03/06/2017

Climate Change Authority Says Turnbull Government Should Adopt New Low Emissions Target

Fairfax - James Massola | Heath Aston | Fergus Hunter

The Turnbull government should adopt a Low Emissions Target as a fall back option to help Australia reduce its carbon emissions and meet its Paris climate targets, according to the Climate Change Authority.

Trump's climate call
US President Donald Trump has withdrawn America from the Paris climate change agreement, but Australia will not follow according to the energy minister.

The call is contained in a new joint report by the Authority and the Australian Energy Market Regulator, requested by Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, on how to improve power security in Australia and reduce electricity prices.
Fairfax Media understands the recommendation is likely to be mirrored in chief scientist Alan Finkel's review of the electricity sector, which will be released at the next Council of Australian Governments meeting next Friday.
The report argues that an Emissions Intensity Scheme is still the best way to reduce emissions but the Turnbull government ruled out this policy after a revolt by the Coalition backbench late last year.
In the absence of an emissions intensity scheme, "a LET could support a wide range of generation technologies including gas and carbon capture and storage" the Authority stated.
The energy market regulator said it had not compared a Low Emissions Target with an Emissions Intensity Scheme in terms of its impact on the electricity market, including on prices and system security.
A low emission target operates in a similar way to the Renewable Energy Target and implementing one could help provide a path forward for the Turnbull government.
The Climate Change Authority says the Turnbull government should adopt a low emissions target. Photo: AP
It would require more electricity be supplied from – depending on its design – renewables, carbon capture and storage and highly efficient gas
A low emissions generation target could be set in a LET, and scaled up in future if needed, or a desired level of emissions intensity per unit of electricity generated could be set.
President Donald Trump speaks about the US role in the Paris climate change accord. Photo: AP
The report was released on Friday as Mr Turnbull stared down calls from his backbench to postpone the release of the Finkel review after the United States abandoned the Paris climate treaty.
A coalition of groups including the Business Council, ACTU, ACOSS, Conservation Foundation and the Climate Institute issued a joint statement on Friday that said Australia must remain a signatory to the Paris deal, which requires a 26-28 per cent emissions cut, against 2005 level, by 2030.
Malcolm Turnbull has rebuffed backbench climate change rebels. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
In Singapore, Mr Turnbull said President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Paris international climate change pact was not a surprise, but disappointing.
"We would prefer the United States to remain part of the agreement," he said.
Mr Trump's decision to pull out of the landmark accord – which seeks to limit global warming to 2 degrees celsius through emissions cuts from member nations – has been met with a swift global backlash.
Mr Turnbull also rebuffed calls by senior conservative Eric Abetz to put the Finkel Review on ice and ask its author to consider the local ramifications for a Paris accord that does not include the US, including putting beef producers at a competitive disadvantage.
Fairfax Media revealed on Thursday that five Coalition backbenchers – Ian Goodenough, Senator Abetz, Ian MacDonald, Tony Pasin and environment committee chair Craig Kelly – want the government to reassess the Paris agreement.
But Mr Turnbull said the timing of the release of the Finkel Review will not change and that the nation needed an "informed, hard-headed, practical approach" to the future of the electricity system.
Labor Climate spokesman Mark Butler said "any notion that the Turnbull government's opposition to an EIS is based on rational concerns for impacts on electricity affordability, reliability or policy effectiveness is demolished by this latest report".
Greens climate spokesman Adam Bandt said that a low emissions target was a "second best option".
This week Dr Finkel told a Senate hearing that his report would cover Australia's responsibilities to cut total emissions under the Paris agreement but did not say whether it would advocate placing a price on carbon.
Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg told the ABC on Friday that an EIS pushed by business leaders would not solve the major issue of reliability, typified by the South Australian blackout earlier this year.
"Our position on an emissions intensity scheme is clear: we believe that that does punish some of the existing coal-fired power generators in the country," he said.
Environment groups are pushing for a faster transition to a 100 per cent renewable power grid.
The ACF, Wilderness Society and Solar Citizens on Friday released a document that called for an "urgent energy system overhaul that provides a clear pathway to a clean, reliable, affordable, inclusive and equitable renewable energy future for all Australians".

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Will India Ever Need Another Coal Plant?

CityLab - 

The country’s energy infrastructure is changing rapidly as solar prices plummet.
Amit Dave/Reuters
In 2010, India was experiencing a massive boost in coal power—but not everyone was benefitting. Those in the Siddhi community, spread across the foothills of the Western Ghats, were almost entirely left in the literal dark. Francis Wilson relied entirely on kerosene lamps since the power grid didn’t cover his area. Mohan Appu had no direct connection to electricity because he had no documents to prove ownership of the house he had lived in for years. Residents of this rural community would have to travel almost 13 miles to charge a mobile phone.
This scenario, which plays out often across pockets of rural areas in the country, reflects the curious situation of India’s energy landscape. For the past two years, there’s been an overabundance of coal power, even though 240 million people in India still have little to no access to electricity. Meanwhile, over the last five months, the price of renewable energy has plummeted so low that analysts have hailed it as both “record-breaking” and “unsustainable” in the same breath. In fact, the pace of change in the country’s energy infrastructure has been so swift that even researchers are scrambling to keep a steady pulse on a constantly developing beat.
As China slowly cut down on its own coal infrastructure, the International Energy Agency in 2015 projected India to be the next coal center in the near future. It stated that “half of the net increase in coal-fired generation capacity worldwide [through 2040] occurs in India.” Nearly a year later, in July 2016, the nonprofit CoalSwarm put out a report that found 370 proposals for coal plants in the works across the country.
The findings revealed a pretty explosive conclusion: that India’s outsized plans for coal energy would wipe out climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Merely a few months after the report, the researchers at CoalSwarm were surprised by a new twist. In December 2016, the Central Authority of India (CAI) laid out an electricity plan that said no new coal plants, beyond those already under construction, are needed for at least the next decade. The CAI also put forth new renewable energy goals—a production of 275 gigawatts (GW) generated from solar, wind, and hydro by 2027.
“You can’t keep building expensive coal-fired power plants that pollute the country and think there’s going to be demand—[some residents] just can’t afford it.”
This means that the majority of the plants that CoalSwarm tracked are now going to be shelved. It’s also a show of India’s push towards reforming its energy infrastructure: the country added more renewable power than thermal in the 2016 fiscal year. “It was hard to keep up,” says Christine Shearer, a senior researcher at CoalSwarm and lead author of the report. “The country is supposed to be at the heart of coal plant growth, but it’s interesting to see the tide go against what we often hear about China and India—that they’re going to keep building coal plants—when actually, they’re both stalling production.”
The glut of power doesn’t mean that every corner of the country is electrified— rather, it gestures strongly towards inertia, uneven distribution, and redundancy. “There are many coal plants which aren’t functioning at full capacity,” says Ashish Fernandes, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace. This underutilization, he points out, has led to an abundance of stale power contained inside state-owned distribution companies.
Another reason for the overabundance: rural areas that lack electricity can’t seem to afford the price of it. The cost can range from around Rs. 120 ($1.86 USD) to Rs. 500 ($7.75 USD) per month for domestic utilities, depending on the state. “If [residents] can’t afford the power, it doesn’t matter what fuel they use,” says Tim Buckley, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). “You’ve got to solve energy poverty, education, and employment to address that problem,” he adds.“You can’t keep building expensive coal-fired power plants that pollute the country and think there’s going to be demand—[some residents] just can’t afford it.” Even when data shows an area as having electricity, it may not mean much, Fernandes says. “We need to look at individual households that have power. According to the government data, if you have one building or streetlight in a rural area that has power, the entire town is considered to be connected,” he adds.
A look at the annual growth of coal capacity, in megawatts, added in India between 1960-2015, right before the country declared an oversupply of coal power. (Courtesy of CoalSwarm)
A report by Greenpeace published in October 2016 identified 65GW of coal power stations under construction in India and an additional 176GW of projects at various stages of obtaining permissions. The report forecast that 94 percent of the capacity being built would not be needed by 2022, representing a waste of $49 billion in investments. This could partly explain why a $150 million coal plant in the state of Maharashtra is currently sitting idle, with a lack of demand from power generators. And it could also explain why another state in India, Gujarat, has walked away from a $4 billion coal plant of 4000 megawatts this month. “There is no financial investment to fund coal in the Indian market because they’re simply not competitive against solar energy prices right now,” says Buckley.
As prospects for India’s coal sector are falling, so is the price of renewable energy. In turn, the country’s future outlook, if all goes accordingly, is pretty good news for the planet. India first set a record-low price in February this year when a kilowatt-hour of solar energy was selling at Rs. 2.97 ($0.046 USD). This month, the country hit another record low—the price of solar dropped 12 percent further, currently selling at Rs. 2.62 ($0.041 USD) per kilowatt-hour. “To spell it out, new solar is 15 percent cheaper than existing domestic coal. No one, anywhere in the world, was expecting solar to get that cheap for at least a decade,” Buckley says, “and India just got there this year.” It’s a marked shift for India—which, in a matter of months, went from potentially thwarting global climate goals to possibly saving them.
The news of falling solar prices in India, and the country’s recent (but significant) efforts to divest from coal as the fundamental energy source, stands in contrast to the current scenario in the U.S. Analysts fear that President Trump’s “America First Energy Plan” will put the country behind China and India in the push to reinvigorate renewable solutions. “What gives me hope is that at a time when Trump is busy trying to destroy the Paris Agreement, the two most important countries in the world for the agreement are China and India,” says Buckley.
According to a study released last week by the Climate Action Tracker, India and China are on pace to “overachieve” their climate goals by 2030. While Trump has taken recent action to revitalize the coal industry, the report finds that China and India’s recent aggressive stances on carbon emissions “significantly outweigh” America’s lack of clean energy initiatives. Ultimately, Buckley points out that it might come down to those two countries taking the lead. “If Trump backs out of the Paris Agreement, which [is] a very likely scenario, he would be ceding America’s leadership in energy markets to China and India,” Buckley says.
Out of the world’s top three carbon transmitters, the U.S. is the only one at risk of missing its target goal, the Climate Action Tracker report concludes. An energy blueprint released this week by the Indian government predicts that 57 percent of total electricity capacity will come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2027—exceeding the Paris Agreement’s target of 40 percent by 2030. Currently, almost 33 percent of the country’s total energy comes from non-fossil fuel, which makes the Paris target relatively unambitious—it looks like India is almost three-and-a-half years ahead of schedule.
The research is undoubtedly positive and the numbers trumpet a new standard being set by two unlikely countries. But in terms of large-scale implementation, neither solar nor coal are easy options in India. For solar energy to be reliable and widespread, the country would need to build grid infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. The dwindling prices of non-fossil fuel energy is encouraging, and the slow-but-steady withdrawal from coal is optimistic, but is it enough to plug the gaps? Fernandes doesn’t think so. “The biggest threats to renewable expansion are the distribution companies,” he says, adding that this is the root of the problem. “Unless the distribution model is overhauled, the same issues will be transferred.”
Solutions like off-grid solar panels are one kind of sustainable technology that could address the distribution problem, says Harish Hande, co-founder of SELCO, an enterprise that introduced off-grid solar energy in the Siddhi community in 2010. Within a year, 100 homes in the area were connected to power in the Western Ghats region. SELCO has been nationally awarded for its energy work in under-served households and areas—but, as Hande points out, a long-standing solution has to go beyond the mere mechanics of the supply chain. “It’s much larger than providing electricity,” he says, “and there have to be enough public-private partnerships that cross over education, health, and the bigger ecosystem for sustainable energy services to become more accessible.”

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Fact-Checking President Trump’s Claims On The Paris Climate Change Deal

Washington Post - Glenn Kessler | Michelle Ye Hee Lee



In his speech announcing his decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord on climate change, President Trump frequently relied on dubious facts and unbalanced claims to make his case that the agreement would hurt the U.S. economy. Notably, he only looked at one side of the scale — claiming the agreement left the United States at a competitive disadvantage, harming U.S. industries. But he often ignored the benefits that could come from tackling climate change, including potential green jobs.
Trump also suggested that the United States was treated unfairly under the agreement. But each of the nations signing the agreement agreed to help lower emissions, based on plans they submitted. So the U.S. target was set by the Obama administration.
The plans are not legally binding, but developing and developed countries are treated differently because developed countries, on a per capita basis, often produce more greenhouse gases than developing countries. For instance, on a per capita basis, the United States in 2015 produced more than double the carbon dioxide emissions of China — and eight times more than India.
Here’s a roundup of various statements made by the president during his Rose Garden address. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios in roundups of speeches.
“We’re getting out, but we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair.”
Each country set its own commitments under the Paris Accord, so Trump’s comment is puzzling. He could unilaterally change the commitments offered by President Barack Obama, which is technically allowed under the Accord. But there is no appetite to renegotiate the entire agreement, as made clear by various statements from world leaders after his announcement.
“China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020.”
This is false. The agreement is nonbinding and each nation sets its own targets. There is nothing in the agreement that stops the United States from building coal plants or gives the permission to China or India to build coal plants. In fact, market forces, primarily reduced costs for natural gas, have forced the closure of coal plants. China announced this year that it would cancel plans to build more than 100 coal-fired plants.
Gary Cohn, chairman of Trump’s National Economic Council, recently told reporters that “coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore as a feedstock. Natural gas, which we have become an abundant producer, which we’re going to become a major exporter of, is such a cleaner fuel.”
“Compliance with the terms of the Paris accord and the onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025, according to the National Economic Research Associates. This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs — not what we need.”
Trump cited a slew of statistics from a study that was funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation, foes of the Paris Accord. So the figures must be viewed with a jaundiced eye. Moreover, the study assumed a scenario that no policy analyst expects — that the United States takes drastic steps to meet the Obama pledge of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in emissions by 2025.
Moreover, the study did not consider possible benefits from reducing climate change. A footnote says: The study “does not take into account potential benefits from avoided emissions. … The model does not take into consideration yet-to-be developed technologies that might influence the long-term cost.”
Trump also cited the impact by 2040, including a “cost to the economy” of nearly $3 trillion in lost gross domestic product. But in addition to an unrealistic scenario, that number must be viewed in context over more than two decades, so “$3 trillion” amounts to a reduction of 6 percent. The study concludes coal usage would almost disappear, but innovation in clean energy sources would slow considerably, which also raises the cost of complying with the commitments.
Environmentalists say greater investment in clean energy will lower costs and spur innovation. That may not be correct either, but it demonstrates how the outcomes in models of economic activity decades from now depend on the assumptions.
“Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree — think of that, this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount.”
Trump is referring to research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a 2015 report. Researchers found that proposed emissions cuts in the Paris plan would result in about 0.2 degrees (Celsius) less warming by 2100, if the cuts were not extended further.
John Reilly, lead author of the report, said he “disagrees completely” with Trump’s characterization that the 0.2 degree cut is a “tiny, tiny” amount that is not worth pursuing. As a part of the deal, countries reexamine their commitments and can exceed or extend their pledges beyond 2030. The intent of the research was to say the Paris deal was a small step, and that more incremental steps need to be taken in the long run.
“The logic that, ‘This isn’t making much progress on a serious problem, therefore we’re going to do nothing,’ just doesn’t make sense to me. The conclusion should be — and our intended implication for people was — not to overly celebrate Paris, because you still have a long journey in front of you. So carb up for the rest of the trip,” Reilly said.
“The green fund would likely obligate the United States to commit potentially tens of billions of dollars of which the United States has already handed over $1 billion. Nobody else is even close. Most of them haven’t even paid anything — including funds raided out of America’s budget for the war against terrorism. That’s where they came.”
It is incorrect that other countries have not contributed to the Green Climate Fund. In fact, 43 governments have pledged money to the fund, including nine developing countries. The countries have pledged to pay $10.13 billion collectively, and the U.S. share is $3 billion. As of May 2017, the United States has contributed $1 billion of the $3 billion it pledged.
Trump implies that the money was taken out of U.S. defense monies. But the U.S. contributions were paid out of the State Department’s Economic Support Fund, one of the foreign assistance programs to promote economic or political stability based on U.S. strategic interests. Republican lawmakers have criticized the use of this fund, saying Congress designated the money to prioritize security, human rights and other efforts unrelated to climate change. However, the payments were made with congressional notification and meetings with congressional staff.
Trump also claimed in the speech that the Green Climate Fund “calls for developed countries to send $100 billion to developing countries.” But, as we noted, it’s actually $10 billion.
“China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years, 13. They can do whatever they want for 13 years. India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries.”
China, in its Paris Accord commitment, said that, compared to 2005 levels, it would seek to cut its carbon emissions by 60 to 65 percent per unit of GDP by 2030. India said it would reduce its emissions per unit of economic output by 33 to 35 percent below 2005 by 2030; the submission does seek foreign aid to meet its goals and mitigate the costs.
Both countries pledge to reach these goals by 2030, meaning they are taking steps now to meet their commitments. India, for instance, seeks to have renewable power make up 40 percent of its power base by 2030, so it is investing heavily in solar energy. The country is now on track to become the world’s third-largest solar power market in 2018, after China and the United States. China is also investing heavily in renewable energy.
“Believe me, we have massive legal liability if we stay in.”
Trump is referring to concerns raised by White House counsel Don McGahn that staying in the Paris agreement would bolster legal arguments of climate advocates challenging Trump’s decision to roll back the Clean Power Plan.
The Clean Power Plan is a flagship environmental regulatory rule of the Obama administration, and proposes to cut carbon emissions from existing power plants 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. It is crucial to the United States meeting its carbon emissions reductions pledge in the Paris agreement. But it has been placed on hold while under litigation.
According to Politico, McGahn raised concerns that the Paris agreement “could be cited in court challenges to Trump’s efforts to kill Obama’s climate rules. McGahn’s comments shocked State Department lawyers, who strongly reject both of those contentions, the sources said.”
“As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States, which is what it does.”
For years, Trump has touted his strong record on the environment. But the evidence is quite slim. We awarded Four Pinocchios to his claim that he is a “very big person when it comes to the environment,” who has “received awards on the environment.”
Environmentalists have criticized many of Trump’s projects, particularly for his plans to build a golf course on protected sand dunes and chopping down hundreds of trees for a golf course renovation. As a businessman, Trump or his property did win two environmental awards. In 2007, the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., received an award for “environmental stewardship through golf course maintenance, construction, education and research.” Three years later, the golf course was cited for a series of environmental violations.
In 2007, Trump won a “Green Space Award” for donating 435 acres of land to the state of New York. He had purchased the land to build a golf course, but withdrew plans after opposition from local residents and environmental restrictions. The land was never developed into a park, and New York closed it after budget cuts in 2010.

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