29/03/2017

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

The Conversation - 

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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.

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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)
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Trump To Sweep Away Obama Climate Change Policies

BBC

The president says the object of his changes is to boost economic growth and stimulate job creation. Reuters
US President Donald Trump is due to sign an executive order to overturn key parts of the Obama administration's plan to tackle global warming.
The move will undo the Clean Power Plan which required states to slash carbon emissions.
The executive order also cuts the Environmental Protection Agency's budget. Regulations on oil, gas and coal production are to be reviewed.
Mr Trump has promised to remove green rules which he says hurt the economy
During the campaign, he vowed to pull the US out of the Paris climate deal agreed in December 2015.
The White House said the new measures would "help keep energy and electricity affordable, reliable and clean in order to boost economic growth and job creation".
But environmental groups warn that they will have serious consequences at home and abroad.

What is Mr Trump's order changing?
President Trump takes a very different approach to the environment from Mr Obama. The former president argued that climate change was "real and cannot be ignored".
The Clean Power Plan sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants to meet US commitments under the Paris accord.
Mr Trump says that the US will no longer wage war on coal. AFP 
The regulation has been unpopular in Republican-run states, where it has been subjected to legal challenges - especially from businesses that rely on burning oil, coal and gas.
Last year the Supreme Court temporarily halted the plan, while the challenges are heard.
The Trump administration says that scrapping the plan will put people to work and reduce America's reliance on imported fuel.
It says the president will be "moving forward on energy production in the US".
"The previous administration devalued workers with their policies. We can protect the environment while providing people with work."
The president also intends to slash funding of the Environmental Protection Agency by a third. He recently appointed climate change sceptic Scott Pruitt as its new head.

What will the impact be? - Matt McGrath, BBC environment correspondent
This order signed by President Trump is both a practical and a philosophical attempt to change the US narrative on climate change.
His supporters say it will create thousands of jobs in the liberated oil and gas industries. His opponents agree the new order will be a job creator - but they'll be jobs for lawyers, not in the coal fields.
Front and centre is practical action on the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the Obama project to cut fossil fuels from energy production. Although it has long been tied up in the courts, the new administration will leave it to fester there while they come up with a much weaker replacement.
There will also be new, less restrictive rules on methane emissions from the oil and industry and more freedom to sell coal leases from federal lands.
President Trump is signalling a significant change in the widely-held philosophy that CO2 is the enemy, the main driver of climate change.
US environmentalists are aghast but also enraged. They will be queuing up to go to court. But in many ways that's playing into the hands of President Trump and the fossil fuel lobby.
"Delay is what they want," one green source told me, "delay is winning."

Will the US honour its commitments under the Paris climate deal?
While campaigning for the presidency, Mr Trump argued that the agreement was unfair to the US.
The landmark agreement commits governments to moving their economies away from fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions to try to contain global temperature rise.
Mr Trump has in the past said climate change had been "created by and for the Chinese".
Reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants was a key part of America's commitment in the Paris climate deal. AP
But at the end of last year, he acknowledged that there was "some connectivity" between human activity and climate change.
It is now unclear where exactly the US stands in relation to the deal.
Whatever the US chooses, the EU, India and China say they will stick to their pledges made in Paris.

What has been the reaction?
The president's order will be resisted by environmentalists, who have promised to challenge it in the courts.
Campaigning groups are scathing of the president's environment policies. AP 
"These actions are an assault on American values and they endanger the health, safety and prosperity of every American," billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer was quoted by Reuters as saying.
Another green group, Earthjustice, said it would challenge the order in and out of court.
"This order ignores the law and scientific reality," its President Trip Van Noppen said.

Does Trump believe in climate change? Tara McKelvey, BBC White House reporter
Yes - at least according to a senior aide.
When asked whether the president believes in man-made climate change, the aide said "sure", adopting a matter-of-fact tone.
This marks a shift. In 2015 the president said that climate change was a "hoax".
By November 2016, the president had softened his position on the matter, saying he saw "some connectivity" between man and climate change.
Now the president has gone further - at least, according to his aide.
The president, a one-time climate-change denier, now believes, that climate change is real - and that humans are behind it.

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