31/03/2017

China Poised To Take Lead On Climate After Trump’s Move To Undo Policies

New York Times - Edward Wong

Burning coal at an unauthorized steel factory in Inner Mongolia in November. China consumes as much coal as the rest of the world combined. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
For years, the Obama administration prodded, cajoled and beseeched China to make commitments to limit the use of fossil fuels to try to slow the global effects of climate change.
President Obama and other American officials saw the pledges from both Beijing and Washington as crucial: China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, followed by the United States.
In the coming years, the opposite dynamic is poised to play out. President Trump’s signing of an executive order on Tuesday aimed at undoing many of the Obama administration’s climate change policies flips the roles of the two powers.
Now, it is far likelier that the world will see China pushing the United States to meet its commitments and try to live up to the letter and spirit of the 2015 Paris Agreement, even if Mr. Trump has signaled he has no intention of doing so.
“They’ve set the direction they intend to go in the next five years,” Barbara Finamore, a senior lawyer and Asia director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York, said of China. “It’s clear they intend to double down on bringing down their reliance on coal and increasing their use of renewable energy.”
“China wants to take over the role of the U.S. as a climate leader, and they’ve baked it into their five-year plans,” she added, referring to the economic development blueprints drawn up by the Chinese government.
Even before the presidential campaign last year, Mr. Trump had made statements consistent with climate change denial, including calling climate change a hoax created by China. He has also threatened to formally withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. Since Mr. Trump’s election in November, senior Chinese officials and leaders have been taking the high ground on the issue by urging all countries, including the United States, to abide by their climate commitments.
The biggest rhetorical turning point came in January, when Xi Jinping, China’s president, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the Paris Agreement was “hard won” and should remain in force.
“All signatories should stick to it instead of walking away from it, as this is a responsibility we must assume for future generations,” he said.
Other Chinese officials at Davos repeated that message, including the energy minister, Nur Bekri, and top executives of state-owned enterprises.
In an interview before the recent climate conference in Marrakesh, Chai Qimin, a climate change researcher and policy adviser, said that policies adopted at a recent Communist Party meeting showed that China “has attached ever greater importance to ecological civilization and green development.”
“Everyone is taking this more and more seriously,” he added.
On Wednesday, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said at a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing that all countries in the Paris Agreement should “fulfill their commitments” and that China would stick to its pledges “regardless of how other countries’ climate policies change.”
Global Times, a state-run nationalist newspaper, used harsher language in an editorial chastising the Trump administration for “brazenly shirking its responsibility on climate change.”
A solar farm near Wenquan, in the region of Xinjiang, this month. China has pledged to generate 20 percent of the country’s energy from sources that are not fossil fuel, including solar, by 2030. Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
“Washington is obliged to set an example for mankind’s efforts against global warming, and now the Trump administration has become the first government of a major power to take opposite actions on the Paris Agreement,” the newspaper said. “It is undermining the great cause of mankind trying to protect the earth, and the move is indeed irresponsible and very disappointing.”
The editorial also questioned why China was making concessions on fossil-fuel use when the United States was scrapping its promises: “How can China, still underdeveloped, give away a chunk of room for development, just to nourish those Western countries that are already rich?”
Chinese participation is critical for global efforts on climate change. With its economic growth and rampant infrastructure construction, China consumes as much coal as the rest of the world combined. The burning of coal, which is at the core of the power, steel and cement industries in the country, generates enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. So environmental advocates and officials around the world constantly say China must break its coal addiction.
But unlike in the United States, Chinese leaders and senior officials have consistently said that climate change is a serious problem and acknowledged that changing the energy mix to move away from fossil-fuel sources is important.
And because of its air pollution crisis, China announced policies in 2013 to limit the use of coal in the country’s three largest population centers. More recently, scientists have said that there is a dangerous cycle at work: Weather patterns from climate change are exacerbating the smog.
“China is cutting back on coal because of its lethal costs to human health as well as its high carbon emissions, and plans to transition to the energy sources of tomorrow, rather than yesterday,” said Isabel Hilton, founder of Chinadialogue, a prominent website that reports on environmental issues and policy. “President Trump seems intent on reviving a 19th-century energy source rather than pursuing the promise of the 21st century.”
Mr. Trump’s pro-coal talk, and the unlikelihood that his administration will pressure China to cut back on fossil fuels, might mean that pro-coal interests in China, including among state-owned energy companies, will try harder to push back against officials putting limits on coal.
But in recent years, coal consumption in China has declined slightly, surprising many analysts and researchers. China’s economic slowdown — from decades of double-digit annual growth to 6.7 percent last year — has been a major factor. Analysts say there appeared to be an increase in coal use during part of 2016 because of economic stimulus policies, but preliminary statistics released in February indicate that overall coal consumption declined last year compared with 2015.
Given such numbers, researchers say China may reach a carbon emissions peak in 2025 — five years ahead of its stated goal of 2030.
China has also made pledges on the percentage of total energy that will be generated by non-fossil-fuel sources, which include hydropower, nuclear power, wind and solar. Mr. Xi has said that by 2030, 20 percent of China’s energy will come from such sources. Chinese officials are now grappling with the complex problem of getting energy generated by wind and solar sources onto the grid and properly used.
“Trump’s rejection of regulatory action on climate change creates a vacuum in global climate leadership that China can now seize,” said Alex L. Wang, a law professor and China environmental expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In recent years, a variety of factors — crisis levels of pollution, economic opportunities from green development and concerns about the domestic risks of rising temperatures — have pushed China to action on climate change. Trump’s actions don’t affect these underlying drivers.”
In addition, China has said that it will put in place by the end of this year a national market for greenhouse gas quotas, commonly known as a cap-and-trade program. It has experimented with seven such regional markets, and there have been problems with them, but the government is determined to set up a national program to put a price on carbon and impose a cost on companies that generate large amounts of carbon dioxide, Chinese policy advisers say.
China appears to be overperforming on other targets besides its carbon emissions peak date. It had stated that by 2020, 58 percent of its energy would come from coal consumption. Official statistics indicate China might meet that target early. Chinese officials now say they expect to get the number down to 60 percent this year.
A report released in January by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, based in Ohio, said China was the world leader in domestic investment in renewable energy and associated low-emissions-energy sectors, with $103 billion invested in 2015. And China is going global with that strategy — last year, it invested $32 billion in large overseas deals involving renewable energy.
“There are clear differences between the Chinese approach and the Trump administration on climate change,” Ms. Hilton said. “While Trump’s administration seems to believe that action on climate change is a waste of money and threatens jobs in the U.S., China sees investment in climate-related action as essential to secure a safe and prosperous future for Chinese citizens, as well as a strategic opportunity to develop and supply the technologies of the future.”

Links
at No comments:

Trump’s Energy And Climate Change Order: Seven Essential Reads

The Conversation - *

President Trump holds up the signed Energy Independence Executive Order, Tuesday, March 28, 2017, at EPA headquarters in Washington, surrounded by coal miners and members of his Cabinet. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
On March 28 President Trump signed an executive order that launched a broad assault on policies put in place by the Obama administration to reduce carbon pollution. Trump’s order directs the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw and rewrite the Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. It also eliminates a number of other policies related to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Our experts explain the policies under assault and the impacts of this about-face.

Challenging established policies
Trump has accused the Environmental Protection Agency of pursuing “an out-of-control anti-energy agenda,” and called for refocusing the agency on its “essential mission of keeping our air and our water clean and safe.”
But as Greg Dotson of the University of Oregon Law School points out, EPA has been analyzing and regulating climate change for decades. Climate change “has been at the heart of EPA’s mission since its creation, and administrations of both parties have moved forward to mitigate this threat – with varying levels of ambition and enthusiasm – for 30 years,” Dotson writes.
Trump has also instructed federal agencies to discount official estimates of the social cost of carbon – a figure that represents the harm done by one ton of carbon dioxide emissions – in making policy decisions. Harvard Kennedy School economist Joseph Aldy, who helped develop the first SCC estimate in 2009 for the Obama administration, explains its purpose: When we know the dollar value of damage from carbon pollution, we can see how much society will benefit from regulations to cut carbon emissions.

Methane leaks, coal leasing, national security
Many other federal agencies have roles in regulating carbon pollution alongside EPA. Trump’s order overturns restrictions on energy production on federal lands managed by the Interior Department.
One measure required energy companies to control “fugitive” emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from oil and natural gas operations on public lands. Catherine Hausman of the University of Michigan calls these leaks “a standard environmental externalities problem, straight out of an Econ 1 textbook,” because they cause environmental damage that is much more costly than the financial losses they represent for energy producers. Consequently, Hausman concludes, businesses have little incentive to self-regulate and capture the emissions on their own.
Trump also directed Interior to lift a moratorium on new coal-mining leases on federal land, which was put in place by the Obama administration in 2016. Studies have shown that these leases undervalue federal coal reserves, thus benefiting energy companies at taxpayers’ expense. Economist Meredith Fowlie of the University of California, Berkeley argues that the coal-leasing program is ripe for reform, and that “Hitting the snooze button will deliver more good deals to the coal companies operating on federal lands, at the expense of taxpayers and the environment.”

Coal mine on federal land in New Mexico. BLM New Mexico/Flickr, CC BY
Although many readers may not associate the Defense Department with climate change, President Obama issued a memorandum in September 2016 that formally stated that climate change affected national security, and directed federal agencies to consider it in defense planning. Trump’s order revokes this directive – even though Trump’s defense secretary, James Mattis, recently stated in written responses to Congress that climate change is “impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today.”
Pennsylvania State University meteorology professor and retired Rear Admiral David Titley agrees with Mattis. “Here is how military planners see this issue: We know that the climate is changing, we know why it’s changing and we understand that change will have large impacts on our national security. Yet as a nation we still only begrudgingly take precautions,” Titley writes.

Views from the states
While Trump’s order marks a dramatic redirection of federal policy, states can chart their own courses in many areas. Rebecca Romsdahl of the University of North Dakota reports that red states are quietly addressing climate change in many ways, from investing in renewable energy to preparing for flooding and droughts. Often local officials frame these actions as smart growth or prudent planning, without mentioning climate change.
“Energy, economic benefits, common sense and sustainability are frames that are providing opportunities for local leaders to address climate change without getting stuck in the political quagmire,” Romsdahl observes.
At the other extreme, California – led by a Democratic governor and Democrat-dominated legislature – remains proudly committed to making deep cuts in its carbon emissions and building an economy based on clean energy. Many advocates assert that by pursuing a low-carbon path, California will attract lucrative industries and high-skill, high-wage jobs.

Wind farm outside of Palm Springs, California. Chris Goldberg/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Economist Matthew Kahn of the University of Southern California is skeptical of these claims, which are based on complex economic modeling and extremely hard to prove. However, he also believes that California’s strong economic growth in recent years shows that pursuing a low-carbon path has not harmed the state’s economy.
Kahn sees value in California’s willingness to serve as a “green guinea pig,” testing strategies that other states can emulate. “With the federal government slamming the brakes on climate action, it is valuable to have California moving full speed ahead,” he states.

*Jennifer Weeks is the Editor, Environment and Energy, The Conversation. 'Trump’s Energy And Climate Change Order: Seven Essential Reads' is a roundup of archival stories.

Links
at No comments:

30/03/2017

'Climate Change Is Real': Companies Challenge Trump's Reversal Of Policy

The Guardian - 

Mars Inc, Staples, The Gap and others speak out against Trump’s sweeping executive order that begins to dismantle Obama’s Clean Power Plan
‘We will continue to support the EPA’s clean power plan,’ says the vice-president of environmental affairs at Staples. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
In 2015, when Barack Obama signed the nation’s clean power plan, more than 300 companies came out in support, calling the guidelines “critical for moving our country toward a clean energy economy”. Now, as Donald Trump moves to strip those laws away, Mars Inc, Staples and The Gap are just a few of those US corporations who are challenging the new president’s reversal on climate policy.
“We’re disappointed the administration has decided to roll back climate regulations such as the clean power plan and others,” Edward Hoover, senior manager of Corporate Communications for Mars, told the Guardian. “Corporations can’t do it alone. Governments play a critical role in mitigating the effects of climate change on our economy.”
The responses come just a day after Trump, flanked by cheering coalminers, signed a sweeping executive order that begins to dismantle steps taken by the Obama administration to cut emissions under the Paris agreement negotiated in 2015. Under the agreement the US had agreed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 26-28% by 2025 as compared with 2005 levels.
“We will continue to support the EPA’s clean power plan and the reduction of carbon emissions associated with electrical power generation,” added Mark Buckley, vice-president of environmental affairs for Staples, calling it “smart business”.
The centerpiece for this reduction was the clean power plan, billed in 2015 as the strongest action ever on climate change by a US president but criticised by some for targeting coal-fired power plants, which release more carbon and fine particulate material than other fossil fuels.
That was when some of the nation’s most recognizable brands signed a letter to the National Governors Association backing their commitment to the reductions, arguing that better regulation would drive innovation and create jobs, rather than stifle them, as Trump went on to repeatedly suggest during the 2016 campaign.
“We believe that investing in a low-carbon economy will not only help foster a healthier environment, it is also a key to unlocking new business growth potential for the US and around the world,” said Gap Inc spokesperson Laura Wilkinson. The clothing manufacturer produces the popular Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic brands. Wilkinson added that the company would continue to “advocate for low carbon policies that will help ensure a healthier and more prosperous future”.
Hoover, whose company is the maker of candies like M&Ms, Skittles, Snickers and Twix, added: “We believe the science is clear and unambiguous: climate change is real and human activity is a factor. As a food business, our supply chain and those who work in it are threatened by its impacts.”
Trump, for his part, has called climate change a “hoax”. Asked by the Guardian this week if Trump accepted the science of manmade climate change, a senior White House official replied: “Sure, yes, I guess.”
Levi Strauss and the eco-oriented Seven Generations cleaning and paper supply company also confirmed their commitment to the 2015 agreement in statements to the Guardian. “We stand firm in our support of the clean power plan,” said Ashley Orgain, manager of mission advocacy for Seven Generations. “Climate change is harming our health now, some of us more than others.”
Even fossil fuel giant Exxonmobil has chimed in to recommend the US stay on course with the Paris agreement, calling it “an effective framework for addressing the risks of climate change” in a letter to Trump last week. It’s worth noting though, that the energy conglomerate deals mainly in oil and natural gas, not coal, and hopes to gain market share under an agreement that would phase out coal-fired plants.

Links
at No comments:

Great Barrier Grief Missing From The Australian

ABC Media Watch

Media Watch  Great Barrier grief missing from The Australian

The Australian offers scant coverage about the latest bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. But now to the Great Barrier Reef and an important story that some in the media have ignored.
As viewers of Channel Nine's 60 Minutes discovered last night in a powerful and moving report, the reef is being hit by a dramatic new wave of coral bleaching:
TOM STEINFORT: Charlie has brought me here to Pixie Reef, an ironic name for a place that's in such a sorry state. All around us is bleached and dying coral, right in the heart of the Great Barrier Reef.
— Channel Nine, 60 Minutes, 26 March, 2017
This latest dire threat to the reef has been widely reported in the media since February, when a rash of headlines echoed a grim official warning from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority:
Great Barrier Reef authority warns of widespread bleaching again this year.
— ABC.net.au, 24 February, 2017
Two weeks later, the threat level was raised further, after official surveys revealed much greater damage than feared.
And once again came a flurry of headlines. With the British tabloids, American broadsheets. And Canadian TV now getting in on the act, along with many others.
Then, just days ago the respected science magazine Nature ran the story on its cover.
Publishing the results of a worldwide study led by scientists from Queensland's James Cook University, which warned that damage to the Barrier Reef caused by climate change could be fatal.
And for the third time in a month, the media swung into action:
KATE LEONARD-JONES: Our national wonder in peril. This sobering view confirming what scientists feared, hundreds of square kilometres of coral dead or dying.
DAVID WACHENFELD: For the second consecutive year we have mass coral bleaching event.
KATE LEONARD-JONES: An event previously unheard of until 20 years ago.
— Channel Seven News Brisbane, 10 March, 2017
And once again it made waves around the world. In the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The BBC. And more, with the message that the reef could only be saved if climate change is halted.
But one place you couldn't read any of this was The Australian newspaper, which has had no mention at all in its print edition.
And how amazing is that? Here is arguably the most important environmental story in Australia and a tourism asset that's worth billions of dollars a year. Yet the Oz does not consider it worth reporting, except in a couple of clips online.
Even more remarkable, The Australian's environment editor, Graham Lloyd, who describes himself as:
… a fearless reporter on all sides of the environment debate.
— The Australian
has also had absolutely nothing to say. Extraordinary isn't it? In fact, Lloyd's been silent on coral bleaching since mid-last year when he reported that scientists had exaggerated the problem. That it wasn't too bad. And that the scientific world was divided.
Media Watch ripped into that article at the time because Lloyd relied heavily to make his case on a bird migration specialist from California called Jim Steele.
Who was not an expert on coral reefs. Or on oceans. Or on global warming,
Lloyd hit back in The Australian accusing us of Bleaching the Facts and:
… scientific bullying to squash discussion of genuine concerns about the Great Barrier Reef.
— The Australian, 25 July, 2016
He also said he was not ignoring coral bleaching but that he preferred to rely on:
… the more sober analysis of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority …
— The Australian, 25 July, 2016
Which of course is the authority behind all this year's warnings. So now Graham Lloyd is ignoring them too. As well as an army of experts like Professor Charlie Veron the so-called godfather of coral now sounding the alarm:
PROF CHARLIE VERON: A lot of people say oh it's just a normal, natural thing. There's nothing normal and natural about this. 20 years ago this would have been a fabulous place, it was a fabulous place. It was just teeming with life and now its teeming with death
— Channel Nine, 60 Minutes, 26 March, 2017
So why are Graham Lloyd and The Australian so busy looking the other way on such a tragic and important story? The Australian declined to explain. But our guess is it just doesn't fit their narrative.

Links
at No comments:

PBS Is The Only Network Reporting On Climate Change. Trump Wants To Cut It

The Guardian - 

During a record-breaking hot presidential election year, American news networks failed to report on climate change
Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstock
Media Matters for America has published its annual review of American evening newscast climate coverage for 2016, and the results are stunning:
In 2016, evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as Fox Broadcast Co.’s Fox News Sunday, collectively decreased their total coverage of climate change by 66 percent compared to 2015
In all of 2016, these news programs spent a combined grand total of 50 minutes talking about climate change. More than half of that come from CBS Evening News, which nevertheless only spent half as much time talking about climate change in 2016 as it had in 2015.
Network climate change coverage in 2015 and 2016. Illustration: Media Matters for America
It’s certainly not as though 2016 lacked newsworthy climate stories. We learned in January that 2015 had smashed the record for hottest year, previously set just a year earlier. And 2016 just kept getting hotter, with nearly every month setting a new heat record. In September, the US and China agreed to formally ratify the Paris climate agreement. The list goes on and on, with newspapers like The Guardian constantly publishing important climate-related news throughout the year.
During 2016 there was also an ongoing presidential campaign in which the candidates’ views on climate science and policy should have been featured prominently. Unfortunately, climate change was rarely raised in the primary debates, and never in the general election debates. In fact, on Sunday news programs, Bernie Sanders brought up climate change four times more often than the program hosts.
Number of times Sunday news show hosts and Bernie Sanders brought up the topic of climate change in 2016. Illustration: Media Matters for America
Only after the election did news networks finally examine what a President Trump would mean for the Earth’s climate:
ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News Sunday did not air a single segment informing viewers of what to expect on climate change and climate-related policies or issues under a Trump or Clinton administration. While these outlets did devote a significant amount of coverage to Trump’s presidency, airing 25 segments informing viewers about the ramifications or actions of a Trump administration as they relate to climate change, all of these segments aired after the election.
As Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) noted, this was a dismal failure by the American news networks:
In a year when the American people were deciding who our next leader should be, you would think there would have been more discussions about climate change in our news programs, not less. This isn’t just shameful, it’s irresponsible. The climate is changing, and it’s affecting everything from the weather to our national security and our economy. Its impacts are already being felt and the American people deserve to know more about it.
PBS was the oasis in this desert of climate news coverage. PBS NewsHour was the only show that examined what impact a Trump or a Clinton presidency would have on climate-related issues and policies before the election. The PBS news program aired more than double the number of climate news segments as any of its network competitors, and interviewed or quoted three times more scientists than even CBS Evening News. ABC World News Tonight failed to interview or quote a single scientist about climate change.
Number of network evening news program climate segments in 2016. Illustration: Medai Matters for America
Perhaps unsurprisingly given his climate denial, Trump’s proposed budget would completely defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which partially funds PBS. About half of that federal funding goes to local PBS stations that broadcast PBS NewsHour. Some of those stations – especially those in rural areas which rely particularly heavily on federal funding – would likely have to shut down, were Trump to get his budgetary wish.
With so little news coverage on the subject, it’s also unsurprising how confused Americans are about climate change – just 49% of Americans realize that most scientists think global warming is happening, and only 53% understand that humans are causing the problem. While concern among Americans about global warming is at an eight-year high, only 64% worry a great deal or fair amount.
That’s entirely understandable – if our leaders deny the problem, and our news networks don’t report on it, Americans are lacking the information signaling that global warming is an urgent threat. That’s why, although Americans (including Trump voters) would prefer that their political leaders take steps to address the problem, they don’t few it as a high priority, and thus aren’t bothered by the lack of political action.
When future generations look back in disbelief at our failure to take the needed steps to preserve a stable climate, the history books will take a harsh view of today’s media outlets and political leaders who refused to inform the public or protect its health and welfare in the face of such an immense known threat.

Links
at No comments:

Donald Trump's Anti-Climate Plans Won't Fool Nature

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Donald Trump on Tuesday in the White House. The US President signed an executive order winding back his predecessor's climate policies. Photo: Bloomberg
Back in 1983, well before the fossil fuel industry realised it had a climate problem, the physics and chemical impacts of burning coal, oil and gas were uncontroversial.
As US President Donald Trump unveils his plans to roll back his predecessor Barack Obama's climate change policies and end his "war on coal", it's worth a reminder the basic science has been settled for decades no matter what politicians do.

Trump Sacrificing Future for Fossil Fuels
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Tuesday that will suspend, rescind or flag for review more than a half-dozen measures in an effort to boost domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels.

The Earth had an "effective temperature" that was a balance of solar radiation it received and what it radiated back to space, I learnt as a Harvard freshman in my Science A-30 atmosphere course.
Our atmosphere was "an insulating blanket" keeping the planet's surface at about 298 degrees Kelvin (25 degrees) compared with space's 3 degrees K, according to class notes I found while sorting some old boxes.
Wind and rain lashes Airlie Beach as Cyclone Debbie blows in on Tuesday. Photo: Dan Peled
Alter the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - back then it was rising at 1.2 parts per million a year or less than half the present rate - and you would warm it up.
Lecture notes from 1983 underlining the build-up of carbon dioxide at that point. It's now about double that pace. Photo: Peter Hannam
Other consequences included melting tundra that would release the more potent greenhouse gas, methane, while oceans would become more acidic as they absorbed more carbon from the air.
'Exceedingly bad'
Among my notes was a 1983 paper by the US National Research Council that argued global warming impacts from burning fossil fuels on poorer nations "could be exceedingly bad news".
The paper warned of "claims for compensation as a matter of right may emerge" from affected populations, requiring "welfare aid".
Those lecture notes were unremarkable - if alarming - decades ago.
Since then, politicians in nations such as the US and Australia - often at the bidding of fossil industry donors and certain media outlets - have seeded sufficient voter doubt to stymie the introduction of consistent policies needed to curb carbon emissions.
Trump's rollback of US policies fit the pattern even if they face fierce legal battles and are likely to be delayed or made less radical in the process.
Atmosphere lecture notes from 1983. Photo: Peter Hannam
And his efforts to open up federal lands to coal miners and scrap other limits on coal-fired power plants are unlikely to lead to a massive jump in coal output because gas and increasingly renewable energy are already pricing coal out of the market.
As in Australia, Trump will find investors are wary of building new coal-fired power that may face a future carbon price or other curb.
Trump has so far failed to fulfil his campaign promise to pull the US out of the Paris climate pact. His executive order signed on Tuesday, though, will make it harder for America to meet its promise to cut emissions by 26 per cent on 2005 levels by 2025. (Australia has a similar goal - but is aiming to reach it five years later.)
The damage may be mostly economic in the short term if American support for renewable energy research is cut - as the Trump budget seeks - and the energy market gets tilted more in favour of fossil fuels over clean sources such as wind and solar.
China, the world's leader in most renewable energy rollout, will likely extend its lead.

 Science moves
The National Research Council in the US was already assessing the risks from climate change back in 1983. Photo: Peter Hannam
Some politicians, mostly on the right, in places such as Australia are already lining up to say their country should follow the US in depleting already insufficient efforts to tackle climate change.
National pledges made in Paris in 2015 fall far short of keeping global temperature increases to 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial times. Even if fully implemented - an outcome make less likely by Trump's policies - warming is headed towards three degrees or more by century's end.
For the planet, the science hasn't shifted but only become more refined.
Each rise of one degree in the atmosphere lifts its capacity to hold moisture by 7 per cent. That means the potential for bigger storms increases, as any first-year lecturer will tell her students.
Big storms such as Cyclone Debbie are projected to become more common, with a bigger clean-up bill for all of us to pay - even if media commentators and most politicians would prefer not to mention the link.
The fact the world's coral reefs - including our Great Barrier Reef - will largely be long gone if the temperature rises anywhere near 3 degrees - and we are one degree there already - is also well understood to scientists.
More complex changes are also afoot with new research regularly improving our partial understanding of the consequences of climate change.
These include signs that the jetstream over the northern hemisphere is weakening, allowing weather patterns to get stuck more often - bringing more extreme warm and cold spells.
Science, in other words, is moving on. It's time we demanded our politicians kept pace.

Links
at No comments:

29/03/2017

Climate Change And Poverty Are As Much Of A Threat As Terrorism For Many Young People

The Conversation - 

Shutterstock
It will probably come as little surprise that recent surveys have found the majority of adults in Europe think that international terrorism is the most pressing threat to the continent.
Though this is valuable information about what adults think, little is known about what children and young people perceive as the greatest threats to life and democracy in Europe.
The stereotypes of young people, particularly teenagers, are that they are disengaged from society, and not focused on national, let alone international, issues. But that couldn't be further from the truth.

Young people's views
For the last four years, our research group WISERDEducation has been surveying students at primary and secondary schools across Wales about aspects of their lives, education and perceptions of the wider world. In 2016 we asked almost 700 secondary school students (aged 13 to 18-years-old) what they considered to be "the most important problem facing Europe today", to see whether their perceptions differed from adults', and also whether views varied by age.
The students were given nine different problems to choose from: climate change, economic instability, international terrorism, poverty, war, availability of energy, population growth, spread of nuclear weapons and infectious diseases. The chart below shows the proportion of students who selected the five most popular options. The remaining options, grouped as "other", were chosen by very few participants, under 20% across all year groups. The chart below also excludes those who answered "don't know".


International terrorism dominated as the greatest problem for Europe among our participants. But looking at different school year groups, a more nuanced picture emerged.


Of Year 9 students (13 to 14-years-old), 44% considered terrorism to be the biggest problem, but this rate fell to 33% of Year 11 students (15 to 16-years-old). For Year 13 students (17 to 18-years-old), the percentage who thought terrorism was the biggest problem was much lower, at 20%.
For the older students, terrorism was displaced by economic instability as the most significant problem facing Europe – which may reflect the fact that employment and the economy were becoming more relevant to them as they came to the end of their school careers. However, while economic instability topped the list for this cohort, no single problem dominated for the Year 13 group. Students' concerns were clustered around a number of key issues, including terrorism, climate change and poverty.
Interestingly, the older students were more likely to see climate change as the most important problem for Europe. Only 12% of Year 9 and 11% of Year 11 students noted climate change as their greatest concern, but this jumped to 18% among Year 13 students. In fact, this was only slightly lower than the 20% of Year 13 students who saw terrorism as the most significant problem.

Threat perception influence
One reason that such a high proportion of students may have selected international terrorism as the most pressing issue facing Europe may have been the timing of our research. Students were surveyed in spring 2016, soon after attacks in Paris. In the month following the attacks, the children's helpline, Childline, reported a surge in calls from young people anxious about the possibility of a similar attack in Britain. Previous research has also found that people tend to prioritise threats that are physically and temporally close to them.
Terrorist attacks may also be seen as more threatening in general because they have clear perpetrators. By contrast no one group or individual can be blamed for climate change, making it seem less tangible as a threat. This is, of course, hugely problematic considering the large body of evidence that shows that climate change is already happening, and that other threats such as international terrorism may be linked to the disruption caused by global warming.
In the context of research on the threats to Europe – in which international terrorism routinely tops the list of concerns – the surprising finding from our survey is that such a high proportion of Year 13 students considered climate change to be a pressing issue, more so than found in some studies of adults' views.
A recent YouGov survey found that Britons are among the least concerned in the world about climate change, with only 12.8% selecting it as their most pressing issue. Considering that 18% of people aged 17 to 18-years-old in our 2016 survey believed it to be the most important issue facing Europe, and that the older the students were, the more likely they were to prioritise climate change, it seems that attitudes may be changing among the next generation of young adults.

Links
at No comments:

AEMO Releases Final Report Into SA Blackout, Blames Wind Farm Settings For State-Wide Power Failure

ABC - Nick Harmsen

AEMO is working with industry to build power system resilience. (AAP: Angela Harper)
Key points:
  • AEMO has released its fourth and final report into SA's September blackout
  • It said overly sensitive settings in some wind farms resulted in the statewide blackout
  • But it also found the intermittent nature of wind was not to blame
Overly sensitive protection mechanisms in some South Australian wind farms are to blame for the catastrophic statewide blackout in September last year, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) says.
In its fourth and final report into the September 29 blackout, AEMO said it was the action of a control setting responding to multiple disturbances that led to the 'black system'.
The report said the unexpected operation of the control settings resulted in the sudden loss of generation from the wind farms.
"Had the generation deficit not occurred, AEMO's modelling indicates SA would have remained connected to Victoria and the black system would have been avoided," the report said.
"AEMO cannot rule out the possibility that later events could have caused a black system, but is not aware of any system damage that would have done this."
AEMO has also contradicted its own early advice that the changing nature of South Australia's electricity generation mix played no role in the blackout.
It said the generation mix now includes increased amounts of non-synchronous inverter-connected generators — in other words, wind and solar.
South Australia's renewables-heavy power mix was a factor in the statewide blackout in September, a new report by the Australian Energy Market Operator confirms.
"This generation has different characteristics to a conventional plant, and uses active control systems, or complex software, to ride through disturbances," the report said.
"With less synchronous generation online, the system is experiencing more periods with low inertia and low available fault levels, so AEMO is working with industry on ways to use the capability of these new types of power generation to build resilience to extreme events."
AEMO said as the generation mix continues to change, it may no longer be able to rely on coal and gas generators to provide a fast enough response to stabilise the grid.
"Instead, additional means of procuring these services must be considered, from non-synchronous generators, where it is technically feasible, or from network or non-network services, such as demand response and synchronous condensers."
The Australian Energy Market Commission is already taking steps in this regard.

How the weather event tripped the system
On Wednesday September 28, two tornadoes with wind speeds between 190 and 260 kilometres per hour tore through a single-circuit 275-kilovolts transmission line and a double-circuit 275kV transmission line, about 170km apart.
The damage to these three transmission lines caused them to trip, and a sequence of faults in quick succession resulted in six voltage dips on the SA grid over a two-minute period at about 4:16pm.
As the number of faults on the transmission network grew, nine wind farms in the mid-north of SA exhibited a sustained reduction in power as a protection feature activated.
For most of them, the protection settings allowed the wind turbines to withstand a pre-set number of voltage dips within a two-minute period.
Two tornadoes with wind speeds of up to 260kph ripped down transmission lines. (ABC News: Dean Faulkner)
When the protection feature kicked in, the output of those wind farms fell by 456 megawatts over a period of less than seven seconds.
When the wind farms unexpectedly reduced their output, the Heywood Interconnector from Victoria tried to make up the shortfall.
About 700 milliseconds after the last wind farm powered down, the flow in the interconnector reached such a level that it activated a special protection scheme that tripped it offline.
The sudden loss of power flows across the interconnector sent the frequency in the SA grid plummeting.
South Australia has an automatic load-shedding system designed to kick-in in just such an event.
But the rate of change of the frequency was so rapid, the automatic load-shedding scheme did not work.
Without it, the remaining generation was much less than the connected load, and as a result, the entire system collapsed.
The SA power system then became separated from the rest of the national grid.
AEMO said its "analysis shows that following system separation, frequency collapse and the consequent black system was inevitable".

Why hasn't the entire state blacked out before?
AEMO said unforeseen separation and complete loss of the Heywood Interconnector has occurred six times in the past 17 years.
But in every other instance, the system stayed alive.
"The key differentiator between the 28 September 2016 event and the other three events is that there was significantly lower inertia in SA in the most recent event, due to a lower number of on-line synchronous generators," the report said.
"This resulted in a substantially faster rate of change of frequency compared to the other events, exceeding the ability of the under-frequency load-shedding scheme to arrest the frequency fall before it dropped below 47Hz."
Synchronous generators include coal, gas and hydro.
The state's last coal generator, at Port Augusta, closed last year.
Some gas generators have been mothballed, or used sparingly, especially in circumstances when the state's wind and solar power output is high.
Immediately before the blackout, wind had been producing almost half of South Australia's power needs, with much of the remainder being imported from Victoria.
South Australia's thermal generators (gas and diesel) had only been outputting about 18 per cent of the state's power needs.
A chart showing the chain of events which led to the statewide blackout. (Supplied: AEMO)
Are wind farms to blame?
It can be argued that the changing nature of the grid, which is seeing wind farms and solar energy replacing traditional thermal generation, did make South Australia more vulnerable to a statewide blackout.
There is no doubt the protection settings on some wind farms also contributed to the chain of events which resulted in this blackout.
But AEMO also makes it clear the intermittent nature of wind was not to blame.
"The most well-known characteristic of wind power, variation of output with wind strength, often termed 'intermittency', was not a material factor in the events immediately prior to the black system."
AEMO said changes made to turbine control settings shortly after the event has removed the risk of recurrence given the same number of disturbances.
SA's automatic load-shedding scheme didn't kick in during the storm. (AAP: David Mariuz)
Links
at No comments: