Lethal Heating: 02/13/17

13/02/2017

Sweltering Heat, Simmering Debate

The intense heat engulfing the eastern states and triggering power shortages in South Australia has, predictably, reignited political debate over the shortfall in grid energy supplies. In South Australia as many as 90,000 people were impacted by power cuts mid week and there was outrage over the inactive gas plant that could have been cranked up to feed energy into the grid at a time the wind turbines were unable to supplement supplies. NSW is now tipped to experience rolling blackouts from Friday afternoon as the mercury soars to 42 degrees before hitting 43 on Saturday.
But the solution in terms of reliability of supply is right in front of us, and while last week seems a long time ago in the world of politics it is worth relaying the Prime Minister’s comments at his address to the National Press Club where matters of energy and storage featured prominently both during the address and question time which followed.
“We have an abundance of coal, gas, sun and wind resources, not to mention uranium. Yet our energy is among the most expensive in the OECD. … [and] energy bills are making up an increasing proportion of household budgets,” the Prime Minister declared. (Perhaps we could we add high power bills are acting as a strong incentive for households to install solar and storage.)
“Australia should be able to achieve the policy trifecta of energy that is affordable, reliable and secure… security, affordability and emissions reduction, that’s what we need to achieve.”
The PM went on to state “Energy storage, long neglected in Australia, will be a priority this year” and announced a new ARENA/CEFC funding round for large-scale energy storage demonstration projects, including pumped hydro, adding he had written to Chief Scientist Alan Finkel asking him to advise on the role of storage and pumped hydro in stabilising the grid.
“Large-scale storage will support variable renewables like wind and solar. It will get more value out of existing baseload generation and it will enhance grid stability. We’re going to get on with it.”
The Australian Solar Council and Energy Storage Council welcomed the PM’s strong statement about energy storage but queried the silence on the election promise of a solar thermal project in Port Augusta part funded by the Clean Energy Innovation Fund, whose funding has in any event been slashed.
The ASC also stated “We all know coal can no longer compete with solar and wind on price even without a price on emissions.”
During his speech to the NPC the PM stated “We will need more synchronous baseload power and as the world’s largest coal exporter, we have a vested interest in showing that we can provide both lower emissions and reliable base load power with state-of-the-art clean coal-fired technology”.
He bemoaned the lack of new coal-fired power stations using so-called lower emissions technologies, despite the multi-million dollars that have been pumped into ‘clean’ coal technology research and demonstration since 2009.
“Here we are, $590 million spent on clean coal, trials and demonstration. Biggest coal exporter in the world. You’d think if anyone had a vested interest in showing that you could do really smart, clean things with coal, it would be us, wouldn’t you? Who has a bigger interest than us? We are the biggest exporter. Yet we don’t have one power station that meets those requirements.”
It was this comment that invoked a strong backlash from community and business groups. The Greens were up in arms; Richard Di Natale said the Coalition had been spruiking renewable energy investment in “clean coal” power stations as a means to reach their modest Renewable Energy Target.
“These alternative facts set the scene for this year’s renewable energy battleground,” he said. “Pushing clean coal is like promoting light cigarettes or scientific whaling: the product is deadly, but comes with a healthy sounding label. After Barnaby Joyce’s “we should be building new coal-fired power stations” comment, this is the final proof that Malcolm Turnbull has been captured by the Trumps in his party.”
The Green’s Adam Bandt describes Turnbull as a coal protectionist, using public money designed to be spent exclusively on renewable energy infrastructure to instead prop up a dying industry saying “He wants to take money out of renewables and give it to the coal industry … it’s like trying to deal with the rise of the internet by subsidising the fax machine industry.
“The Prime Minister laments spending over half a billion dollars of public money on clean coal only to find the technology still doesn’t exist. That should tell him something. Maybe it’s a sign that this technology is bogus and he should stop throwing good money after bad.
“New coal fired power stations are uneconomic because they can’t compete with wind and solar. They will never be built in Australia unless the government stumps up the money.”
It’s worth recording that the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group also affirmed that ‘clean’ coal is an unwise investment, and the duo representing a large swag of Australian commerce reinforced their support for the RET.
Big energy retailers AGL EnergyAustralia and Origin likewise have no goals for new coal plants in Australia and in many instances are steering efforts towards renewables.
And on a technical matter, Section 62 of The Clean Energy Finance Corporation Act prohibits investment of its funds in carbon capture and storage. Despite this Treasurer Scott Morrison told media “Coal is a big part of the future under a Coalition Government and restated his intent to set aside in the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to fund a new generation of coal-fired power stations.
Repeating Bandt’s retort “it’s like trying to deal with the rise of the internet by subsidising the fax machine industry.”
Back to last week’s address to the Press Club where the PM also criticised some states for “setting huge renewable targets, far beyond that of the national RET, with no consideration given to the baseload power and storage needed for stability”.
We read – horrifyingly so – that Energy Minster Frydenberg now refers to Labor’s renewables target of 50 per cent by 2030 a “horror show” and note that the past PM continues to rage war on renewables, incorrectly saying the RET should be scrapped because it will push up power prices, despite all evidence to the contrary.
BNEF’s Kobad Bhavnagri helped demystify the cost of renewables during a recent ABC radio interview in which he backed up Shadow Environment Minister Mark Butler’s assertion that the RET puts downward pressure on prices. That too was the conclusion drawn by Warburton in his review of the RET two years ago.
Making the point that energy markets are highly complex and only made worse by politics which causes instability in the market (politicians “cherry pick” reports to support their view), Bhavnagri stressed that today it’s cheaper to build clean energy plants – solar and wind – than gas or coal fired power plants – and once they are built the energy source is free.
On this, BNEF calculates the cost of new wind and solar at $80 per MWh and the cost of a new coal generator at around $160 per MWh. BNEF notes too that the price of wind and solar continues to decline.
“Energy is part of the culture wars” Bhavnagri said. “It is hard to get sensible debate …. It should be left to the experts … and whatever the plan you have to factor in climate change.”

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Can A Children's Lawsuit Force Action On Climate Change?

Christian Science Monitor - Patrick Reilly

The young plaintiffs in a case proceeding to trial in federal court think so.

A plume of steam billows from the coal-fired Merrimack Station in Bow, N.H., Jan. 20, 2015. Jim Cole/AP/File

On Friday, President Trump was named the lead defendant in a lawsuit brought by 21 US students – one as young as nine – against the US government.
The case, Juliana v. United States, was first filed in 2015 with President Barack Obama listed as lead defendant, so the switch to Mr. Trump is largely procedural.
But the plaintiffs are seeking a court order that will compel the US government to drastically curb carbon emissions. With the change from Mr. Obama to Trump, they’re now taking on an administration that looks askance at climate science.

This marks the latest shift in a years-long legal campaign that aims to move beyond political inaction on climate change by establishing a Constitutional right to a stable climate.
"The US is most responsible for climate change, so it's really the most important case in the world right now on the issue," said Julia Olson, lead counsel for the plaintiffs.
The group sponsoring this lawsuit, Our Children’s Trust, has been attempting to litigate climate-change action since 2011, when young plaintiffs affiliated with the group filed lawsuits or regulatory petitions in all 50 states.
While these cases differed in their specifics, they all sought to apply the public trust doctrine – the concept that the government owns and must maintain natural resources for the public’s use – to the atmosphere, and, by extension, compel state governments to implement policies that would drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The group has had some success. In September 2016, after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court sided with the group, Gov. Charles Baker issued an executive order directing the state government to establish emissions-reductions regulations by August 2017, and prepare a "comprehensive energy plan" within two years.
But elsewhere, judges saw greenhouse-gas reductions as a matter for the legislatures, not the courts.
In New Mexico, for instance, the state appeals court ruled that, "where the State has a duty to protect the atmosphere under ... the New Mexico Constitution, the courts cannot independently regulate greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere as Plaintiffs have proposed.”
Robert L. Wilkins, judge for the US District Court in the District of Columbia, echoed these thoughts on the federal level, ruling that "federal courts have occasionally been called upon to craft remedies that were seen by some as drastic.... But that reality does not mean that every dispute is one for the federal courts to resolve, nor does it mean that a sweeping court-imposed remedy is the appropriate medicine for every intractable problem.”
But last November, a federal judge in Oregon ruled that a case brought by Kelsey Juliana and 20 other young plaintiffs could proceed to trial. Judge Ann Aiken grounded her ruling in the Fifth Amendment's promise that "no person ... shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

She wrote, "Where a complaint alleges governmental action is affirmatively and substantially damaging the climate system in a way that will cause human deaths, shorten human lifespans, result in widespread damage to property, threaten human food sources, and dramatically alter the planet's ecosystem, it states a claim for a due process violation."
The trial will begin in Judge Aiken’s courtroom later this year. The plaintiffs' attorney, Ms. Olson, is confident that the case will proceed to – and win in – the Supreme Court, as reported by Slate’s Eric Holthaus.
But legal experts caution that the trial and appeals process could take years, and that the Trump administration will likely want to drag it out for as long as possible.

And even the landmark legal victory sought by Our Children’s Trust might not mean the end of the story. The decades-long struggle to desegregate cities through busing and other programs revealed the difficulties of translating court orders into workable public policy – especially when doing so impacts citizens' day-to-day lives.
Even so, after years of legislative inaction on the issue, environmental activists are looking for outside-the-box solutions, and many see new hope in Our Children’s Trust.
As Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Slate, "There is no question that [Judge Aiken’s] decision, in both its eloquence and its bold declaration of a new constitutional right, breaks new ground."

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Introducing The Terrifying Mathematics Of The Anthropocene

The Conversation - Owen Gaffney | Will Steffen

Here are some surprising facts about humans’ effect on planet Earth. We have made enough concrete to create an exact replica of Earth 2mm thick. We have produced enough plastic to wrap Earth in clingfilm. We are creating “technofossils”, a new term for congealed human-made materials – plastics and concretes – that will be around for tens of millions of years.
But it is the scale that humans have altered Earth’s life support system that is the most concerning.
In 2000, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed that human impact on the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and ice sheets had reached such a scale that it had pushed Earth into a new epoch. They called it the Anthropocene and argued the current Holocene epoch was over.
The Holocene began 11,700 years ago as we emerged from a deep ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, the defining feature of the Holocene has been a remarkably stable Earth system. This stability has allowed us to develop agriculture and hence villages, towns and eventually cities – human civilisation.
We use pretty powerful rhetoric to describe the Anthropocene and current human impact. As The Economist stated in 2011, humanity has “become a force of nature reshaping the planet on a geological scale”. We are like an asteroid strike. We have the impact of an ice age.
But what does this really mean? Does it mean, for example, that we are having as big an impact as these natural forces are having right now, or is it, somehow, more profound?

Humans: the new asteroids. Steve Jurvetson, CC BY

The maths of the Anthropocene
In our recent study, we wanted to find the simplest way to mathematically describe the Anthropocene and articulate the difference between how the planet once functioned and how it now functions.
Life on Earth, the chemical and physical composition of the atmosphere and oceans, and the size of the ice sheets have changed over time because of slight alterations to Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes to the sun’s energy output or major asteroid impacts like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

Cyanobacteria changed the world; now it’s our turn. Matthew J Parker, CC BY-SA

They can also change due to geophysical forces: continents collide, cutting off ocean currents so heat is distributed in a new way, upsetting climate and biodiversity.
They also shift due to sheer internal dynamics of the system – new life evolves to drive great planetary shifts, such as the Great Oxidation Event around 2.5 billion years ago when newly evolved cyanobacteria began emitting the deadly poison oxygen that killed all simple life forms it came in touch with. Life had to evolve to tolerate oxygen.
Taking as our starting point a 1999 article by Earth system scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, we can say the rate of change of the Earth system (E) has been driven by three things: astronomical forcings such as those from the sun or asteroids; geophysical forcing, for example changing currents; and internal dynamics, such as the evolution of cyanobacteria. Let’s call them A, G and I.
Mathematically, we can put it like this:

It reads: the rate of change of the Earth system (dE/dt) is a function of astronomical and geophysical forcings and internal dynamics. It is a very simple statement about the main drivers of the system.
This equation has been true for four billion years, since the first life evolved. In his article, Schellnhuber argued that people must be added into this mix, but his theory came before the full impact of humanity had been assessed. In the past few decades, this equation has been radically altered.
We are losing biodiversity at rates tens to hundreds of times faster than natural rates. Indeed, we are approaching mass extinction rates. There have been five mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth. The last killed the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, now humans are causing the sixth.
The rate we are emitting carbon dioxide might be at an all time high since that time too. Global temperatures are rising at a rate 170 times faster than the Holocene baseline. The global nitrogen cycle is undergoing its largest and most rapid change in possibly 2.5 billion years.
In fact, the rate of change of the Earth system under human influence in the past four decades is so significant we can now show that the equation has become:

H stands for humanity. In the Anthropocene Equation, the rate of change of the Earth system is a function of humanity.
A, G and I are now approaching zero relative to the other big force – us – they have become essentially negligible. We are now the dominant influence on the stability and resilience of the planet we call home.
This is worth a little reflection. For four billion years, the Earth system changed under the influence of tremendous solar-system wide forces of nature. Now this no longer holds.

IPCC, 2014: Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland

A new reality
Heavenly bodies of course still exert some force; so does the ground beneath our feet. But the rates at which these forces operate are now negligible compared with the rate at which we are changing the Earth system. In the 1950s or 1960s, our own impact rivalled the great forces of nature. Now it usurps them entirely.
This should come as a shock not only to environmentalists but to everyone on Earth. But our conclusion is arguably a modest addition to the canon of academic literature. The scale and rate of change has already been well established by Earth system scientists over the past two decades.
Recently, Mark Williams and colleagues argued that the Anthropocene represents the third new era in Earth’s biosphere, and astrobiologist David Grinspoon argued that the Anthropocene marks one of the major events in a planet’s “life”, when self-aware cognitive processes become a key part of the way the planet functions.
Still, formalising the Anthropocene mathematically brings home an entirely new reality.

The equations that shape our planet. Owen Gaffney, Will Steffen, Author provided

The drama is heightened when we consider that for much of Earth’s history the planet has been either very hot – a greenhouse world – or very cold – an icehouse world. These appear to be the deeply stable states lasting millions of years and resistant to even quite major shoves from astronomical or geophysical forces.
But the past 2.5 million years have been uncharacteristically unstable, periodically flickering from cold to a gentle warmth.

The consumption vortex
So, who do we mean when we talk of H? Some will argue that we cannot treat humanity as one homogenous whole. We agree.
While all of humanity is now in the Anthropocene, we are not all in it in the same way. Industrialised societies are the reason we have arrived at this place, not Inuits in northern Canada or smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Fossil fuels have turned us into a force of nature. Reuters

Scientific and technological innovations and economic policies promoting growth at all costs have created a consumption and production vortex on a collision course with the Earth system.
Others may say that natural forces are too important to ignore; for example, the El Niño weather system periodically changes patterns globally and causes Earth to warm for a year or so, and the tides generate more energy than all of humanity. But a warm El Niño is balanced by a cool La Niña. The tides and other great forces of nature are powerful but stable. Overall, they do not affect the rate of change of the Earth system.
Now, only a truly catastrophic volcanic eruption or direct asteroid hit could match us for impact.
So, can the Anthropocene equation be solved? The current rate of change must return to around zero as soon as possible. It cannot continue indefinitely. Either humanity puts on the brakes or it would seem unlikely a global civilisation will continue to function on a destabilised planet. The choice is ours.