Lethal Heating: 08/01/17

01/08/2017

As The UK Plans To Phase Out Petrol Cars, Is Australia Being Left Behind?

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Britain has joined France and India in trying to ban the sale of diesel and petrol cars, but some say Australia's size makes the transition too difficult

The Australian Energy Market Operator suggest up to 45% of new cars will be electric by 2036, but other estimates vary from 15% to 100%. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

It is only a matter of time until every Australian car is all-electric. But while other countries are speeding up the transition, with plans to ban petrol cars within a couple of decades, Australia is stuck debating even modest cuts to vehicle emissions, let alone policies to encourage zero-emissions cars.
But as the UK, France, India and other countries move quickly towards getting all-petrol cars off the roads, could Australia's fleet be caught up in the winds of change?
According to Michael Bradley, chief executive of the Australian Automobile Association, Australia should be cautious in embracing all-electric cars.
"All the signs point to electric vehicles making up a significant proportion of the global fleet but in Australia we have some unique challenges," he tells the Guardian. He says the distances Australians travel and the reliance of our electricity grid on coal means electric cars are neither convenient for consumers, nor a solution to climate change.

The rise of electric cars
Recently, Stanford University economist Tony Seba made headlines with modelling suggesting no petrol or diesel cars would be sold anywhere in the world by 2025. He argued that once the shift starts – which it already has – "internal combustion engine vehicles will enter a vicious cycle of increasing costs". He argued the combination of automation and electrification would turn the industry upside down, increasing safety, lowering maintenance and insurance costs, and leading to a world where few people owned cars, with most relying on robot electric cars hailed with apps such as Uber.
But other more conservative projections also see the transition happening quickly, if not so suddenly.
Projections by the Australian Energy Market Operator suggest as many as 45% of new cars will be electric by 2036. Other projections from the CSIRO, Australian National Uuniversity, the Department of Environment and Energy and others put the number at between 15% and 100%.
According to Behyad Jafari, chief executive of the Electric Vehicle Association, the one thing that's clear is even the more optimistic projections need to be ramped up year after year.
"We saw this with the uptake of rooftop solar panels too," says Jafari. "The people who came closest with their projections but still fell short were Greenpeace – they were laughed at for their projections."
But Jafari says the moves in the UK, France, India and elsewhere will drive changes in the automotive industry that will affect Australia regardless of policy settings here.
Jafari said moves in the UK, which is one of the few other right-hand-drive markets in the world, will have a strong impact.
"As a major right-hand-drive market, auto manufacturers, particularly those based in Europe and the US do their product planning based on the needs of the UK market first, and then off the back of that they look at which models they will bring to Australia," says Jafari.
"With the UK moving away [from internal combustion engines] by 2040, that sends a signal starting today that the investments and the advancements in technology are required."
But so far, Australia is trailing the world with its takeup. In 2016 there were 1,369 electric vehicles sold – just 0.1% of the sales – a drop from the 2015 figure of 1,771. Fewer than half of those cars were all-electric, with the rest being plug-in hybrids.

Driver anxiety
Globally, one of the biggest concerns consumers have about electric cars is the distance they can travel between charges – and the availability of public charging stations. The concern has been labelled "range anxiety".
Bradley says it's a real problem in Australia. "It's an issue for Australia given our vehicle use and how it's different to what it is in other countries," he says.
Since Australia is a vast continent, with large distances between cities, and with a lot of people commuting to work, electric cars might not be able to go the distance Bradley says.
But Jafari says while range is something that is of great concern to consumers, it's mostly a misplaced worry. "People are tricked by thinking that because we have a large country that we drive long distances. In fact we fly long distances and drive relatively short ones," he says.
Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics seems to support Jafari's argument. In 2016, the majority of drivers drove less than 30km per day. And 99% of drivers drove less than 160km a day – a distance some electric cars could do on half a charge and one all would easily achieve on one charge.
Bradley says those figures don't account for what people do on weekends – when they might drive out of town. For those drives, he said, people would need to charge along the way. And again, given Australia's vast size, charging infrastructure is expensive to deploy.
Technology available today would seem to satisfy most consumer needs, however. A Tesla Model S can drive 426km on one charge, meaning it could easily drive between Sydney and Canberra on a single charge.
And with just two quick charges of less than 30 minutes along the way, it could drive from Sydney to Melbourne.
Installing fast-charging stations along highways will alleviate range anxiety, and that's what has started to happen.
This week the Queensland government launched its planned "electric super highway", which will be a 1,600km stretch dotted with super-fast charging stations along the way. When completed in just six months' time, electric vehicle owners will be able to drive from far-north Queensland to the border of NSW without being more than 100km from a charging station.

Jafari says he's not concerned about public charging infrastructure since he thinks businesses will jump in and build that as soon as there's confidence in the electric car market growing in Australia.
He says the key thing that will shift the takeup of electric cars in Australia will be the availability of models under $60,000 and closer to the $25,000 range. That will be more likely as more such models are made for the UK market, but how fast it happens will depend on Australian policies such as the controversial emissions standards.

Environmental motives
Many consumers who are considering electric cars have environmental concerns at the front of their minds.
When it comes to air quality concerns, there's no question electric cars are the best option. "Obviously electric vehicles are a clear winner on that front," says Bradley.
But Bradley says in the Australian context, when it comes to climate change and emissions of CO2, electric cars are not a solution. "Driving an electric car on Australia's grid at the moment is dirtier than driving a comparable petrol car."
Australia's electricity grid relies heavily on coal, making it highly emissions intensive.
According to the Australian government's Green Vehicle Guide, a Tesla Model S, for example, might put out zero emissions, but it produces about 185g of CO2 per kilometre when the lifecycle of its fuel (in this case electricity) is considered.
But Jafari argues that's not a fair comparison, since a Tesla Model S is a performance car – with acceleration similar to some of the fastest sports cars on the market.
In addition, Jafari says there are a multitude of ways of charging electric vehicles with electricity from renewable sources.
Queensland's electric highway will be powered with renewable energy, for example, and most public charging stations purchase green energy. AGL has also launched a $1 a day car charging plan for home charging, which is sourced from emissions-free sources.
"The energy industry is decarbonising and, without a shift towards electrification of vehicles, leaves the benefits of that on the table – we'll produce more green energy but leave our cars powered by fossil fuels," Jafari says.

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What’s Missing from “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Al Gore’s New Climate-Change Documentary

New Yorker - Michelle Nijhuis

The news, the former Vice-President says, has become “like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.” But is fear enough to spur us to action? Photograph Courtesy Paramount Pictures

In one of the most memorable moments of Al Gore’s new climate-change documentary, “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Gore refers to a sequence from the film’s 2006 predecessor, the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth.” The most criticized scene in that movie, he tells an audience of climate-change activists, was an animation showing how a combination of sea-level rise and storm surges could flood the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, then under construction in lower Manhattan. “People said, ‘That’s ridiculous. What a terrible exaggeration,’ ” Gore recalls.
A moment later, on the screen behind him, the animated flood is replaced by news footage of Hurricane Sandy, which in late 2012 flooded the main floor of the unfinished museum with seven feet of black, debris-filled water. Several days after the storm, in a briefing on recovery efforts, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “There is a wakeup call here, and that is climate change and our vulnerability to it. It was true ten years ago, it was true five years ago. It is undeniable today.”

Eleven years ago, when “An Inconvenient Truth” was released, the effects of climate change were still, for most of us, the stuff of animations and projections. The connection between global warming and extreme weather, though well established in computer models, was difficult to demonstrate in the real world; as scientists routinely reminded the public, no single event—not even one as devastating as Hurricane Katrina—could be confidently attributed to humanity’s impact on the planet.
Scientists’ characteristic caution, combined with the George W. Bush Administration’s deep hostility toward climate science and emissions reductions, insured that in the United States, at least, the ramifications of climate change were almost always presented to the public as theoretical and highly uncertain. The souped-up PowerPoint presentation that was “An Inconvenient Truth” effectively separated facts from muddle, and Gore’s earnest, insistent monotone, for so long a political handicap, found its most successful application.

Today, both the causes and the effects of climate change are clearer, and while some people have been harder hit than others, few of us are totally untouched; the news, as Gore puts it in a practiced bit of dark humor, has become “like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.” The former Vice-President is still giving, and constantly updating, his presentation, and it is now filled with footage from climate-related disasters, ranging from the 2012 inundation of the 9/11 memorial to the painful, ongoing recovery from Typhoon Haiyan, the intense 2013 storm that killed more than six thousand people in the Philippines and affected some eleven million others throughout Southeast Asia. After a 2015 heat wave killed more than twelve hundred Pakistanis, Gore reports, cemeteries in the city of Karachi prepared for the following summer by digging anticipatory mass graves.

“An Inconvenient Sequel,” which opened in select cities on Friday and will open nationwide next week, arrives on the heels of a widely shared New York magazine article by David Wallace-Wells. The piece describes, in dramatic terms, the worst-case repercussions of climate change. “Absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” Wallace-Wells writes.
Some climatologists objected to the article’s characterizations of their work, but the real controversy centered on its approach. Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center, at Pennsylvania State University, declared that he was “not a fan of this sort of doomist framing,” and the sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen described it as “climate disaster porn.” Wallace-Wells, for his part, acknowledged that his piece was “alarmist,” and proudly so. “We should be alarmed,” he wrote after its publication. (Earlier this month, the biologist Paul Ehrlich used a similar defense after co-authoring a study that warned of a coming “annihilation” of vertebrates. “I am an alarmist,” Ehrlich told the Washington Post. “My colleagues are alarmists. We’re alarmed, and we’re frightened. And there’s no other way to put it.”)

Psychologists have studied the dynamics of what advertisers call “fear appeals,” and they have found that while fear is very good at getting our attention, it’s not very good at keeping it. For that, the scary stuff must be followed by solutions that are small enough to be practical but large enough to be meaningful. Wallace-Wells’s article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” successfully got attention, quickly becoming the most-viewed article in New York’s history. But it offers little in the way of fixes, nodding briefly to the allure—if not the wisdom—of geoengineering and suggesting that civilization will eventually cobble together a substantive response to climate change, if only because the alternative is so appalling.
“An Inconvenient Sequel,” which is a work of advocacy rather than journalism, pivots efficiently away from its disaster reel and toward solutions, cheering the rise of cheaper renewables and the promise of the Paris climate accord, even in the wake of the U.S.’s withdrawal. But its tight focus on Gore means that grassroots climate activists—many of whom were galvanized by Gore’s first film, and by the hundreds of trainings he has held in the years since—get short shrift. For the most part, they are shown sitting in auditoriums, listening raptly to Gore’s presentation. A long segment of the film is devoted to Gore’s behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Indian delegation at the Paris conference—which, while procedurally interesting, is hardly the sort of thing that most viewers can try at home.

Intentionally or unintentionally, “The Uninhabitable Earth” leaves room for something “An Inconvenient Sequel” does not: grief. The present and possible future ravages of climate change, on our own species and others, are enormously, often overwhelmingly sad, and most of us would rather not contemplate them. Wallace-Wells, as a journalist, isn’t professionally obligated to pivot away from the worst-case scenarios, and he makes the unusual decision to leave us staring at them. The vantage isn’t pleasant, but its provision feels, oddly, like a gesture of respect: for once, we’re given a chance to absorb and reflect, and, in time, find our own way to a response.

I saw “An Inconvenient Sequel” on a hot July night in Portland, Oregon, at a screening hosted by the environmental group Renew Oregon and attended by Governor Kate Brown. Brown has committed her state to meeting the emissions-reduction goals set by the Paris accord, but most paths to those goals require a price on carbon, and Oregon legislators have so far failed to approve a bill that would do so. At the screening, she announced, to enthusiastic applause, that she would work to pass a state “cap and invest” bill in 2018. “I think the rest of the world needs to see Americans, and Oregonians, standing up,” she told me later. “We must participate, and we must be part of the solution.”

After the credits rolled, Shilpa Joshi, a Renew Oregon staffer, stood to speak to the audience, and acknowledged the weight of the suffering we had just witnessed. “My family is from India, and it resonates with me on a deep level,” she said. She then described how audience members could help build support for a clean-energy economy in Oregon, detailing the kind of right-sized solutions that the movie had only touched upon. “Change at the local level is the best way to create real change in our state, and in our country, and in our world,” she reminded her listeners. No matter how climate change is framed—no matter how sunny or doleful the vision—it’s what happens off the screen, and off the page, that will decide whether the planet remains habitable.

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When Life on Earth Was Nearly Extinguished

New York Times - Peter Brannen*

Armando Veve

It has been called the "Great Dying."
The planet's most profound catastrophe struck 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, killing 90 percent of life in the ocean and 75 percent on land. The fossil record nearly goes silent and remains startlingly impoverished for millions of years: trees disappear, bacteria replace coral reefs, insects hush. What looks like fungus spikes in the fossil record, perhaps the sepulchral rot of a dying world.
It was as close as earth has ever come to being sterilized altogether, and would take 10 million years for the planet to fully recover, setting the stage for the eventual rise of the dinosaurs.
"The End-Permian mass extinction is unique in earth history," said Seth Burgess, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey. "Nothing else is as severe, and it's not even close."
A growing body of evidence suggests that this ancient apocalypse was brought on, in large part, by gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia. Today the consequence of quickly injecting huge pulses of carbon dioxide into the air is discussed as if the threat exists only in the speculative output of computer models. But, as scientists have discovered, this has happened many times before, and sometimes the results were catastrophic.
This month the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology published a special issue that explores a growing body of evidence that past volcanic releases of carbon dioxide may have helped drive many of the most extreme die-offs in earth history.
While cautioning that there may have been other killers involved in these Armageddons, as well, the paleontologist David Bond and the geologist Stephen Grasby write in the journal that most mass extinctions were marked by "global warming, anoxia and ocean acidification, driven by changes in atmospheric CO₂." After synthesizing a vast body of literature and reviewing almost 20 global mass extinctions over the past half billion years — including the most extreme ones, the so-called Big Five — the authors concluded that "large scale volcanism is the main driver of mass extinctions" and that "most extinctions are associated with global warming and proximal killers such as marine anoxia."
The journal's special issue reflects a research community that, failing to find asteroid impacts at the crime scenes of many of the planet's worst prehistoric calamities, has turned its attention away from the sky and toward homegrown killers.
Today, in the lonely reaches of Siberia, piles of ancient basalt stack up, in places, miles thick. During the height of the End-Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago, this lava would have covered millions of square miles of what was then the supercontinent Pangaea. But it wasn't simply the lava that nearly exterminated life on earth.
As the work of Dr. Burgess documents, when this magma started spreading into the shallow crust of Siberia, it intruded into one of the world's largest coal basins, cooking huge deposits of carbon-rich rocks. The superheated fossil fuels then ruptured at the earth's surface in spectacular gas explosions, as documented by a team led by the Norwegian geologist Henrik Svensen.
Though volcanoes in Siberia had already been erupting for around 300,000 years, Dr. Burgess's work indicates that it wasn't until the magma started burning through fossil fuels on a colossal scale that the mass extinction began. The carbon dioxide was delivered to the atmosphere just as effectively as by any coal-fired power plant or minivan muffler today.
In the resulting chaos, as temperatures rose and life died in the acidifying, oxygen-starved oceans, the planet nearly lost its pulse. I asked Dr. Burgess what a time traveler visiting the End-Permian earth would have experienced. "It would be hot and it would be terrible," he said, laughing.
Though the asteroid that would wipe out the dinosaurs 186 million years later might get more attention, the Great Dying dwarfs that catastrophe in destruction. It brought about the end to a less well-known but similarly fascinating, and much older world — a supercontinental wilderness stocked with an odd collection of uncanny pre-mammal forbears and, in the seas, an archaic hallucination of shells and tentacles that had prevailed since the dawn of animal life.
Today humanity plays the role of that primeval Siberian supervolcano, burning through the world's ancient stores of carbon, long buried underground in the form of oil, coal and natural gas. Though there were likely other killers afoot in the Great Dying — like ozone-destroying halocarbons, acid rain and a heavy dose of toxic heavy metals raining from the volcanic smog — it was the chemistry-warping pulse of carbon dioxide that has attracted the most suspicion for its role in nearly ending the world. And we have only to look at the modern ocean to see why.
Excess carbon dioxide reacts with seawater to make it inhospitable to the animals that use carbonate to build their skeletons. Our modern oceans have already become 30 percent more acidic since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the shells of fluttering planktonic snails — which form a foundational part of the food web in the Antarctic and the Pacific Northwest — have been found pitted with holes in our newly souring seas.
By 2050 the Southern Ocean will no longer be able to host those creatures, which also form a critical part of the diet of salmon. Acidification will also doom, perhaps by midcentury, the already ailing coral reefs that host 25 percent of the ocean's biodiversity. And the world's shallow oceans are losing oxygen as the planet warms and nutrient pollution pours in from agricultural heartlands and urban watersheds. Paleontologists have seen all these changes before.
It's still an open question what will result from our continuing chemistry experiment with the planet, but the history of mass extinctions counsels extreme caution.
Luckily, we're still a long way away from an End-Permian level mass extinction, though some paleontologists warn that a few more centuries of environmental excess may well get us there. But you don't have to get all the way to the apocalypse before life begins to get markedly less comfortable.
Even before the United States' harebrained exit from the Paris climate agreement, the planet was well off course from its 3.6-degree Fahrenheit (2-degree Celsius) target for 2100. We're currently on pace for about 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) of warming by the end of the century, a temperature that at times in the past has meant no ice at either pole. But the calendar doesn't stop at the end of the century, and continued warming beyond that will begin to make parts of the planet uninhabitable for mammals like ourselves, because of the dangers of heat stress. And, as the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef shows, the oceans are already struggling to adapt to a warmer, more acidic world.
Though the Great Dying was truly extreme, and likely included some stresses beyond the scope of humanity's armamentarium, we have emerged as a formidable geological force in our own right as we continue to tweak and warp the complex earth systems that sustain life.
"The rate at which we're injecting CO₂ into the atmosphere today, according to our best estimates, is 10 times faster than it was during the End-Permian," the paleoclimatologist Lee Kump, dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State, told me. "And rates matter. So today we're creating a very difficult environment for life to adapt, and we're imposing that change maybe 10 times faster than the worst events in earth's history."

*Peter Brannen writes about science and is the author of "The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions."

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