity Market being done by the Australian Energy Market Operator, Australian Energy Market Commission and the Australian Energy Regulator looking into energy security and adapting rules to deal with the influx of renewable energy. The missing piece of the puzzle is how to marry this to climate change policy.
"This is really a review of the reviews. I don't think it makes sense to do a review of the NEM without including climate change policies," Grattan Institute energy program director Tony Wood told The Australian Financial Review.

"Sadly, the [Finkel] review's terms of reference fail to recognise the elephant in the room – the absence of a federal policy to reduce electricity emissions in line with Australia's committed 2030 target."

The Turnbull government has committed to a 2017 review of its Direct Action climate change policies, including the $2.5 billion Emissions Reduction Fund and so-called safeguard mechanism for big polluters.
But Mr Wood said the pace of change in the NEM, including problems with the integration of renewables into the nation's energy mix, meant the Turnbull government should consider bringing the review forward.
Other energy observers believe last Friday's "extraordinary" Council of Australian Governments energy council meeting was more about political positioning than genuine action.
The agenda for the meeting, including looking at battery storage, interconnectors and issues arising from more solar and wind projects in the NEM, was essentially the same as the last COAG energy council meeting in August.

Kobad Bhavnagri, head of Australia for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said the fact energy security had become a paramount concern for federal and state governments demonstrated "the cost of nearly 10 years of shambolic energy policymaking".
"Renewables undoubtedly make system management more complex. However, opposing or limiting the uptake of renewables is, in our view, a retrograde response, which ignores the imperative to decarbonise," he said.
Mr Bhavnagri said the energy sector was concerned Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had used the aftermath of the South Australian blackout to attack state-based renewable targets saying it had re-politicised the debate.
"Notwithstanding the cause, the statewide blackout shows the need for management of the electricity system to evolve. Instead, work needs to be done to evolve and improve the current system to facilitate technological change," he said.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance's report on the SA blackout found that while the focus has been on wind power disconnecting from the grid, fossil-fuel generators also failed.
"The two back-up generators that are paid to provide emergency power to restart major suppliers failed. Notably, the fact that these fossil-fuelled facilities failed to provide reliable supply and fulfil their primary function has received little media scrutiny," it found.

AEMO's preliminary review of the SA's "system black" found the destructive storms critically damaged the state's transmission network, but it has yet to find the reason why this triggered a statewide blackout.
Meanwhile, SA network company Electranet said the restoration of damaged transmission lines in the state's mid-north was nearly complete. The delays had caused major headaches for big industrial users, including BHP's Olympic Dam mine.
ElectraNet said it expected one of the damaged circuits will be back up by Monday, provided weather conditions remain stable. Another circuit will follow a few days later.

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We Have Money To Fight Climate Change. It's Just That We're Spending It On Defense

The Guardian - Kenneth Pennington

Stopping one fighter plane program would save enough to build wind farms to power 320,000 homes. We need to drastically reassess our priorities

'The F-35 fighter plane program is a prime candidate for big cuts. It's the most expensive weapon ever designed, complete with massive cost overruns.' Photograph: Lockheed Martin/AAPIMAGE

One year ago this week, I was sitting in a cramped hotel room with 15 other staffers in Las Vegas for Bernie Sanders' first debate for the presidential nomination. The question came from CNN: "What is the greatest national security threat?" Pundits criticized and mocked him for weeks after he answered "climate change". But he was right.
And it's not just Sanders pointing out the imminent threat posed by climate change to global and national security. CIA analysts and our nation's military strategists are rightfully naming it as a contributor to refugee flows, the spread of disease, and conflicts over basic resources like food and water.
In 2014, 17.5 million people were displaced by climate-related disasters. Those numbers will continue to rise dramatically in the coming decades, according to climate displacement program manager Alice Thomas of Refugees International.
Our nation's defense officials know global warming's destructive forces could undermine fragile governments in unstable regions of the world where extremist ideologies can take root. Yet mainstream Republican avoidance of reality on the science of climate change impedes the necessary reassignment of resources to meet the challenges posed.
Now a new report from the Institute of Policy Studies provides the most accurate calculation of government spending on climate security to date. The picture isn't pretty. We're spending 28 times as much on military security than climate security. A public sector investment of $55bn per year is required to meet the challenge, according to the study. With $21bn in the 2017 budget, a shortfall of $34bn is left.
That may seem like an insurmountable hill to climb. It's not! As the IPS report points out, plenty of money lies untouched in the nation's bloated military budget.
The F-35 fighter plane program is a prime candidate for big cuts. It's the most expensive weapon ever designed, complete with massive cost overruns. The sad cherry on top: the military admits that this plane just doesn't work. If we turned back now, IPS says we could build enough offshore wind farms to power 320,000 homes for millions of people.
Savings from gutting a Navy program designed to build close-to-shore combat ships would provide enough funds to retrain more than 150,000 coal industry workers. The ships have been plagued with mechanical errors. Our own Government Accountability Office says the "actual lethality and survivability performance of LCS is still largely unproven through realistic testing". Others have called the ships an outright "waste". Retraining and redistributing our fossil-fuel workforce to green jobs would be a welcome reprioritization.
Congress could harness additional savings by reducing service contracting and canceling other wasteful or unnecessary weapons programs. But one party largely stands in the way. Republicans are hell-bent on leading our country down an unforgivable road with grave consequences. Their party's nominee for president believes that global warming is a hoax engineered by the Chinese. That would be comical if it weren't so dangerous.
Rich Americans justify inaction by dismissing climate change as a far off problem that will affect others. But climate change is here and now. And while the sharpest edge of its destructive forces will sadly hurt people of color and lower-income the hardest, we're all in deep trouble.
In an unusually forceful public service announcement, The Weather Channel this week warned Floridians that Hurricane Matthew would lead to a heartbreaking loss of life. Florida governor Rick Scott said: "This storm will kill you." These un-natural weather occurrences are becoming more and more frequent.
My home state of California faces its worst drought in 1,200 years. When I traveled home for the holidays two years ago, I saw the devastating impact of climate change firsthand. Where boats once sat docked in my hometown marina, only dust remained. Climate scientists are telling us that the United States is not immune to the instability and infighting that will occur when populations are forced to fight over food and water. They need only look to California for confirmation, where northerners and southerners argue fiercely over water access.
The only practical solution to curb unrest, suffering and death here and abroad is a massive redistribution of government money. This week's new report from IPS serves as a thoughtful blueprint.
Republicans should take heed of former GOP President Dwight Eisenhower's words of wisdom:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Let's steward our resources wisely. Let's choose climate over combat.

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Removing CO2 From the Air Only Hope for Fixing Climate Change, New Study Says

InsideClimate News - Zahra Hirji

Without 'negative emissions' to help return atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm, future generations could face costs that 'may become too heavy to bear,' paper says.

Scientist James Hansen, lead author of a new study urgently calling for removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, poses next to a mock grave stone declaring "Climate change a matter of life or death" in 2009 in Coventry, England. Hansen, a prominent climate researcher, has dismissed criticisms that his recent papers blur the line between advocacy and research. Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The only way to keep young people from inheriting a world reeling from catastrophic climate change is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions dramatically and immediately, according to a new paper. Not only that, but it's also necessary to aggressively remove greenhouse gas that's already accumulated.
"If rapid emission reductions are initiated soon, it is still possible that at least a large fraction of required CO2 extraction can be achieved via relatively natural agricultural and forestry practices with other benefits," the authors wrote.
"On the other hand, if large fossil fuel emissions are allowed to continue, the scale and cost of industrial CO2 extraction, occurring in conjunction with a deteriorating climate with growing economic effects, may become unmanageable. Simply put, the burden placed on young people and future generations may become too heavy to bear."
The study's 12 authors, led by prominent climate scientist James Hansen, the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, call for bringing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels down to levels not recorded since the 1980s: 350 parts per million, a long standing goal of Hansen's.
The level is now above 400 ppm, up more than 40 percent since before the Industrial Revolution. Many scientists reckon that 450 ppm is the safe limit to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
The paper, called "Young People's Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions," was published Tuesday in the journal Earth System Dynamics Discussions.
It was written to support litigation by Hansen and a group of young people (including Hansen's granddaughter) seeking to force more ambitious climate action. And it is the latest in a string of scientific analyses showing that nations are far from reining in dangerous warming, despite the imminent entry into force of a comprehensive treaty negotiated last year in Paris.
The Paris deal aims to limit warming to 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius, in line with the 450 ppm level. That would require bringing emissions to "net zero" sometime in the second half of this century through a swift clean energy transformation. Any CO2 spewed into the air—be it from a coal plant, an SUV or an airplane—would have to be completely offset, or "zeroed," by increasing the growth of forests and other carbon sinks.
But according to the paper, even a net-zero world wouldn't be enough to prevent burdening future generations with an impossible task.
To attain Hansen's bolder goal, countries have to achieve "negative emissions," by removing more accumulated CO2 from the atmosphere.
The paper lays out five possible scenarios. In the worst-case scenario, emissions continue to rise by at least 2 percent a year after 2015, and CO2 levels more than double to 864 ppm by 2100. To prevent that dire outcome, which assumes countries aren't reducing their emissions to net zero, 768 ppm of CO2 would have to be sucked out of the atmosphere by that time.
That would be enormously expensive for future generations—perhaps impossible.
In the most optimistic scenario, CO2 emissions stay flat until 2020, and then emissions drop by a steep 6 percent a year. This implies the world is rapidly transitioning to a clean energy economy and producing net-zero emissions before mid-century. But even this scenario requires pulling 72 ppm of CO2 out of the air by 2100—a more plausible, but still difficult burden.
Hansen, now an adjunct professor at Columbia University, has long warned that global warming inaction would lead to dire consequences. Nearly 40 years ago he developed one of the world's first climate models, and was among the first scientists to conclude that the burning fossil fuels was to blame for modern climate change.
Eleven other scientists contributed to the paper from academic institutions across the globe, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Australian National University and the University of Paris-Saclay in France.
It was published in a discussion journal, where research is published and sent for peer review at the same time.
Last year, Hansen and a team of 16 international scientists similarly publicized a paper in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics before it was peer reviewed. The move was criticized by some as blurring the line between advocacy and research. The study, timed to influence the Paris climate talks, warned that even 2 degrees of warming is "highly dangerous" and could cause sea level rise of "at least several meters" this century. The peer-reviewed version was published earlier this year.
"Some people might object to discussing such a paper before it has gone through the peer-review process. But again I'm going to do that, simply because we are running out of time on this climate issue," Hansen told reporters this week.
As part of the paper, the scientists analyzed how today's warming compares to the rest of the Holocene period, which covers the previous 11,700 years, and an even warmer period of history called the Eemain period, which occurred 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. During the warm Eemian, sea-level rise was between 20 and 30 feet higher than it is today. Today's global temperatures are already at the level expected during the Eemian, or possibly above them, the paper says.
The authors recommend aiming for temperature and CO2 levels observed during the 1980s because they're more in line with conditions during the early Holocene period, which did not experience catastrophic sea-level rise.
"A danger of the 1.5 degree C and 2 degree C temperature targets is that they are far above the Holocene temperature range," the authors wrote. "If such temperature levels are allowed to long exist they will spur 'slow' amplifying feedbacks, which may have potential to run out of humanity's control. The most threatening slow feedback likely is ice sheet melt and consequent sea level rise, but there are other risks in pushing the climate system far out of its Holocene range."
To achieve negative emissions the study recommends using forestry and agricultural practices that increase the carbon-sucking ability of soil and trees, with the goal of pulling 100 gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere. Even if that's achieved, more expensive and intensive methods for emissions extraction would be needed, such as carbon capture and sequestration. One such approach would burn biomass as fuel while capturing the CO2 emissions and burying the pollutant deep in the ground.
"We assume that improved practices will aim at optimizing agricultural and forest carbon uptake via relatively natural approaches, compatible with delivering a range of ecosystem services from the land," the authors wrote. "In contrast, proposed technological extraction and storage of CO2 does not have co-benefits and remains unproven at relevant scale."
Hansen, his 17-year-old granddaughter Sophie Kivlehan and 20 other young people are suing the federal government to take more action on climate change. The Department of Justice and fossil fuel industry groups have opposed the lawsuit, but a judge ruled in April that it could proceed. Oral arguments were made in Oregon on Sept. 13, and U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken plans to rule within 60 days on whether the case will proceed.
"If the case goes to trial, we do expect that we can introduce this paper into the considerations," Hansen told InsideClimate News via email.
The study's chief conclusion on negative emissions "is hardly new or surprising or controversial," said Michael Mann, a Penn State climate scientist who was not involved in the study. "That's well known."
But the fact that it's being publicized prior to peer review and submitted in a legal case "will certainly raise eyebrows about whether or not this breaches the firewall many feel should exist wherein policy agenda should not influence the way that science is done," he said.
Typically, scientific papers are subject to peer review when they're submitted. If journal editors and outside commenters have any questions or concerns, the authors revise their work to address them before publication.
For this paper, scientists and others can now submit comments online and Hansen's team must respond.

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