'Capitulation': Clive Hamilton Exits Climate Change Authority, Blasts Turnbull

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The Turnbull government's recent embrace of coal-fired power shows it has "abandoned all pretense of taking global warming seriously", Climate Change Authority member Clive Hamilton said, explaining why he resigned from the agency.
Professor Hamilton, who teaches public ethics at Charles Sturt University, sent his resignation letter to Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg on Friday, saying it was "perverse" that the government would be boosting coal when 2016 marked the hottest year on record.

Professor Clive Hamilton has resigned from the Climate Change Authority, saying the Turnbull government isn't serious about tackling global warming. Photo: Katherine Griffiths

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull used his National Press Club speech last week to call for support for so-called "clean coal-fired power plants" to provide "reliable baseload power" while meeting Australia's carbon emissions goals.
Professor Hamilton said the comments were "completely irresponsible and perhaps the sharpest indicator yet just how completely Malcolm Turnbull has capitulated to the hard right of the Liberal Party".

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"If the new coal-fired power plants were built, it would make the government's already weak 2030 [carbon] reduction target unattainable," he said in his letter.
"Deeper cuts in the subsequent decades, essential to limit the worst impacts of warming, would be off the table.
"Professor Hamilton told Fairfax Media the authority "no longer has any role in the development of climate change policy in Australia".
Mr Frydenberg said the government was "unapologetic that our priority as we transition to a lower emissions future is energy security and affordability".
"We are smashing our 2020 target by 224 million tonnes and we have an ambitious 26 to 28 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030 on 2005, which on a per capita basis is one of the highest in the G20," he said.
The Senate blocked repeated efforts by Abbott government to scrap the authority.
In October 2015, then environment minister Greg Hunt appointed five new members including Wendy Craik as chairwoman in a move the Greens said amounted to a stacking of Coalition-leaning appointees.
"In its first years, the authority did great work," Professor Hamilton said, including recommending Australia should aim to cut 2000-level emissions by 40-60 per cent by 2030.
The current government target is for a cut of as much as 28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, which amounts to about 20 per cent below 2000 levels.
The authority, though, "has become a shadow of its former self", particularly since the departure of former Reserve Bank governor Bernie Fraser as its chairman, Professor Hamilton said.
Last September, Professor Hamilton and fellow authority member David Karoly, issued a dissenting report, accusing the authority of failing to give the government independent advice.
The two claimed its Special Review of Australia's climate goals and policies was based on "reading from a political crystal ball" rather than meeting its own terms of reference.

Links

• Professor Hamilton's resignation letter (pdf)
• 'Untrue and dangerous': Climate Change Authority board at war over own advice
• Towards a climate policy toolkit: Special Review of Australia’s climate goals and policies
• David Karoly and Clive Hamilton: why we can't sign the latest Climate Change Authority report 

Carmichael Mine Jobs Need '21 Times The Subsidies' Of Renewables, Says Lobby Group

The Guardian - Joshua Robertson

Federal funding for Adani project amounts to $683,060 a job, compared with $32,191 a worker in Queensland’s clean energy sector, 350.org says

Solar panels. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has announced a $20m investment in the Ross River solar farm in Townsville, a 116MW project expected to deliver 150 jobs. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

Clean energy projects in Queensland are already on track to create more employment than Australia’s largest proposed coalmine, which if funded federally would cost taxpayers 21 times more per job, according to new study.
Federal government agencies are investing $71.4m in seven solar farms and a windfarm in Queensland, which are set to deliver a total of 2,218 jobs, according to analysis by climate advocacy group 350.org.
Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal project in central Queensland, which has obtained conditional approval for a $1bn federal infrastructure loan, is predicted to deliver 1,464 jobs.
The level of federal subsidy for Adani would amount to $683,060 a job, compared with $32,191 a worker in Queensland’s clean energy sector.
The Queensland government has accused the federal government of misrepresenting key data while talking up coal in an ideological attack on renewable energy.
The Queensland energy minister, Mark Bailey, has told the federal energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, he was using “clearly flawed” modelling to attack the state’s renewable energy target of 50% by 2030. It is the country’s most ambitious target, alongside South Australia’s.
Bailey has rejected Coalition calls for new coal-fired power stations, vowing the state would push ahead with its “clean energy transition” despite the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, “doing his best to spike the development of renewables”.
The federal minister for Northern Australia, Matt Canavan, a strong backer of the economic benefits of the Adani project for his central Queensland constituency, has previously told Guardian Australia that renewables projects were not major sources of jobs.
Canavan this week called for a new coal-fired power station in North Queensland to help kickstart new industries including mining near Mount Isa in the state’s northwest.
Bailey told Guardian Australia the environmental benefits of “so-called ‘state-of-the art clean coal-fired technology’” touted by Turnbull in a national press club address a fortnight ago were “very marginal”.
The so-called “ultra-supercritical” coal-fired stations cut carbon emissions by only 8.5% compared with the state’s “supercritical” station at Tarong, or “a mere 15%” compared to average emissions across the national energy market.
“In contrast, cleaner sources such as combined cycle gas are 56% more effective, while solar and wind are more than 90% more effective in reducing carbon emissions,” Bailey said.
“And they don’t lock in carbon emissions for the next 30 to 40 years, which is the life of an average power station.
“The Turnbull government needs to commit to using the latest integration technology and market design to manage the transition to genuinely clean energy sources instead of leaning on phrases like ‘clean coal’ to mask their increasingly anti-renewables stance.”

South Australian Energy Minister: ‘Clean coal is a fairytale’

Adani has sought a $1bn loan from the commonwealth’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund to help build a railway linking its Galilee basin mine site to its coastal port hundreds of kilometres away. Just over half of its thermal coal is slated for export to the Indian power market, the rest for elsewhere in Asia.
A spokesman for 350.org, Campbell Klose, said the figures on federal subsidies to Adani compared to renewable energy projects showed the “minimal return” should the loan go ahead.
“Anyone with a pair of eyes can see that if our government was serious about jobs in regional Queensland, they would be investing in clean energy projects,” he said.
“You don’t need an economics degree to work this one out. It really makes you wonder who Turnbull and Canavan are getting their advice from.”
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation on Monday announced a $20m investment in the Ross River solar farm in Townsville, a 116MW project expected to deliver 150 jobs and enter “full commercial use” in 2018.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena) has committed $20m towards the Darling Downs solar farm at Dalby, which is expected to generate 650 jobs but must secure additional funding.
The 170MW Mount Emerald wind farm at Mareeba comes with 150 jobs, and is under construction and expected to enter full commercial use in September 2018. Solar farms at Collinsville and Kidston are expected to generate 367 and 379 jobs respectively.
Arena is investing a total of $51.4m and CEFC $20m in Queensland renewables projects costing just over $1b.
Bailey has written to Frydenberg saying he was “disappointed by the lack of detail” provided to show how the federal environment department estimated the state’s renewable scheme would cost $27b.
“It confirms my concerns, however, about your use of this figure which even with limited visibility of your modelling is clearly flawed,” Bailey said in the letter.
Bailey told Guardian Australia that while the national energy market was playing “catch up to best practice in energy technology… business does not want to invest in new coal-fired power stations”.
He cited the Australian Industry Group’s claim that a new coal-fired energy policy would double electricity prices, as well as ANZ’s policy of not lending to power stations emitting more than 800 kilograms per megawatt hour, which ruled out “most ‘clean coal’ generators”.
Australia’s chief scientist, Alan Finkel, who is reviewing Australia’s energy security, last week said taxpayers should not subsidise new coal-fired power.
Canavan told the Australian Financial Review that the Queensland government was trying to protect its ownership of two-thirds of the state’s energy generation.
“I think it is a scandal. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has already expressed its concerns about the concentration of generators in Queensland. We do need base load power. There is no base load power north of Rockhampton,” he said.

Links

• 'Clean' coal power plants: Matt Canavan hints at government subsidy
• Analysis How Malcolm Turnbull could ignore the facts and fund the myth of 'clean' coal
• South Australian energy minister: 'Clean coal is a fairytale' – video
• Chief scientist to lead review into Australia's energy security

Commentary: Forget The Anthropocene. Welcome To The Idiocene.

Environmental Health News - Peter Dykstra

Will the daily barrage of falsehoods, insults, and boneheaded moves give cover to the business of dismantling environmental protection?

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

The first glimpses of a Trump Administration in action have, to most citizens in America and abroad, been quite unnerving. Appalling. Unsettling. In other words, everything that his pre-election conduct promised us.
On an almost everyday basis, a new media maelstrom leaves us staring slackjawed at something new: The Wall. The Muslim Ban. Disputes over inaugural crowd size or millions of alleged illegal voters – those two important if only to show an Oval Office capacity for deep self-delusion. His accusations that real journalists publish fake news, while re-tweeting news that is truly fake. Launching Twitter attacks – by one pre-inaugural estimate once every 42 hours – on reporters, news organizations, sovereign nations, beauty contestants, Gold Star parents, Meryl Streep, Samuel L. Jackson, John Lewis, and at least two future members of his own cabinet, Ben Carson and Nikki Haley. A prime time Supreme Court appointment.
This is a bonanza for some constituencies: Late-night satirists. Tea Partiers. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Geoff Livingston/flickr

But it also plays to the news media’s worst instincts to follow, en masse, the brightest, shiniest object of the day.
And while we’re doing that, the real work of dismantling government – including efforts on health, climate change, and environmental protection – are free to continue without scrutiny, or even in relative secrecy.
The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America has tracked the demise of climate reporting on network newscasts for years.  I can't see that trend changing under Donald J. Trump.
Traditional print media and online sources haven’t been nearly as negligent as commercial broadcast news. Old-line media like the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Associated Press have, if anything, upped their game.
AP science and environment stories are particularly widespread, but for hardly the best of reasons: Stories from the sprawling news nonprofit are being scooped up by daily newspapers whose in-house environment reporting has vanished in the industry-wide meltdown. New media and nonprofit news sites are performing nobly, but let’s face it: Collectively, we don’t rate a mention when the administration talks about war against the media.
A prominent industry newsletter, the Tyndall Report, chronicled the steep drop in issue-oriented coverage in TV news during the 2016 campaign. They saved this remarkable line for the exclamation point:
“No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates' terms, not on the networks' initiative.”
This past week, while the news media obsessed over two genuinely important stories – the “Muslim Ban” and the Supreme Court appointment – here’s what fell into the shadows:

• Congress rescinded a rule requiring transparency in oil companies' payments to foreign governments.  Let's assume Secretary of State Tillerson is okay with this.
• An EPA transition team leader floated the notion of firing two-thirds of the agency’s staff.
• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pushed its “Doomsday Clock” thirty seconds closer to midnight.
• The leading U.S. diplomat on the Arctic quietly walked away from the Chairmanship of the multi-nation Arctic Council
• An executive order directed federal agencies to abolish two regulations for every one new one it creates – a sort of buy one, get one free for the Koch Brothers.
• Trump promised pharmaceutical executives that the Food and Drug Administration would face a regulatory purge.
• The Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline projects were revived by Executive Order.
• Congress voted to overturn the Stream Protection Rule, which guards 6,000 miles of American streams from surface mine runoff.
• The potential gutting, or outright abolition, of the Endangered Species Act.
• The House Science Committee announced a hearing titled “Making the EPA Great Again.”

Each of these items got covered. Then they went away, while the national conversation from network newscasts to trending Twitter stories featured the Ban, and such Earth-shattering figures as LeBron James, Beyoncé and Punxsutawney Phil.
And chances are that someone who reads an environmental page like this one would already know these things. But beyond the small circle of us who follow this stuff closely, the rollbacks, science purges, and outright denial of scientific fact will continue, buried at the bottom of a broad heap of absurdity.
Don’t rely on the nation’s political press to give a rip, or have a clue. Case in point: In the pundit-fest following President Trump’s Tuesday prime time special announcing Neil Gorsuch, there was little mention of the Gorsuch family’s Washington DC pedigree. Gorsuch was branded as a westerner even though he spent much of his adolescence in the capital, watching his mother Anne stage a previous attempt to dismantle EPA. A CNN reporter named Pamela Brown speculated that many conservatives, for whom “your Momma was an EPA Administrator” would be the highest of insults, would mistrust the nominee.
History much? Of all the Reagan-era appointees, Anne Gorsuch Burford would have been one of the best fits in a Trump cabinet. Her Trump-ish attempts to cripple the EPA were thwarted by a Democratic congress, and her career ended in scandal. The type of scandal that pretty much happens hourly, with little notice or no consequence, in the current administration. But there’s no need for an ambitious Washington reporter to have known that. Being steeped in knowledge of the environment beat rarely furthers your political journalism career.
Jake Fuentes on the Medium.com offers another angle on this: Many of us presume that our new President is outwardly disjointed in his public utterances. But his media success, so far, is unquestionable. Could the Muslim ban be a conscious headfake to throw the press and public into an uproar while our system of protections is dismantled?
Maybe.
But don’t expect the denial, the harassment of scientists, or the relentless contempt for environmental protection to impress very many people. When the Commander-in-Chief launches a 3 a.m., 140-character hissyfit at an environmental journalist, I’ll know we’ve arrived.

Links

• The Holocene climate experience
• Meteorologists and the sacred position between people and science
• At the Women's March, a call for climate protection, too
• 25 smears, hoaxes, grifts and whoppers on climate and the environment in the Obama era
• Commentary: Fiends of the Earth