14/03/2017

'Clean Coal' Is A Con And It's Costing Us Lives

Huffington Post - Helen Szoke

This renewed debate, where scant word has been uttered on the inextricable links between coal, climate change and poverty, is maddening.
There is no such thing as clean coal. Ashley Cooper via Getty Images
There's been a lot of energy invested this year in a debate over so-called "clean coal" and Australia's electricity supplies.
Recently, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull took to social media to promise to "keep the lights on" and the power bills paid,scant declaring "all forms of generation" have a role to play in our energy sector. A couple of weeks earlier, Treasurer Scott Morrison was waving around a piece of coal in Parliament before it was passed around like a plaything.
Meanwhile, residents in South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland have just sweltered through a summer of unrelenting, record-breaking temperatures.
Further afield in the Pacific, our Fijian neighbours have marked the one-year anniversary of Cyclone Winston unleashing its devastating fury on the island nation.
The biggest cyclone in Fiji's history, Winston left a trail of destruction, from which communities are still recovering today.
Tragically, Winston killed 44 people, wiped out whole villages, destroyed an estimated 32,000 houses and left 50,000 people in need of shelter. In dollar terms, the damage bill amounted to one fifth of Fiji's gross domestic product.
The reality is coal is not some benign plaything to be used as a prop for a headline-grabbing stunt in our Federal Parliament.
This is what's missing from the current energy debate. The devastation that climate change is causing, and will continue to cause, if we do not curb the use of coal -- the burning of which is the single greatest contributor to climate change.
The reality is coal is not some benign plaything to be used as a prop for a headline-grabbing stunt in our Federal Parliament. It is also no longer the cheapest way to ensure our power bills can be paid.
In Oxfam's work around the world, we know that climate change is not only a driver of record temperatures and increasingly ferocious cyclones, but is also pushing more and more people into deeper poverty. The increasing risk of droughts, floods, hunger and disease caused by climate change is most heavily weighing on the world's most vulnerable communities.
Climate change could drive a staggering 122 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030.
It is already undermining people's ability to feed themselves. Globally, crop yields are likely to decline by 2 percent a decade from the 2030s. Compared to a world without climate change, there could be 25 million more malnourished children under the age of five by 2050 -- 20 times the number of children aged under five in Australia.
Instead of setting about building a smart, clean, reliable and low-cost electricity system, the Australian Government has misled the public about the causes of blackouts and electricity price rises, moved away from renewable energy, and promoted the false promise of "clean coal".
But instead of setting about building a smart, clean, reliable and low-cost electricity system, the Australian Government has misled the public about the causes of blackouts and electricity price rises, moved away from renewable energy, and promoted the false promise of "clean coal". Labor leader Bill Shorten has re-affirmed Labor's commitment to 50 percent renewables by 2030 -- which is certainly a welcome step in the right direction, but it's still short of what is needed.
There is no such thing as clean coal. Limiting the global average temperature rise to 1.5°C, as we and all nations committed to strive towards under the Paris Agreement, means there is simply no room for new coal.
The solution is clear -- to help limit warming to 1.5°C, Australia must move towards 100 percent renewable energy. We must reach zero carbon pollution well before mid-century.
While Australia engages in a time-wasting debate, other nations across the globe -- including our closest neighbours -- grapple with the devastating impacts of climate change and move towards renewable energy at a pace that is leaving our country far behind.
Renewable energy sources are now cheaper than coal, even before we take into account coal's cost in terms of carbon pollution. What's more, renewable energy sources are far better placed to help bring electricity to those in poor countries who currently live without it. Even one of the country's major energy generators has questioned the viability of any more "efficient" coal power stations being built in Australia.
Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison brings a lump of coal to Question Time. Fairfax
Developing countries, often the least responsible for climate change and those left to deal with the consequences, are leading the charge against coal and fossil fuels.
At the Marrakech Climate Change Conference last year, the 48 members of the Climate Vulnerable Forum -- the body for the most vulnerable countries to climate change -- committed to strive for 100 percent renewable energy as soon as possible, and at the latest by 2030 to 2050.
In 2011, global investment in renewable energy surpassed investment in fossil fuels. In 2013, the world began adding more new power from renewable energy sources than from coal, oil and gas combined. And as of 2015, the world has more installed capacity to generate electricity from renewables than from coal.
Pacific island governments, including Fiji -- which will chair the next round of international climate negotiations -- have repeatedly called for a moratorium on the development of new coalmines and are leading by example with ambitious renewable energy plans. But here in Australia -- a country fortunate to have some of the world's most promising renewable energy potential -- the frustrating debate over coal continues.
This renewed debate, where scant word has been uttered on the inextricable links between coal, climate change and poverty, is maddedevelning.
Developing countries, often the least responsible for climate change and those left to deal with the consequences, are leading the charge against coal and fossil fuels.
I have visited some of our neighbouring countries in the Pacific, where communities are being hit hardest by climate change. Where the people who can least afford it are being forced to adapt as their land is swallowed up and to rebuild in the face of extreme weather events.
In the wake of Cyclone Winston, Oxfam worked with our team in Fiji to deliver vital clean drinking water, sanitation supplies and shelter to those who had been left in dire need. The sobering reality is that if climate change is not addressed, Australia will be called on to respond to more devastating emergencies caused by extreme weather, both here in Australia and abroad.
Fijian leaders used the recent anniversary of Winston's destruction to make an impassioned plea for global action on climate change. It's time for Australia to heed this call and make a radical shift in its utterly out-of-step stance -- a position that is against our own interests and at odds with our commitments under the Paris Agreement.
We must reject the "clean coal" con; lives are at stake.

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The World’s Oceans Are Storing Up Staggering Amounts Of Heat — And It’s Even More Than We Thought

Washington Post - Chelsea Harvey

A diver films a reef affected by bleaching off Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef. (XL Catlin Seaview Survey via AFP/Getty Images)
The world is getting warmer every year, thanks to climate change — but where exactly most of that heat is going may be a surprise.
As a stunning early spring blooms across the United States, just weeks after scientists declared 2016 the hottest year on record, it’s easy to forget that all the extra warmth in the air accounts for only a fraction of the heat produced by greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, more than 90 percent of it gets stored in the ocean. And now, scientists think they’ve calculated just how much the ocean has warmed in the past few decades.
A new study, out Friday in the journal Science Advances, suggests that since 1960, a staggering 337 zetajoules of energy — that’s 337 followed by 21 zeros  — has been added to the ocean in the form of heat. And most of it has occurred since 1980.
“The ocean is the memory of all of the past climate change,” said study co-author Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The new value is a number that significantly exceeds previous estimates, Trenberth noted. Compared with ocean warming estimates produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the new values are about 13 percent greater. This is the result of a new methodology for estimating ocean warming, involving a series of steps “that really make this paper different than previous ones,” Trenberth told The Washington Post.
In previous decades, there have been a lot of challenges associated with monitoring temperature changes in the ocean. Before the year 2000 or so, most monitoring instruments had to be deployed from ships. This mean that scientists only had the most reliable data for parts of the world that lie along major shipping routes.
In the past 15 years, though, scientists have developed the “Argo” network, a system of free-drifting devices that are designed to periodically adjust their buoyancy, so they can sink several thousand meters into the sea, collect measurements, and then rise back up to the surface. There are now about 3,500 of these devices deployed throughout the world’s oceans, leading to a much better dispersal of observations.
The new study, which was led by Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and included other scientists from that institution, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, employs a new methodology for using both the recent Argo measurements and past observations from ships to produce a continuous series of estimates from 1960 to 2015.
The scientists incorporated an updated database of pre-Argo measurements that have been corrected for certain biases, as well as information from climate models, and extended existing observations of ocean conditions taken at specific locations to larger areas of the sea. They then conducted a comparison of recent Argo data with measurements created using their new methodology and found that the method produces true-to-life results.
The results suggest that the ocean has been sucking up more heat than previous research has indicated. In fact, according to Trenberth, the new estimates help explain observations of global sea-level rise that scientists have had difficulty accounting for until now.
A certain percentage of sea-level rise can be attributed to the expansion of ocean water, caused by rising water temperatures, while the rest comes from melting glaciers. Scientists have good estimates of how much melting ice is going into the ocean, but they’ve come up a bit short in the past in trying to reconcile the rest of the planet’s observed sea-level rise with their estimates of how much the ocean has warmed in recent decades.
“This actually fills in the gap,” Trenberth said.
The study also suggests that the extra heat is not being stored evenly throughout the oceans. The Atlantic and Southern oceans, in particular, are the biggest new heat reservoirs, the results indicate, storing about 59 percent of the heat despite accounting for less than half of all the ocean area in the world.
The researchers think the reason has to do with a major ocean current system known as “overturning circulation.” This system is kind of like a giant ocean conveyor belt that runs warm water from the equator toward the poles, where it cools, sinks to the bottom of the oceans and flows back in the other direction. The system helps transport both heat around the world, and the overturning process is pronounced in both the Atlantic and Southern ocean waters.
While the paper’s staggering new results reaffirm the importance of the ocean as a climate change buffer — without it, much of that heat would remain in the atmosphere or the earth’s land masses — it’s certainly not without consequences. Rising ocean temperatures are believed to be a major cause of the mass coral bleaching that’s occurred all over the world over the past several years, in conjunction with an unusually strong El Niño beginning in 2015.
It’s still unclear how other organisms might be affected, but many marine animals thrive best within specific temperature ranges. Many marine biologists believe that continued warming, along with other climate-related changes such as ocean acidification, may force certain species to migrate to cooler or deeper areas in the future.
Trenberth added that increasing heat moving into the surface of the ocean could also lead to “dead spots” in the ocean — places where layers of warm water get stuck on top of layers of cooler water. When this stratification happens, it can become more difficult for the waters to mix and churn as they normally would, a process that helps stir up nutrients and oxygen that are vital to marine organisms.
All this is to say that climate change affects far more than just our air temperature — and the new study documents its clear progression in places thousands of meters below the surface of the sea. The results also come at a sensitive point for ocean and climate research, just a week after The Washington Post revealed a proposal from the Trump administration that calls for significant budget cuts for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including a 26 percent cut for its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. It’s the primary research arm of NOAA, Trenberth pointed out, and such drastic cuts to the program could mean even basic observations programs like Argo may no longer continue.
“As a result, the information will not even be there,” Trenberth said. “That would be tragic.”

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Curbing Climate Change Has A Dollar Value — Here’s How And Why We Measure It

The Conversation - 

Coal train in Missouri. Assigning a social cost to carbon emissions puts a price on activities that generate them, such as burning fossil fuels. Scott Granneman/Flickr, CC BY-SA
President Trump is expected to issue an executive order soon to reverse Obama-era rules to cut carbon pollution, including a moratorium on leasing public lands for coal mining and a plan to reduce carbon emissions from power plants.
Trump and his appointees argue that these steps will bring coal miners’ jobs back (although coal industry job losses reflect competition from cheap natural gas, not regulations that have yet to take effect). But they ignore the fact that mitigating climate change will produce large economic gains.
While burning fossil fuels produces benefits, such as powering the electric grid and fueling cars, it also generates widespread costs to society – including damages from climate change that affect people around the world now and in the future. Public policies that reduce carbon pollution deliver benefits by avoiding these damages.
Since the Reagan administration, federal agencies have been required to enact only regulations whose potential benefits to society justify or outweigh their potential costs. To quantify benefits from acting to curb climate change, the U.S. government developed a formal measure in 2009 of the value of reducing carbon pollution, which is referred to as the social cost of carbon, or SCC. Currently, federal agencies use an SCC figure of about US$40 per ton in today’s dollars.
Now the Trump administration and critics in Congress may reduce this figure or even stop using it. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s recent comment that carbon dioxide is not “a primary contributor” to climate change suggests that Pruitt may challenge the agency’s 2009 finding that carbon emissions are pollutants and threaten human health.
As an economist for the White House, I was a member of the working group that developed the first government-wide SCC estimate. We can always improve our processes for estimating and using the SCC, but getting rid of it would be a mistake. A well-functioning democracy needs transparency about the economic benefits of investments driven by public policy – as well as the benefits we give up when we walk away from making these investments.
As a result of human activities since the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels have increased to 400 parts per million, higher than any time in at least the last one million years. US Global Change Research Program

The value of avoiding hurricanes and wildfires
Scientists widely agree that carbon dioxide emissions, primarily from burning fossil fuels, pose significant risks to Earth’s climate. Intuitively, it makes sense that reducing carbon emissions benefits society by reducing risks of flooding, wildfires, storms and other impacts associated with severe climate change.
We can estimate the benefits of many goods and services, from pop music to recreation, from the prices people pay for them in markets. But valuing environmental benefits is not so simple. Americans can’t go to the store and buy a stable climate.
Carbon pollution drives global warming that causes many different impacts on the natural and built environment and human health. Because carbon emissions have such broad and diverse impacts, scholars have developed models to characterize the economic benefits (or costs) of reducing them.
Current U.S. government practice draws from three peer-reviewed integrated assessment models. An integrated assessment model represents a chain of events, starting with economic activities that involve fossil fuel combustion. This generates carbon emissions, which contribute to climate change.
And climate change causes outcomes that can be measured in monetary terms. For example, rising carbon pollution will increase the likelihood of lower agricultural yields, threaten public health through heat stress and damage infrastructure through floods and intense storms.
Flooding in Hoboken, New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency and severity of coastal storms. acarrino/Flickr, CC BY-ND

Thousands of scenarios
The social cost of carbon represents the damages of one ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the air. To estimate it, economists run models that forecast varying levels of carbon dioxide emissions. They can then model and compare two forecasts – one with slightly higher emissions than the other. The difference in total climate change damages represents the social cost of carbon.
Carbon pollution can remain in the atmosphere for up to 200 years, so these models are run over a century or more in order to account for long-term damages that carbon emissions impose on society.
SCC estimates are based on chains of events that include many uncertainties – for example, how many tons of carbon will be emitted in a given year, the amount of warming that will result, and how severely this warming will exacerbate risks like floods and heat waves. Since we cannot predict any single scenario with certainty, the U.S. government has modeled hundreds of thousands of different scenarios to produce its SCC estimates.
Some model scenarios, based on admittedly extreme assumptions, produce negative SCC estimates – that is, they find that carbon pollution is good for the planet. But the vast majority of scenarios show that carbon pollution is bad for the planet, and that on average, every ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere imposes damages equal to about $40 in today’s dollars.

Balancing costs and benefits of regulations
The federal government began calculating a social cost of carbon after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in 2007 that the Department of Transportation had to account for climate benefits from its regulations to improve automobile fuel economy. Environmental groups and a dozen states challenged the regulations, in part because the Bush administration had valued the benefits of cutting carbon dioxide emissions at zero.
In response, the Obama administration created a working group in 2009 with officials from 12 agencies to develop the federal government’s first official SCC estimate. Our initial figure of $25 for 2010 was updated in 2013, 2015 and 2016, reflecting updates in the underlying models.
Agencies have used these estimates in benefit-cost analyses for scores of federal regulations, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, the Department of Transportation’s medium and heavy-duty vehicle fuel economy standards, and the Department of Energy’s minimum efficiency standard for refrigerators and freezers. Some of these studies were required only by executive order, but others were required by law. Unless the authorizing statutes are amended, the Trump administration will have to produce analyses accounting for carbon pollution reduction benefits if it wants to issue new regulations that can withstand legal challenges.
Fuel economy label for gasoline-powered vehicle. Federal agencies have have factored the social cost of carbon into regulations governing vehicle fuel economy and other issues. www.fueleconomy.gov
The Trump administration could continue to use SCC estimates in regulatory evaluations, but water them down. For example, some scholars have called for focusing only on domestic benefits – as opposed to total global benefits – of reducing carbon pollution in the United States. Emitting a ton of carbon imposes damages in the United States and around the world, just as a ton emitted in Beijing imposes damages on the United States and other countries around the world. Considering only the domestic impacts of carbon pollution could lower the SCC by three-quarters.
But if the United States ignores the benefits of reducing carbon pollution that other countries enjoy, then those other countries may follow suit and consider only how cutting emissions will benefit them internally. This approach ignores the strategic value that serves as the primary motivation for countries to work together to combat climate change. The world would achieve much greater emissions reductions and greater net economic benefits if countries implement policies based on the global social cost of carbon instead of a domestic-only SCC.
As climate change science and economics continue to evolve, our tools for estimating benefits from reducing carbon pollution will need to evolve and improve. In January the National Academies of Sciences published a report that lays out an extensive research agenda for improving the estimation and use of the social cost of carbon.
The federal government has used used benefit-cost analysis to calculate society’s bottom line from regulations for decades. So far, the Trump administration appears to be focused solely on costs – an approach that maximizes the corporate bottom line, but leaves the public out of the equation.

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