Instead Of 'Fair Dinkum' Power, How About Some 'Fair Dinkum' Action?

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

Labor was lashed for doing something about carbon emissions; the Coalition is being lambasted for doing nothing

Former Labor minister Greg Combet says if the world is to do what is necessary to contain warming at 2C, then almost all coal-fired power will be gone by 2040. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP 

Seven years ago, Greg Combet, then a Labor minister, implemented a carbon price in a minority parliament, an experience so arduous it helped curtail his political career. Now, safely outside political life, he looks on with bemusement about where the climate and energy debate has washed up.
On Tuesday, Combet launched a new report by the Industrial Relations Research Centre at the University of New South Wales investigating how countries such as Australia can achieve a fair transition for coal workers displaced as the economy decarbonises.
It got a bit lost in the wash of the week – let’s face it, it’s hard for substance to compete with the rolling spectacle of political dysfunction – but it’s an interesting bit of analysis funded by the CFMEU’s mining and energy division.
In 2011 Combet had to fight almost everyone in the country to get the clean energy package legislated. Business was hostile. The energy sector was hostile. Barnaby Joyce was screeching apocalyptically about $100 lamb roasts.
But while Combet’s experience was everyone shouting at him for doing something, we’ve now come full circle. Now, all the shouting is about the current government doing nothing.

Business and energy retailers are on the frontline of increasingly frantic calls for policy certainty. The Gillard government would have killed for the conditions the Coalition has blown away over the last three years with reckless abandon.
In any case, Combet ventured out this week about the future of coal. He insists the outlook is clear. If the world, and specifically Australia, is to do what is necessary to contain warming at 2C, then almost all coal-fired power will be gone by 2040. “That’s only 22 years away,” he tells Guardian Australia. “The energy companies get it. This is very much front of mind for the asset holders, and they want rational policy. They aren’t fighting it anymore. They don’t want stranded assets.”

A hands off approach has left many retrenched workers and their communities with very difficult transition problems

He says the energy market is going to transition “whether or not we’ve got Scott Morrison at the helm” and government owes it to people who will be materially affected in the transition to play it straight.
“Workers in coal power stations need to know the truth. You really have to tell people the truth about structural change when it’s coming – you can’t be populist about it”.
Earlier this year I asked the resources minister Matt Canavan whether he felt an obligation to help Australian communities face up to the inevitability of a carbon-constrained future. He responded as if I’d committed a thought crime.
Labor, for its part, is putting a package of measures together. It’s likely to include a new statutory authority to oversee the transition and the programs intended to ameliorate it; specific industrial relations arrangements to ensure workers are managed through the process; and programs to drive economic diversification.
Labor took a policy on coal transition to the last federal election, but it has to be re-engineered in some respects to take into account lessons learned from the closure of the Hazelwood plant, and also to reference the requirements of the reliability obligation in the national energy guarantee.
Scott Morrison dumped the emissions reduction component of the Neg – it was a casualty of the Liberal leadership implosion – but Labor is likely to keep the policy with its own tweaks. A Labor Neg will have a higher emissions reduction target than the 26% proposed by Malcolm Turnbull, which will drive coal closure, but the reliability obligation (which requires retailers to provide sufficient quantities of dispatchable power to the grid) could mean that some coal persists in the system in a reserve capacity.
Labor’s objective is to land the policy before the party convenes in Adelaide in mid-December for its national conference.
The government’s new energy minister, Angus Taylor, is pushing in the opposite direction. Taylor is a bright bloke, with a lot of expertise in energy, which makes some of the positions he is pursuing hard to comprehend.
While the science says the energy sector has to transition, and quickly, Taylor is digging in for coal. He’s signalled he wants to extend the life of existing plants and achieve new investment in generation by offering government support, including the possible indemnification of new coal-fired power from future carbon risk, which transfers the risk of these projects from private proponents to taxpayers.
Taylor will also meet with the energy companies in Sydney next week to waggle his finger censoriously at them over their pricing behaviour. Now, why? Because he needs an outcome on that before voters go to the polls next year, because Morrison, in the spirit of handing on a poisoned chalice, has dubbed him the minister for getting power prices down.
Power prices are high, and it would be terrific if they were lower. Ministers should stick up for the interests of consumers, that’s a given, but we also need ministers to think about interests that extend further than the next six months – something this government has become incapable of doing, which is what happens when the sum of your mistakes forces you to live minute to minute, without much care for whether anything connects to anything else, or whether things make sense.
As the chairman of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, investment banker and company director Steven Skala, noted this week, the transition is on in the energy market. It can’t be reversed. Business has moved. The financial markets have moved. “The question now is not one of direction, but of pace,” he said.
Unlike some disruptions, which present too quickly for governments to ameliorate the effects, we can see this one coming. We are living through the first phase of it.
When it comes to Australia’s 8,000 coal workers and the communities that depend on those workers spending their incomes locally, governments can either pretend they can hold back the future, indulging inane, virtue signalling with Alan Jones about “fair dinkum” power while letting real people be crunched in the transformation, or they can act to make the shift as just as possible.
The report Combet launched this week warns that a hands off approach has left many retrenched workers and their communities with very difficult transition problems.
“Because of lack of subsequent support, some problems – like intergenerational unemployment, poverty and poor physical and psychological health – continue and worsen with time, becoming entrenched and systemic,” it says. “These people, their families and communities have been left to carry the main costs of structural adjustment. This represents a very unfair transition.”
So here’s a thought.
Instead of “fair dinkum” power, perhaps we could contemplate some “fair dinkum” action?

Links

• Scott Morrison says national energy guarantee 'is dead'
• Coalition urged to revive 'necessary and inevitable' emissions reduction
• 'Investors are mostly concerned about political risks': energy minister Angus Taylor – full interview
• Clean Energy Finance Corporation signals it may accelerate reinvestment

We Have A Decade To Prevent Dangerous Climate Change: These 10 Policies Can Limit Warming To 2°C

Forbes - Silvio Marcacci

The world’s scientists estimate we have a decade to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, prevent dangerous levels of global warming beyond 2° Celsius, and avoid the worst impacts of climate change – but there’s no single silver bullet solution.

As government officials and other policymakers determine how to meet emissions reductions commitments pledged under the Paris Agreement or reach clean energy deployment and decarbonization goals, they need to be able to identify which policies work and how to design those policies.
It’s a daunting challenge, and each day that passes makes the challenge ahead more difficult, but the technologies, policies, and strategies to meet it exist today: Energy Innovation’s new book Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy finds that 10 policies applied to the 20 largest-emitting nations, can meet the 2°C target.

Policy contributions to meeting the 2°C global warming target. (Analysis done using data with permission from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) Energy Innovation

Doing The Math On Emissions
The vast majority of GHG emissions come from a handful of countries – nearly 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated by just 20 countries. Energy use (power plants, vehicles, and buildings) or industrial processes (cement or iron and steel manufacturing) is the predominant source of emissions in these countries, so focusing efforts accordingly can drive the fastest emission reductions.

The top 20 emitting countries are responsible for roughly 75 percent of global emissions. (Graph data reproduced with permission from CAIT Climate Data Explorer, 2017. Energy Innovation

The Paris Agreement, signed in 2015 by 189 countries responsible for nearly 99% of the world’s GHG emissions, committed each country to reduce emissions over the next 10-30 years. If these targets are met, they would move the emissions curve a third of the way toward the 2°C target, and if existing policies and the Paris pledges are extended to 2100 with the same ambition, the emissions curve moves about 80% of the way to a 2°C pathway.

Pledges made as part of the Paris Agreement get us partway to the 2°C pathway. (Graph data reproduced with permission from Climate Interactive and Climate Action Tracker) Energy Innovation

Even if the United States withdraws from the Paris Agreement, commitments from remaining countries still cover more than 80% of the world’s current emissions – without counting pledges from U.S. states, cities, and businesses to meet the Paris goals.
Many policymakers understand the need to reduce GHG emissions, but need data to evaluate available policies. Different policies are best suited for different circumstances, and some policies look good on paper but fail to perform in the real world. Despite this, a practical consensus about successful policy is emerging, and can generally be classified as one of four types, each of which reinforces the others:

• Performance standards improve new equipment and help capture savings that economic signals cannot because of market barriers.
• Economic signals can be highly efficient and encourage the uptake of more efficient equipment driven by performance standards.
• Research & development (R&D) and supporting policies lower the costs of performance standards and economic signals by pushing new technologies to market and lowering the costs of existing technologies by removing deployment market barriers.

A portfolio of policies including these four policy types is the most effective, lowest-cost way to drive down GHG emissions. Properly designed, they reinforce each other through system dynamics that emerge organically.

Reducing Power Sector Emissions
The power sector is responsible for 25% of annual GHG emissions, or about 12 billion tons of CO₂ emissions. This is expected to grow to nearly 18.9 billion tons by 2050, comprising roughly 30% of annual GHG emissions in 2050. Without additional policies, the power sector will be responsible for 28% of cumulative emissions through 2050.
The emissions growth is largely caused by increasing amounts of coal and natural gas for power generation. For example, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects global coal electricity generation will grow from 8.1 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2010 to 11.1 TWh in 2050, while global natural gas electricity generation will grow from 4.6 TWh in 2010 to 11.1 TWh in 2050.

Toronto's WindShare turbine in Toronto, Ontario David Dodge, Green Energy Futures

Reducing power sector emissions involves using low- or zero-carbon technologies to produce power and reduce electricity demand, and the best policies for increasing carbon-free power generation are renewable portfolio standards and feed-in tariffs. Complementary power sector policies encouraging utilities to pursue cleaner options and reduce electricity demand are also important, as are policies that reduce demand by improving the efficiency of energy-consuming products (e.g., appliances). In total, smart power sector policies can contribute at least 21% of the reductions needed to meet the 2°C target.

Reducing Transportation Sector Emissions
The transportation sector generates more than 15% of annual GHG emissions, with the most recent data showing about 7.5 billion tons of CO₂ emissions in 2014. This number is expected to grow to more than 9 billion tons by 2050, and without additional policies the transportation sector will be responsible for 14% of cumulative emissions through 2050.
Transportation’s emissions growth is largely due to increasing car ownership and freight transport: Passenger travel demand is expected to more than double between 2010 and 2050, and freight transport is expected to increase nearly 60% over the same period. Without action, the vast majority of this demand will be met with petroleum fuels, causing emissions to grow.

Smog from vehicle traffic in China Energy Innovation

Reducing transportation sector emissions requires improving the efficiency of vehicles produced and average efficiency of vehicles sold, increasing the share of electric vehicles sold, and providing alternatives to owning and driving a vehicle through smart urban planning.
Decarbonizing the transportation sector is an important element of any climate strategy, with significant co-benefits such as reduced particulate pollution and lost time due to traffic. Together, smart transportation sector policies can contribute at least 7% of the reductions needed to meet the 2°C target.

Reducing Building Sector Emissions
Our buildings are responsible for 8% of annual GHG emissions, or about 4 billion tons of CO₂ emissions. This total is expected to grow to between 5-6 gigatons by 2050, and without policy solutions, the building sector will be responsible for 8% of cumulative emissions through 2050.
Buildings and appliances are also significant drivers of electricity demand. For example, buildings are responsible for 54% of global electricity demand, and that share is expected to grow to nearly 60% by 2050. When electricity emissions attributable to the building sector are included, its share of global GHG emissions increases to 20% and grows to 26% by 2050, largely due to a growing building stock filled with more energy-consuming technologies.

Air conditioners on a residential building Wikimedia Commons

Reducing building sector emissions requires improving the efficiency of building equipment (e.g. air conditioning and heating equipment), the thermal efficiency of buildings, and the efficiency of appliances used in buildings. Decarbonizing the building sector and reducing electricity demand are essential emissions reductions strategies, and building codes and appliance standards can achieve at least 5% of the reductions required to meet the 2°C target. This can rise to an even higher share later on, because higher efficiency standards take years to reach full effect.

Reducing Industrial Sector Emissions
The industrial sector, including agriculture and waste, is responsible for 38% of annual global GHG emissions, with CO₂e emissions of about 19 billion tons. Emissions are expected to grow to more than 42 billion tons by 2050. Without additional policies, this sector will be responsible for 49% of cumulative emissions through 2050. The industrial sector is also responsible for roughly 44% of global electricity demand, although that share is expected to fall to about 36% by 2050.
Industry sector emissions can be broken into two categories: emissions from fossil fuel combustion for energy use and process emissions (released in industrial processes such as cement clinker manufacture and metallurgical coal coking). Non-energy emissions in agriculture and waste also fall under process emissions, and the share of industrial process emissions is significant. At least 10 billion tons of CO₂e per year come from industrial processes: about 5.2 billion tons of CO₂e per year from agriculture, 1.5 billion tons from waste, and 3.2 billion tons from more traditional manufacturing-related processes.

Source: Pixabay

Reducing industrial sector emissions requires improving industrial production efficiency, thus lowering energy demand, and eliminating industrial process emissions. Heavily decarbonizing the industry sector is essential – industrial energy efficiency improvements can achieve 16% of the necessary reductions to meet the 2°C target, and reducing process emissions can achieve at least 10% of the necessary reductions.

The Decarbonization Role of Cross-Sector Policies
In addition to sector-specific policies, cross-sector policies are crucial to decarbonization. Carbon pricing is one of the most important decarbonization policies and operates across multiple sectors, delivering large emission reductions. Similarly, support for R&D is critical to lowering long-run decarbonization costs, and typically targets technological breakthroughs in different economic sectors.
These policies are essential for cost-effective economic decarbonization, and although carbon pricing’s effect is directly related to the price or emission cap used, strong carbon pricing set at the social cost of carbon can achieve 26% of the emission reductions necessary by 2050 to hit the 2°C target.
Challenges in making assumptions about R&D achievement and spending make explicitly modeling R&D’s emissions reduction effect difficult, but R&D breakthroughs lower the costs of meeting the 2°C target and reduce the number and strength of policies needed. For example, decades of R&D coupled with strong policies driving deployment mean building new zero-carbon electricity generation like solar and wind turbines is cheaper than running existing fossil fuel generation in many parts of the country. The history of research-based cost declines coupled with well-designed policy shows how R&D fits together with other policy types to drive down costs and accelerate the clean energy transition.

How to Win on Climate
Climate change requires action as soon as possible to limit emissions and avoid exceeding 2° C of warming. Policymakers around the world have committed to reducing emissions, laying the foundation for deeper emission cuts that put the world on a trajectory to a lower-carbon future. The key now is in turning these pledges into reality—with laser-focused, well-designed policy.
We have the technology today to rapidly move to a clean energy system – and the price of that future, without counting environmental benefits, is about the same as a carbon-intensive one. So the challenge is not technical, nor even economic, but rather a matter of enacting the right policies and ensuring they are properly designed and enforced.

Links

• Designing Climate Solutions
• How Can We Address Climate Change? Here are Three Ideas
• Negative Emissions Won't Rescue Us From Climate Change
• Trump's Blowhard Tactics on Climate Change and Storms Foreshadow A Political Blue Wave
• Why And How Business Must Tackle Climate Change Now
• Why Do Climate Change Discussions Ignore Boomers?