20/02/2018

Emissions Increases Approved By Regulator May Wipe Out $260m Of Direct Action Cuts

The Guardian - 

Nearly 60 industrial sites get green light to increase emissions, cancelling out cuts paid for by Coalition using public money
Citic Pacific’s Sino Iron project in the Pilbara is among the industrial sites that have been allowed to increase emissions under the safeguard mechanism. Photograph: Amy Coopes/AFP 
Nearly 60 Australian industrial sites have been given the green light to increase greenhouse gas pollution, potentially cancelling out hundreds of millions of dollars of public spending on emissions cuts under the Coalition’s Direct Action climate policy.
The increases have been quietly approved under the “safeguard mechanism”, which was introduced as part of Direct Action to ensure cuts paid for using the main part of the policy – the emission reduction fund – were not undone by emissions increasing in other parts of the economy.
Under the safeguard mechanism, government agency the Clean Energy Regulator sets an emissions limit for each large industrial site based on its highest level of emissions over the previous five years. But companies can apply to have the limit recalculated.
The regulator has signed contracts worth $2.25bn under the emissions fund, mostly with businesses that plan to plant trees and repair degraded habitat over the next decade. The idea is the vegetation will store carbon dioxide drawn from the atmosphere.
But an analysis of data on the regulator’s website by consultants RepuTex Carbon found the regulator had simultaneously allowed 57 industrial sites to increase emissions above their previous highest level.
If all sites emitted to their newly approved level, it could add up to 22m tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year – 4% of Australia’s annual emissions.
Based on the average price paid by the government – $11.90 per tonne of carbon dioxide – it would effectively cancel out up to $261.8m of emissions cuts a year.
This has prompted fresh accusations that Direct Action is doing little to curtail Australia’s emissions, which were already rising before a round of 44 industrial facilities had their emissions increases approved on 25 January.
The RepuTex executive director, Hugh Grossman, said it showed the safeguard mechanism was ineffective.
“It’s a safeguard in name only. There is no doubt emissions growth is outpacing the abatement from the emissions reduction fund, so what has been the point?” he said.
RepuTex found that by 2030, emissions from large industrial sites were projected to be 30% higher than in 2005, and 16% higher than when the safeguard mechanism was announced four years ago.
They are expected to grow to be the biggest source of Australia’s emissions, surpassing those from burning coal and gas for electricity.
The biggest increases allowed under the safeguard mechanism have been for coalmining operations, including Whitehaven’s Maules Creek open cut mine in New South Wales, BM Alliance’s Broadmeadow mine in Queensland and Citic Pacific’s Sino Iron project in the Pilbara. Liquefied natural gas plants such as the projects of Chevron at Gorgon and Santos at Curtis Island have opened with approved emissions limits that are not offset elsewhere.
Grossman said the industrial sector now posed a larger problem than electricity emissions, which had started to decline, though not quickly enough.
“It’s black and white – if industrial emissions are not resolved, we won’t meet our Paris commitments,” he said.
Under the 2015 Paris deal, Australia pledged to cut emissions by between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels by 2030.
The growth in industrial emissions suggests deeper cuts would be needed in other parts of the economy for that commitment to be met. But the government is not proposing deeper cuts in the electricity sector, currently the biggest emissions source. Under the national energy guarantee, it proposes to cut pollution from generators by 26% and is considering allowing electricity retailers to defer some cuts.
It is also considering making the safeguard mechanism less stringent. A Turnbull government climate policy review released in December suggested emissions limits could be loosened so they “increase with production, supporting business growth”.
The environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, said the safeguard mechanism was operating in accordance with legislation, rules and regulations.
A spokeswoman for the Clean Energy Regulator said they included allowing reappraisal of how much a facility could emit if there was not enough historic data over the previous five years, or if the data did not accurately represent activity at the industrial site now. She said the safeguard mechanism was meant to make sure cuts paid for using the emissions reduction fund were not offset by “significant increases above business-as-usual levels”, but also to accommodate economic growth.
The Australian National University economist Paul Burke said the safeguard mechanism had been designed to be loose and flexible. “It is a complicated and inefficient way to approach the goal of reducing emissions,” he said.
Frydenberg said the mechanism was part of a suite of policies, including the successful emissions reduction fund, the renewable energy target and a national energy productivity plan, the details of which are yet to be released. He said contracts had been signed to cut emissions by 191m tonnes over the coming years, and the Climate Change Authority, a government agency, had found the fund was performing well.
The minister said Australia was on track to comfortably beat its 2020 target of a 5% cut below 2000 levels. He did not mention the 2030 target.
Environment department data released in December showed national emissions have increased each year since 2014, when the carbon price scheme that put a charge on greenhouse pollution was repealed. They rose 0.7% last financial year.
The department projects its current trajectory emissions will be about 2% higher in 2030 than in 2005.
RepuTex projects Australia will also fall short of its 2020 target of a 5% cut in absolute terms, with emissions expected to be at the same level as in 2000. But the country will meet its target under United Nations greenhouse accounting rules by using credits carried over from the previous target period, when Australia’s target was an 8% emissions increase between 1990 and 2012.

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‘It’s Not Fast Enough. It’s Not Big Enough. There’s Not Enough Action.’

Washington Post - Brady Dennis | Chris Mooney

The Eiffel Tower lights up in December 2015 with an advocacy message for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. (Michel Euler/AP)
Barely two years ago, after weeks of intense bargaining in Paris, leaders from 195 countries announced a global agreement that once had seemed impossible. For the first time, the nations of the world would band together to reduce humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels in an effort to hold off the most devastating effects of climate change.
“History will remember this day,” the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, said amid a backdrop of diplomats cheering and hugging.
Two years later, the euphoria of Paris is colliding with the reality of the present.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide are rising again after several years of remaining flat. The United States, under President Trump, is planning to withdraw from the Paris accord and is expected to see emissions increase by 1.8 percent this year, after a three-year string of declines. Other countries, too, are showing signs they might fail to live up to the pledges they made in Paris.
In short, the world is off target.
“It’s not fast enough. It’s not big enough,” said Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in England. “There’s not enough action.”
Even as renewable energy grows cheaper and automakers churn out battery-powered and more efficient cars, many nations around the world are nonetheless struggling to hit the relatively modest goals set in Paris.
The reasons vary. Brazil has struggled to rein in deforestation, which fuels greenhouse gas emissions. In Turkey, Indonesia and other countries with growing economies, new coal plants are being planned to meet the demand for electricity. In the United States, the federal government has scaled back its support for clean energy and ramped up support for fossil fuels.
There’s still time for the world to set itself on a more sustainable track; many countries have until 2030 to meet their initial targets. But when policymakers from around the world gather at a key U.N. climate meeting in Poland later this year, countries will be forced to reckon with the difference between how much they say they want to limit the warming of the planet and how little they actually are doing to make that happen.


Because the Paris agreement does not legally force countries to cut emissions, world leaders in Poland will have to rely on political and moral persuasion to push for more action.
“More than two decades ago, the world agreed to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in our air to prevent dangerous climate outcomes,” said Rob Jackson, an energy and climate expert at Stanford University, referring to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change that set international negotiations in motion. “To date, we have failed.”
“Tremendous gains in energy efficiency and renewable power aren’t yet reducing our global hunger for fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas,” he added. “Until they do, greenhouse gas concentrations will keep rising.”
The Paris agreement laid out ambitious goals to limit the planet’s warming — world leaders knew they would be difficult to achieve. The deal called for finding ways to remain “well below” a rise of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, and if possible, not above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). A rise of about 1 degree Celsius already has occurred.
But at the same time, the emissions-cutting pledges that countries brought to the table in Paris were nowhere near sufficient to meet such goals, which world leaders acknowledged at the time. The plan was for nations to ramp up their ambition over time.
“There’s this inherent conflict between the global goals and the national contributions,” said Niklas Höhne, a founder of the NewClimate Institute and professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Now, after the United States has said it will withdraw from the process and as many other nations struggle to meet even the modest pledges they made, the world must begin to wrestle with the forces that have so far prevented climate action from matching climate rhetoric.
In many corners of the world, emissions have continued virtually unabated, raising questions about how countries — even well-intentioned ones — can make bolder promises down the line when they have so far been unable to follow through on their current ones.
The struggles of Germany, one of the globe’s most progressive nations when it comes to embracing renewable energy, illustrates the problem.
Steam rises from the cooling towers of the RWE Niederaussem coal-fired power plant near Bergheim, Germany. (Volker Hartmann/Getty Images)
The country’s “Energiewende,” or “energy transition,” aims to generate 80 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2050. The country also has set an aggressive near-term goal of cutting greenhouses gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2020.
But Germany is struggling to meet its goals. The county’s emissions actually rose slightly in 2015 and 2016 because of continued coal burning and emissions growth in the transportation sector. That failing trajectory won’t change without “massive and rapid efforts,” according to the German Environment Agency.
The European Union faces a similar quandary. Third after China and the United States in total world emissions, the bloc has pledged a 40 percent cut below 1990 levels by 2030. Time remains for the E.U. to meet that promise, but according to the European Environment Agency, it is on track to fall well short of its goal.
Then, of course, comes Trump’s rejection of the Obama administration’s pledge in Paris to cut the nation’s emissions by more than a quarter below its 2005 level by 2025. Instead, the Trump administration has encouraged the ramping up of oil and gas drilling while slapping tariffs on imports of solar panels.
Largely because of the United States’ dramatic changes in policy, a group called the Climate Action Tracker recently raised its prediction for how much the planet will warm even with the current Paris promises — upping it by 0.3 degrees Celsius, or more than half a degree Fahrenheit. In other words, the United States’ rejection of its pledge could push the entire globe backward on its goal of lowering temperatures.
The news isn’t all bad. China and India, which together produce about 24 percent of the world’s emissions, have encouraged the rapidly growing renewable energy markets in their countries. If they exceed their emissions-cutting targets, that could offset failures elsewhere around the world, Höhne said.
Yet another major developing nation, Brazil, has struggled to further reduce deforestation of the Amazon — one of the top ways in which the nation contributes to climate change — amid economic struggles that have weakened law enforcement in the world’s largest rain forest. Deforestation has actually risen since the record-low year of 2012, with 2016’s total of almost 8,000 square kilometers close to double the level seen four years earlier.
Smoke rises as Amazon wood is burned for charcoal last June at a sawmill in a recently deforested section of the Amazon rain forest in Rondonia state, Brazil. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
As for other challenges, there are fast-growing nations such as Turkey, with a population almost equal to Germany’s (about 80 million) but only about half the emissions. That won’t last, though. Turkey is expected to roughly double its emissions by 2030 as it continues to grow. Much of that could come in the form of building new coal plants, according to the Climate Action Tracker.
The U.N. Environment Program found in its latest “emissions gap” report that a large number of Group of 20 countries would require further steps to meet their Paris pledges. The list included the United States, Japan and Australia. The Climate Action Tracker, meanwhile, lists a number of major countries that have both insufficiently strong pledges and too little action to meet them. That includes the United States, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Turkey, among others.
Erik Solheim, UNEP’s executive director, said world leaders can be a major impediment to more rapid action.
“Political resoluteness is the main obstacle. . . . Change is always difficult, and politicians are risk-averse,” Solheim said. “Some people still believe going green creates fewer jobs, when the opposite is actually the case. . . . It comes from this old-fashioned thinking that you have less jobs and economic growth if you change, when the opposite is the case.”
That said, he remains optimistic that the world can bend its trajectory in the right direction — and in time.
“There’s a much more rapid shift than people tend to believe,” Solheim said, citing the falling price of wind and solar technologies, as well as climate action on the part of states, cities and some of the world’s largest corporations. “The good news is the changes are happening much faster than anyone thought. . . . [But] we have a long way to go. The challenge is huge, and if we fail, the consequences for people will be dramatic.”
This year, countries will officially begin to grapple with how off target they are through the “Talanoa dialogue,” which refers to a process used in Fiji and other Pacific islands for finding consensus and building trust without laying blame. Culminating at the December U.N. meeting in Poland, the dialogue will nudge world leaders to assess where they stand on the need to cut emissions and how far they have to go.
By 2020, countries are expected to actually ramp up the promises they made in Paris.
The problem, experts say, is that if the world’s emissions don’t start declining decisively by then — and declining fast — it may be too late to stave off devastating sea level rise, crippling droughts and storms, and other catastrophic effects of climate change.

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'First Hint' Of A Puzzling Change In Southern Ocean Revealed By CSIRO

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Researchers aboard an Australian ship undertaking pioneering work in the Southern Ocean have found the "first hint" of a shift in a decades-long trend towards fresher, less dense water off Antarctica.
Teams of scientists on the RV Investigator have been profiling the salinity and temperature of water between Tasmania and Antarctica at 108 locations.
Dr Steve Rintoul, chief scientist of the RV Investigator voyage, with one of the deep-sea floats. Photo: Peter Mathew
They also released the first batch of deep Argot floats to measure conditions as deep as 4000 metres.
But it is the early analysis of data on salinity in the so-called bottom waters near the seabed that may stir international debate.
"Every time we've measured since the 1970s, [bottom water's] been becoming lighter and fresher," Steve Rintoul, the voyage chief scientist, told Fairfax Media on Monday as the ship took its final ocean profile.
"We’ve got the first hint now that maybe things are shifting back to becoming saltier and denser in the deepest part of the ocean," said Dr Rintoul, who is a senior researcher at CSIRO and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems (ACE) CRC.
Dr Rintoul said “this increase in salinity still brings levels to nowhere near where they were in the 1970s ... nor even into the 1990s".  The trend of warming of those waters has not changed.
Still the salinity puzzle will be an important one to resolve, particularly if confirmed by the 11 deep floats that are starting to send back their once-a-month readings,
An iceberg off Antarctica.  Photo: Michael S. Nolan
These deep-water devices, being used for the first time in operational work,  will transmit data for as long as seven years each time they surface.
Understanding the Southern Ocean is important not only to improving weather forecasts for Australia.
The region surrounding Antarctica is also a "modulator of the global climate", said Cai Wenju, director of CSIRO's new Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research that is also a partner of the Investigator's research.
While oceans globally take up about 93 per cent of the extra heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases, they also absorb about a third of the extra carbon-dioxide released by human activities, such as burning coal.
Of those totals, the Southern Ocean accounts for as much as 75 per cent of the ocean heat sink and 40 per cent of the CO2 dissolved in the seas, Dr Rintoul said.
“Changes in the [deep ocean] circulation would alter the efficiency that the Southern Ocean takes up heat and carbon, and have a big impact on climate,” he said.
Dr Rintoul said the salinity changes detected may be a response following the breaking off of half the Merz Glacier Tongue in 2010 in eastern Antarctica.
“The big step in [bottom water] freshening that happened in 2010 after the calving of the Merz Glacier may now be recovering after the sea ice distribution changed again," he said.
The drop in sea ice coverage from a record large extent about four years ago to record - or near record - low coverage this year may also be a factor, he said.
According to Jan Lieser, a sea ice expert at the ACE CRC, sea ice levels as of February 17 were the lowest in accurate satellite records going back to 1981 for this date, at about 2.17 million square kilometres.
The melting season is nearing its end, and it remains to be seen whether coverage will drop below the record minimum set last March, Dr Lieser said.
The RV Investigators' researchers also collected samples of key ocean nutrients, such as iron.
They also monitored cloud formation with a special NASA plane making regular flights overhead when conditions were ideal.
IMAGE
The interaction between clouds and aerosols, and their role in future global warming, is one of the largest uncertainties in climate models, CSIRO said.
Air over the Southern Ocean is relatively pristine compared with other regions of the world, with the source of aerosols mainly organic material produced by tiny phytoplankton, Dr Rintoul said.
The scientists had collected "a fantastic data set" of aerosols using a combination of instruments based on the vessel, in the aircraft and from satellites, he said.

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