Lethal Heating: 12/16/16

16/12/2016

Decarbonisation And Politics: How To Make It Matter To Voters

Renew Economy - David Leitch*

“If at first you don’t succeed”

AAP Image/Dean Lewins, File

Climate change doesn’t much matter to voters even though they (naturally) accept the science
The annual Climate institute survey shows that 75% of the public agree with the concept of climate change. On the other hand it doesn’t rate as a top 3 issue with voters. For those of us that think it’s a relatively urgent issue the challenge is how to make it front of mind for voters.
Power prices are going up. There will be a large blame game as to why. The anti renewables camp will say it is the fault of renewables, the pro renewables camp will say it’s the fault of lack of certainty around energy policy preventing the investment in new supply. This is not an easy argument to win as the facts cant be reduced to a simple slogan.
Do we need a national political champion that sees how decarbonization can be turned into an election winning issue? No such person is in evidence at the moment. Kevin Rudd was the last such person but perhaps because he saw foresaw the political strength of the “big fat tax on everything” he dropped it, and having played the public for a fool paid the consequence.
Of course, it was a leading issue in the Gillard Govt and the experience has clearly left a sour taste in the “prgamatists” that drive ALP strategy. No leading politician since has been prepared to back climate change as a front of mind election issue.
A variety of NGOs from the CEC, the Climate Institute, Beyond Zero, IGCC, Climateworks are all out there but would it be better if there was an umbrella organization, better funded which undertook more direct action? Our view of direct action means reaching voters directly, via advertising, social media, but also influencing the conventional media. Making the jobs case. Making the lo
Or is it better just to stay with the incremental approach and simply allow the facts to gradually become clear? In the end incrementalism will get us there but only over time.

The public in Australia increasingly supports the concept that global warming is occurring
The Climate Institute published its annual survey of attitudes towards Australia on climate change, and this didn’t perhaps get the attention it deserved. There is a lot of detail in the survey, and of course the answer to survey questions and the conclusions drawn always depend on the exact question asked and the survey methodology.
The Climate Institute’s annual survey consists of a 2000 person Galaxy Research Poll in the first week of August with a 2.2% error margin and qualitative focus group interviews conducted in Brisbane, Melbourne and Newcastle.
About ¾ of Australians agree that Climate Change is occurring. This number has been climbing for the past five years.

Figure 1: Views on climate change. Source: Climate Institute

However it wasn’t an election issue. Both major parties ran completely dead on climate change. And for good reason. The Coalition knew it was weak on the “bad boy” image and the ALP was still licking its wounds from having its butt kicked from West Australia to Queensland by Tony Abbott hammering the “big tax on everything” and “Julia’s a liar” images.
Essential Research found the economy and healthcare are the big issues.

Figure 2 Top 3 election issues. Source Essential Research July 26

According to vote compass, an opt in survey of ABC viewers, in the big three States, the environment only rated as a top 3 issue in Victoria.

Figure 3 Election issues: Source ABC vote compass May 2016

A Roy Morgan survey of the problems facing Australia and the world rated climate change at just 7% a long way below the economy at over 40%.

Figure 4 Problems facing Australia: Source Roy Morgan May 2016

Interestingly though for the first time in a number of years when Australians were asked the main problems facing the world they nominated the Environment and Climate Change as No 1 @ 25% just pipping the economy.

Figure 5 Problem facing world. Source Roy Morgan May 2016

Coalition response – turn climate change into a cost of living issue
Facing the fact that the majority of the people believe in climate change, the Coalitions’ response seems to be to turn it into an economic issue. Ie Climate change means renewable energy means less reliability and higher prices. However they are still left with the intellectually indefensible position of having signed up for COP 21 without being able to demonstrate how that will be achieved. This is a weakness that can be exploited but probably won’t swing many votes.

ALP response – wedge Turnbull
The ALP’s response is to cast the Prime Minister as someone that believes in the problems Climate Change causes but is powerless to do anything about it because he does not have enough Cabinet Authority. Turnbull has recently been wedged on this issue in a textbook example of wedging. When a politician is effectively wedged it creates an impression of weakness or lack of guile. You didn’t see Bob Hawke or John Howard getting wedged all that often.
The ALP has also presented a 50% renewable energy by 2030 policy. The Coalition expressly rejects that this is achievable. So in a sense that is where the crux of the debate lies. State ALP Govts in Victoria and QLD have started their own policies to move towards the Federal ALP target.
If you think, as I do, that execution and management matter, then the appointment of Simon Corbell as advisor to the Victorian Govt is an extremely positive sign. Based on the ACT’s track record we can expect financially astute, progressive policy to be advanced in a straightforward and steady fashion with few errors. If it goes well in Victoria it will build very strong national support. So we see the Victorian legislated policy as a key driver for public support. Of course its not enough on its own.

How to lift climate change up the list of issues that matter
Your analyst is more interested in issues than political loyalty. We see climate change as a large, going on for existential, global problem and believe that Australia as a wealthy, high emitting reasonably large country has a role to play. From that perspective the challenge is to lift climate change out of the abstract “its happening but it doesn’t matter” into the “its happening and I’m going to vote for someone to do something about it” category. The question is how to achieve this.

Some questions for activists to consider
Should this be a party driven top down approach a la that taken by the Greens or should it be a bottom up approach in marginal electorates driven by being able to show to marginal voters why they should think about climate change?
How can the link be made from climate change as an “abstract future” issue to something that requires immediate vote driving action?
What would it take to get the ALP’s 50% renewable by 2030 policy as a vote winner instead of a “we’ve got the greenies covered” policy not to be talked about. The ALP went to some lengths in the last election not to put its 50% renewable policy in front of voters. For instance we think extending the SREC benefit to household storage and allowing utility scale storage to gain REC credits would be vote winning policies.
In short how can we get climate change on the front page in a positive way?
Is it even a good idea to spend scarce resources on Federal policy or would it be preferable to assist State Governments that have gone down the higher renewables path and get them to do even more?

*David Leitch is principal of ITK. He was formerly a Utility Analyst for leading investment banks over the past 30 years.

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Climate Change Energy Impasse Shows How Our Politics Is Failing

Fairfax - Warwick McKibbin*

Cheap energy like gas has not developed fast enough due to poor bipartisan politics. Robert Shakespeare

With the Australian economy shrinking by 0.5 per cent in the September quarter, it is becoming increasingly obvious that there are problems with Australia's future growth prospects.
The core problem is not the state of innovation in Australia or the inability of Australian companies and workers to compete in the global economy. There is enormous untapped potential growth in an Australian economy which is located in the most dynamic region in the world. There is no need for another round of inefficient government subsidies to encourage industries and pick winners. One of the key problems for the economy is the current state of Australian politics and the impact this has on uncertainty.
Uncertainty discourages investment by companies and undermines the confidence of households and investors. This has been a growing problem for the past decade since the state of policy debate degenerated into a game where the party in opposition opposes everything a government is attempting to implement and then attempts to implement the opposite to their original position when in government. This destructive style of political process across the political spectrum creates enormous policy incoherence and uncertainty. Who would invest a billion dollars in a new venture unless there was a very high return in order to compensate for serious political risk?
This political uncertainty adds substantial costs to infrastructure projects when bidders have to price in additional costs to cover the likelihood that a contract would be broken with a change of state governments. Add to this the role of 20th century employment practices in contributing to cost blowouts in large projects and the key drivers of Australia's future growth are held hostage to narrow interest groups.

Attempts to address rising Australian government debt are in the right direction but completely inadequate relative to the scale of the problem.

Important cases

Energy and climate policies are other important cases in point. Low cost and reliable energy is critical for economic growth. Investment in energy generation involves decades of substantial investment in generation and transmission. When investment stalls, as it has with the decade of ambiguity about Australia's climate policies, the cost of producing energy inevitably rises. A lack of any consensus among politicians and the apparent destruction of good policy processes, will continue to lead to rising input costs for Australian companies and a lack of investment in new and existing technologies for Australia's energy future.
There is apparent glee among some commentators that US climate policy will stall under President Trump. This could well be a serious misunderstanding of what might eventuate from a Trump presidency.
If an incoming President Trump carries out his promise to scale up gas and oil production in the US then he will drive down the cost of these energy sources. This will cause even more substitution in the US out of coal-fired electricity generation into gas generation. This will continue the trend of lower carbon emissions that emerged under the Obama administration.

It has been market forces rather than climate policy under the Obama administration has been the main cause of the loss of coal mining jobs in the US. The decline of coal has been primarily due to technological innovation in oil and gas production. Given this reality, and the pledge by President Trump to bring back coal mining jobs, his most likely policy intervention will be some form of subsidies to coal. This will unlikely increase the use of coal in electricity generation in the US because market forces will be driving generation towards gas and other energy sources including nuclear.
The results of this policy will be to increase the export of US coal to the global economy. This will drive down the world price of coal as it did during the US energy boom from 2010. Thus US carbon dioxide emissions may continue their downward trend under the Trump administration and make the Paris Accord feasible and strategically useful for the US. For other countries, the falling world price of coal could complicate their domestic emission targets.

Aussie problems
In Australia this raises several problems. One is a further drop of the terms of trade. Another is a fall in state and federal government revenue. The third is the need to stay within the Paris Agreement especially if the US does not abandon it.

Given the extreme state of uncertainty in the global economy there are many events that will be outside the influence of Australian policymakers. But there are some policies that Australia can influence. It is well past time for Australia to have clear and sensible climate and energy policies that enables large scale investment in low cost generation technologies to be undertaken.
Bipartisan coherence and co-operation on climate, energy and budgetary policy would be an enormous stimulus to private investment and help with reversing the trend decline in Australia's economic prospects. The benefits of the apparent breakdown of sensible bipartisan policy design at the national and state level over the past decade are short term and largely accrue to vested interests and politicians seeking power. The costs will be large and will ultimately be borne by Australian taxpayers and future generations.

*Warwick McKibbin AO, is the Director of the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis in the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington

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'The Arctic Is Unraveling,' Scientists Conclude After Latest Sobering Climate Report

InsideClimate News - Bob Berwyn

Unprecedented warming has sent the Arctic into uncharted territory, says latest NOAA report, as its science faces potential hostility from the Trump administration.

Secretary of State John Kerry, center, visited Norway this year, witnessing the impacts of a melting Arctic. Credit: Getty Images

The ill winds of climate change are irrevocably reshaping the Arctic, including massive declines in sea ice and snow and a record-late start to sea ice formation this fall. Those were the sobering conclusions of the 2016 Arctic Report Card released Tuesday.

The report card is sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and co-authored by more than 50 scientists from Asia, North America and Europe. The data shows that the Arctic is warming at double the rate of the global average temperature. Between October 2015 and September 2016, temperatures over Arctic land areas were 2.0 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 baseline, the warmest on record going back to 1900.

The report, released at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, clearly links the Arctic heatwave to a record-late start to formation of sea ice this fall, and to record high and low seasonal snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere. If the extreme warmth recorded in the Arctic this fall persists for the next few years, it may signal a completely new climate in the region, scientists said.

Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA's Arctic Research Program, said the report highlights the clear and pronounced global warming signal in the Arctic and its effects cascading throughout the environment, like the spread of parasitic diseases in Arctic animals.

"We've seen a year in 2016 like we've never seen before ... with clear acceleration of many global warming signals. The Arctic was whispering change. Now it's not whispering. It's speaking, it's shouting change, and the changes are large," said co-author Donald Perovich, who studies Arctic climate at Dartmouth College.

Sustained observations of the Arctic is crucial to making science-based policy decisions, he added, a goal threatened by the inclusion of numerous climate deniers in President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet. This week, Trump's transition team posted a new "Energy Independence" website that repeats his previous intentions to open up vast areas for fossil fuel development and to scrap existing climate action plans.

Arctic ice doesn't care about politics, and what happens in the region now is critically important to the U.S., said Rafe Pomerance, chair of Arctic 21 and a member of the Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

"What kind of Arctic do we want to have? It has to be one that maintains the stability of the climate system," he said. "The melting of Greenland is going to put an enormous hit on real estate values. The fate of Greenland is the fate of Miami. It's in the U.S. national interest to stop Greenland's ice sheet from melting. How are we going to bring it to a halt?"

The scientific report stands in stark contrast to the incoming administration's apparent intention to foster more fossil fuel development, he said.

"This is a byproduct of the poison of denialism, a political issue that has taken hold so deeply so that this is the kind of stuff that can be contemplated," he said. "Evidence doesn't mean anything, science doesn't seem to mean anything. They ought to take what's going on in the Arctic really seriously. This is a crisis. The Arctic is unraveling."

The report card underscores nearly a year of unusual conditions, said Lars Kaleschke, an Arctic researcher at the University of Hamburg who was not among the report's authors. Extremely warm air temperatures last January and February led to the smallest maximum winter sea ice extent on record, equaling the record set in 2015. And the return of extreme warmth in November led to a short period of ice retreat at a time when it's usually growing fast.

Kaleschke said he's become concerned by reports that the incoming U.S. administration may cut NASA's Earth observation budget, which includes many programs critical to understanding Arctic global warming changes.

"That would be a huge loss for the climate research community," he said. Those programs are critical to efforts to understand rapid Arctic changes. NASA's airborne IceBridge program, for example, helps confirm ice thickness measurements made by the European Space Agency's CryoSat program.

Kaleschke said Trump appears to have a clear anti-science attitude that will affect the world's ability to respond to climate change.

The global warming signal was particularly evident in Greenland in 2016, said Marco Tedesco, a climate researcher with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who was involved in the report.

"The Greenland Ice Sheet continued to lose mass in 2016. The melt onset was the second earliest and the melt season was 30 to 40 days longer than average in the northeast, he said. Spring snow cover extent in Greenland and other parts of the Arctic reached new record lows in spring and there's new evidence that snow depth is also decreasing, which would be a precursor to even earlier and faster melting."

Arctic permafrost is also releasing more greenhouse gases in the winter than plants can take up in the summer, making the Arctic a net source of heat-trapping pollution, he added.

Snow cover on land helps cool the entire Northern Hemisphere climate system, insulates soil and regulates the water cycle through the seasons.

Highlighting the the recent changes in the Arctic is even more important in light of the current political context, said University of Sheffield geographer Edward Hanna, who co-authored the report's chapter on air surface temperatures.

Air temperatures across the Arctic between January and March 2016 soared past previous record highs, with some locations reporting anomalies of more than 8 degrees Celsius. In recent decades, there have been more frequent surges of warm air from mid-latitudes far north into the Arctic. That lends support to the emerging hypothesis that the Arctic meltdown is changing the path of the jet stream, possibly leading to more sustained extreme weather events in the Northern Hemisphere, Hanna said.
The steady trend toward thinner, younger ice in the Arctic is also notable, suggesting the meltdown is irreversible.
"It's hard to see how the summer sea ice will survive," he concluded.

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