Lethal Heating: 02/20/19

20/02/2019

Young Climate Strikers Can Win Their Fight. We Must All Help

The Guardian - George Monbiot

Courage and conviction may not be enough – that’s something I learned from other movements’ failures

One of the youth climate strikers in Parliament Square. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

This one has to succeed. It is not just that the youth climate strike, now building worldwide with tremendous speed, is our best (and possibly our last) hope of avoiding catastrophe. It is also that the impacts on the young people themselves, if their mobilisation and hopes collapse so early in their lives, could be devastating.
To help this movement win, we should ask why others lost. We should ask, for instance, why Occupy, despite the energy and sacrifices of so many, came to an end, while the institutions it confronted remain intact. We should wonder why the global justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, despite the numbers involved, their courage and determination, has not changed the world. We should consider why Podemos, the Spanish party that rose so high on the optimism of the indignados movement, now seems to be spiralling into recriminatory collapse.

Much of what I propose here is controversial, and I can't promise I've got it right

Those of us who witnessed these disappointments have, I feel, a painful duty to be as honest about them as possible, to help ensure their failures are not repeated. Much of what I propose here is controversial, and I can’t promise I’ve got it right. So my first advice is this: don’t listen only to me.
A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go. Using the narrative structure common to almost all successful political and religious transformations, the restoration story, it might go something like this. “The world has been thrown into climate chaos, caused by fossil fuel companies, the billionaires who profit from them and the politicians they have bought. But we, the young heroes, will confront these oligarchs, using our moral authority to create a movement so big and politically dangerous that our governments are forced to shut down the fossil economy and restore the benign conditions in which humans and other species can thrive.”
This restoration narrative, I think, could be greatly strengthened by recent findings suggesting that ecological recovery – restoring forests, salt marshes, peat bogs, the seabed and other crucial ecosystems – could, by drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, make a massive contribution towards preventing climate breakdown. (I’ll write about that when I finish my research on the subject, in a few weeks). A successful movement should also define a clear and tangible objective, perhaps a date by which nations achieve a zero-carbon economy. It could recommend a pathway, such as a ramped-up version of the green new deal proposed by the most progressive Democrats. If so, it will need to set a series of waymarks, by which it can judge whether or not governments are on track. This ensures that the activists, rather than the government, keep setting the agenda.
This objective should be supported by a set of irreducible principles that can be explained and spread with pride and conviction. Here are a couple of possible examples. “Human life is not negotiable, it cannot be exchanged for money.” “Those generations that are yet to be born have the same rights as those already alive.”
Clear principles appear to be essential to the long-running success of a campaign. A fascinating report in the online magazine Truthout explains how indigenous people living around Lake Texcoco in Mexico confronted a $13bn international airport – one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Latin America – and, across 17 years, and despite all predictions, won. The campaign was built on the principle that their land and community were not for sale, however much money might be offered. This ensured that the Mexican government’s only remaining strategy was force. But the people had created such strong community organisations and attracted so much support from other Mexicans that force ceased to be an option.

Thousands of UK students strike over climate change

This suggests another crucial element: a protest community strong enough to resist all attempts at division and co-option. Such communities do not arise by accident but are consciously and carefully constructed, often with the help of training, music and fun. They must be strong enough to support people threatened by despair, burnout or breakdown, especially when the response gets nasty. Already, conspiracy theories are being spreadby politicians and the media, suggesting that the young people have been organised by unknown sinister forces: after all, how could children possibly organise themselves?
Greta Thunberg, whose school strike sparked this movement, has written a response far more dignified and mature than the articles attacking her. But the nastiness has only just begun. As some of us can testify, the viciousness of the lobby groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, and the publications that amplify their message, knows no limits. As we have already seen, they treat even children as fair game.
I would suggest that the climate strikers develop clear rules of engagement, in order to give their opponents no ammunition. In my view, the global justice movement was gravely damaged by its failure to exclude or contain the black bloc: people dressed in black, some of whom came to protests tooled up for a fight and often smashed up random local businesses, denting support for the mobilisation with every blow. Some people in the movement believed that everyone had a right to join it on whatever terms they wished. I see this as an unaffordable indulgence.
A good exercise is to ask yourself what the police and authorities would most like to happen, then do the opposite. They would love a violent faction to emerge that would erode the young strikers’ credibility and provide an excuse to send in the riot police and break up the protests. Never give them this excuse.
Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing. One promising approach is Big Organizing, through which campaigners create proliferating networks, each branch of which trains the branches that grow from it. It helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez take her seat in the United States Congress. They need clever, funny and innovative tactics, which take opponents by surprise and create a sense of forward momentum. Designing such tactics, narratives and principles is, I believe, best done by a small number of people, then put to the wider group for approval. I saw how Occupy became bogged down in the impossible process of developing complex policies through consensus.
All this is a lot to dump on young people. But there are plenty of veterans, many of whom have far more experience than I do, who are ready to offer advice and help. Any support must come on the young strikers’ terms: they lead, we follow. But they carry a terrible burden: this is a struggle they cannot afford to lose. We will help them lift it if they wish.

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Climate Change An 'Imminent' Security Threat, Risk Experts Say

Reuters - Laurie Goering

From Iraq and Pakistan to the Caribbean, climate change is driving threats of new insecurity and violence, security analysts say

Soldiers of Puerto Rico's national guard distribute relief items to people, after the area was hit by Hurricane Maria in San Juan, Puerto Rico September 24, 2017. REUTERS/Alvin Baez

THE HAGUE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Climate change threats - from worsening water shortages in Iraq and Pakistan to harsher hurricanes in the Caribbean - are a growing security risk and require concerted action to ensure they don't spark new violence, security experts warned Tuesday.
"Climate change is not about something in the far and distant future. We are discussing imminent threats to national security," said Monika Sie Dhian Ho, general director of the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank.
The drying of Africa's Lake Chad basin, for instance, has helped drive recruitment for Islamist militant group Boko Haram among young people unable to farm or find other work, said Haruna Kuje Ayuba of Nigeria's Nasarawa State University.
"People are already deprived of a basic livelihood," the geography professor said at a conference on climate and security at The Hague. "If you give them a little money and tell them to destroy this or kill that, they are ready to do it."
Iraq, meanwhile, has seen its water supplies plunge as its upstream neighbours build dams and climate change brings hotter and dryer conditions to Baghdad, said Hisham Al-Alawi, Iraq's ambassador to the Netherlands.
"Overall we are getting less by nearly 40 percent of the waters we used to get," he told the conference.
Shoring up the country's water security, largely by building more storage and cutting water losses, will take nearly $80 billion through 2035, he said.
Faced with more heat and less rain, "we need to be wise and start planning for the future, as this trend is likely to continue," he said.

'Existential Crisis'
The threat of worsening violence related to climate change also extends to countries and regions not currently thought of as insecurity hot spots, climate and security analysts at the conference warned.
The Caribbean, for instance, faces more destructive hurricanes, coral bleaching, sea-level rise and looming water shortages that threaten its main economic pillars, particularly tourism.
"We're facing an existential crisis in the Caribbean," said Selwin Hart, the Barbados-born executive director of the Inter-American Development Bank.
Ninety percent of the region's economic activity - particularly tourism, fishing and port operations - takes place on the threatened coastline, he said.
Hurricanes, in recent years, have flattened the economies of some Caribbean nations, with Hurricane Maria in 2017 costing Dominica about 225 percent of its GDP, according to World Bank estimates.
But as the global emissions that drive climate change continue to rise, "there's not a realistic chance of achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement", Hart suggested.
The agreement calls for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels to hold the global average temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
The failure to cut emissions means the Caribbean, while doing what it can to become more resilient to the growing risks, also needs "to plan for the worst-case scenario", Hart said.
It is trying to do that by building coordination and assistance networks among Caribbean states and looking to shore up access to food and water, among other changes, said Ronald Jackson, of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency.
Often that work requires persuading officials from very different ministries - finance, tourism, agriculture, water, energy and security, for instance - to sit down together and coordinate plans, said Jackson, the group's executive director.
And the work has to be done quickly, he said. Last October the world's climate scientists warned that to hold global temperature hikes to 1.5 degrees C, global energy systems would have to dramatically shift in the next dozen years.
"Before the 1.5 degree report came out we were looking at a much longer time frame" for change, Jackson said. "But now it's the 2020s, early 2030s. We're out of time. We have to act now."
Military officials around the world have increasingly recognised the risks associated with climate change, and moved to shore up bases against sea-level rise, curb military emissions, adopt clean energy and analyse changing risks.
At the Planetary Security conference at the Hague on Tuesday, they announced the creation of a new International Military Council on Climate and Security, made up of senior military leaders from around the world.
The panel aims to help build policy to address climate security risks at national, regional and international levels, backers said.
"Climate change fuels the roots of conflict around the globe and poses a direct threat to populations and installations in coastal areas and small islands," said General Tom Middendorp, a former Dutch defense chief who will chair the new council.
"It should therefore be taken very seriously as a major security issue that needs to be addressed. The military can and should be part of the solution," he said.

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We Have A New Global Tally Of The Insect Apocalypse. It’s Alarming.

Vox - Brian Resnick

When insects go extinct, other species follow.

“Help.”
Brice Nihiser/Barcroft Images/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Insects are the most abundant animals on planet Earth. If you were to put them all together into one creepy-crawly mass, they’d outweigh all humanity by a factor of 17.
Insects outweigh all the fish in the oceans and all the livestock munching grass on land. Their abundance, variety (there could be as many as 30 million species), and ubiquity mean insects play a foundational role in food webs and ecosystems: from the bees that pollinate the flowers of food crops like almonds to the termites that recycle dead trees in forests.
Insects are also superlative for another, disturbing reason: They’re vanishing at a very fast rate in some parts of the world.
“The pace of modern insect extinctions surpasses that of vertebrates by a large margin,” write the authors of an alarming new review in Biological Conservation of the scientific literature on insect population declines published in the past 40 years. The state of insect biodiversity, they write, is “dreadful.” And their biomass — the estimated weight of all insects on Earth combined — is dropping by an estimated 2.5 percent every year.
In all, the researchers conclude that as much as 40 percent of all insect species may be endangered over the next several decades. And around 41 percent of all insect species on record have seen population declines in the past decade. Most of the data was obtained from studies conducted in Europe and North America. However, of the world’s insect species live in the tropics, where new species are still being discovered. A true, global assessment might tell a different story. The authors note that there’s not enough data from tropical regions.
(Update: It turns out there’s another big caveat to the new data trove. As University of New England ecologist Manu Saunders pointed out in a blog post, though the intent of the authors of the Biological Conservation paper was to “compil[e] all long-term insect surveys conducted over the past 40 years that are available through global peer-reviewed literature databases,” in fact, they limited their search just to papers that included the terms “insect,” “declines,” and “survey.”
The trouble with this method is that it biases the analysis toward declines, and excludes gains or stable populations. “‘Survey,’” writes Saunders, “is just one term that could pick up long-term studies.” Which means the paper is not an absolute reckoning of insect declines.)
“It is evident that we are witnessing the largest [insect] extinction event on Earth since the late Permian and Cretaceous periods,” the study authors write. Given their limited research methods, this might be a premature conclusion. But there are reasons to be worried about insects, particularly vulnerable orders, like butterflies. And human activity is hugely to blame.

Bees, butterflies, moths, dung beetles, and crickets are all declining
Butterflies and moths, known as the Lepidoptera order, are some of the hardest hit: 53 percent of Lepidoptera have seen declining population numbers, according to the new survey. This is especially concerning as butterflies, which are very sensitive to changes in landscape and food sources, are often a bellwether of environmental health.
Some 50 percent of Orthoptera species (grasshoppers and crickets, another important source of food for an enormous array of animals) are also in decline. Forty percent of bee species are listed as vulnerable for extinction, and most dung beetle species (named for — you guessed it — what they like to eat) are vulnerable or endangered.

Biological Conservation

This new study paints a picture of a problem that’s been recorded in individual ecosystems. A 2017 study in Germany noted a 75 percent decline in flying insects over three decades. “The widespread insect biomass decline is alarming,” the authors wrote, “ever more so as all traps were placed in protected areas that are meant to preserve ecosystem functions and biodiversity.”
What’s “most worrying,” the authors write, is that the losses seem to impact both “specialist” insects and “generalist” insects. A specialist is an organism that occupies a tiny niche in an ecosystem (like a moth that only feeds on one particular plant). A generalist, on the other hand, is more adaptable and can more easily change environments and food sources.
Both types of insects are facing major losses. “This suggests that the causes of insect declines are not tied to particular habitats, but instead affect common traits shared among all insects,” the study authors write.

What’s killing all the insects?
The state of insect biodiversity is “dreadful” because we know what happens when ecosystems lose insects: They lose other species as well.
In October, a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science documented that between 1976 and 2013, the number of invertebrates (like insects, spiders, and centipedes) in the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico caught in survey nets plummeted by a factor of four or eight. When measured by the number caught in sticky traps, invertebrates declined by a factor of 60. And that loss of insects coincided with losses of birds, lizards, and frogs. “The food web appears to have been obliterated from the bottom,” the Washington Post’s Ben Guarino reported on the study.
So what’s happening?
The researchers in the new Biological Conservation paper outline four broad, global problems leading to insect loss. They won’t surprise you.

Habitat loss as a result of human development, deforestation, and the expansion of agriculture
Pollution, particularly via pesticides, fertilizers, and industrial wastes
Parasites and pathogens — like the viruses that attack honeybees — and invasive species
Climate change

In summary: Human activity is to blame.

Biological Conservation

“Habitat restoration, coupled with a drastic reduction in agro-chemical inputs and agricultural ‘redesign’, is probably the most effective way to stop further declines,” the researchers write, with “redesign” meaning making agricultural plots more hospitable to the native insects (for instance, maintaining flowering plants for pollinators to feast on). Pesticide use needs to decline drastically as well. “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” the researchers write.
And if we don’t act, the researchers give a stark warning:

The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least, as insects are at the structural and functional base of many of the world’s ecosystems since their rise at the end of the Devonian period, almost 400 million years ago.

With so much devastating and widespread loss of insects — and other forms of life — it’s hard to say where we should focus our attention. In Science, Jonathan Baillie, the chief scientist at the National Geographic Society, and Ya-Ping Zhang, the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, argued that half of all land should be protected for wildlife by 2050, to give plants and animals a chance to thrive.
This is a lofty, perhaps unrealistic goal. But we’ve taken so much from wildlife. We need to think more about how to stop taking environments away from plants and animals. “Simply put,” Baillie and Zhang write in Science, “there is finite space and energy on the planet, and we must decide how much of it we’re willing to share.”

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'Our Little Brown Rat': First Climate Change-Caused Mammal Extinction

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The Morrison government has formally recognised the extinction of a tiny island rodent, the Bramble Cay melomys - the first known demise of a mammal because of human-induced climate change.
The changed status of the Melomys rubicola from the government's "endangered" to "extinct" category was included without fanfare in a statement released by federal Environment Minister Melissa Price late on Monday.

The extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys is understood to be the first mammal killed off by human-led climate change. Credit: Queensland government

Geoff Richardson, an environment department official, told Senate estimates on Monday night that research efforts since 2014 - "including a pretty rushed trip in 2015" - had failed to identify any melomys individuals in their only known location on Bramble Cay, a tiny Torres Strait island near Papua New Guinea .
Declaring its extinction "was not a decision to take lightly," Mr Richardson said. "There's always a delay while the evidence is gathered to be absolutely certain."
The federal extinction listing comes almost three years after the Queensland government reached a similar conclusion, with a finding that the demise of the melomys "probably represents the first recorded mammalian extinction due to anthropogenic climate change".

The limited range of the animal, living on a five-hectare island less than three metres high, left it vulnerable to climate change. However, its 2008 "recovery plan", drawn up when numbers were likely down to just dozens of individuals, downplayed the risks.
"[T]he likely consequences of climate change, including sea-level rise and increase in the frequency and intensity of tropical storms, are unlikely to have any major impact on the survival of the Bramble Cay melomys in the life of this plan," the five-year scheme stated.

Bramble Cay is a small island in north-eastern Torres Strait near Papua New Guinea

Leaflet
Map data by OpenStreetMap, under ODbL.

The federal policy director for the Wilderness Society, Tim Beshara, said preparation for the plan was limited, and it was never reviewed at its completion in 2013.
“The Bramble Cay melomys was a little brown rat," Mr Beshara said. "But it was our little brown rat and it was our responsibility to make sure it persisted. And we failed."

'Incredibly disappointing'
Kylie Jonasson, another department official, told estimates that "we could have engaged sooner in the case of the [melomys] with the Queensland government, or vice versa".
Leeanne Enoch, Queensland's Environment Minister, said the animal's extinction showed "we are living the real effects of climate change right now".
“We have consistently called on [Prime Minister] Scott Morrison and Melissa Price to show leadership on climate change, instead of burying their heads in the sand," Ms Enoch said. “How many more species do we have to lose for the federal government to take action?”
Minister Price said it was "incredibly disappointing when any species is formally declared extinct, and everybody has feared the worst for some time, given the Bramble Cay melomys hasn’t been sighted since 2009.
"Our agencies will continue to focus their efforts on protecting species identified as priorities, supported by the Government’s $425 million investment in threatened species programs," she said.

'National tragedy'
Greens Senator Janet Rice, chair of the Senate inquiry into Australia's animal extinction crisis, said the country already had the worst mammalian extinction rate in the world, and one of the highest overall extinction rates.
"Business as usual is the death warrant for our threatened animals," Senator Rice said, noting the spectacled flying fox was the latest species moved into the endangered category in Monday's update.
"The extinction of the Bramble Cay Melomys should be a national tragedy, and the Morrison government’s failure to protect Australia’s nearly 500 animals threatened with extinction is an absolute disgrace," she said.
"The environment department says it’s learnt from this extinction and takes extinction seriously, but if it was serious it should be conducting an immediate review of how this happened," she said.

'Fickle' funding
John Woinarski, a professor at Charles Darwin University who has published research on the melomys, said failure to assign primary responsibility to one agency appears to be a critical factor in the animal's demise.
“Respective officials didn’t understand the urgency," and how predictable and preventable the extinction was, he said.
“It should be mandatory whenever there is an extinction that there be the equivalent of coronial inquest to figure out the cause, the failings and to develop the systematic improvements so the problems are not repeated," Professor Woinarski said.
One of the main challenges is that much of the loss of biodiversity in Australia is in remote areas, where the threatened species have "a low public profile" and lack the charisma of animals like koalas.
Another is that conservation programs are prone to "fickle" funding cycles when we need to work on decades or generational scales, Professor Woinarski said.
Much of the loss of biodiversity is in remote areas, with low public profile and charisma.
Tony Burke, federal Labor's environment spokesman, said the end of the melomys was "a stark reminder of the need for strong environmental laws".
"It is not enough to put a species on a list," Mr Burke said. "The recovery plan needs to be properly designed, enforced and regularly updated."

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One Of Antartica's Biggest Glaciers Has A Giant Hole Under It. What Would Happen If It Collapsed?

USA TODAY - Brett Molina

A cavity two thirds the size of Manhattan has formed under one of the world’s most dangerous glaciers

The Thwaites Glacier is one of the most dangerous glaciers in the world, and scientists are eager to travel to Antarctica to study it.

NASA researchers released a study in January that said a giant cavity roughly two-thirds the size of Manhattan was rapidly melting underneath the glacier due to climate change. The cavity is big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, with most of it melting over the last three years.

Even before this cavity, Thwaites' rapid ice loss and potential impact on global sea levels was significant enough that researchers from around the world planned to physically travel there starting this year.

Only 28 people have ever set foot on the glacier, according to Britain's Natural Environmental Research Council, or NERC.

So what might happen if Thwaites does collapse?

"It could potentially destabilize the whole region of west Antarctica," Lucas Zoet, a University of Wisconsin geoscientist, , told USA TODAY.

The glacier sits in west Antarctica and flows into the Amundsen Sea. Roughly the size of Florida, Thwaites' melting is currently responsible for about four percent of global sea level rise, according to NASA in its recent study on the glacier's giant hole.

"It's a major throughway of how ice gets discharged from west Antarctica into the ocean," said Zoet.

Thwaites has been difficult to study because it's far from U.S. bases in the Antarctic and also because the weather is "particularly bad," said Zoet.

The glacier measures more than 70,000 square miles, making it one of the largest glaciers in the world, said NERC.

A map of where Thwaites is located. (Photo11: USA TODAY)

The glacier's grounding line, the point at which ice meets the land underneath, has retreated over 9 miles between 1992 and 2011, according to NERC. As ice and warmer sea water flow underneath the glacier, it lifts off the land and speeds up its retreat.

"If this cavity grows or sort of expands, that’s one way it can get off this last sort of ridge that Thwaites Glacier is hanging on to," Zoet told USA TODAY.

What especially worries scientists is if the melting accelerates. If all the ice on Thwaites is lost, it would raise ocean levels another two feet, according to the NASA study. But the glacier also backstops neighboring glaciers. If those glaciers also melt, sea levels could rise an additional eight feet, researchers warn. "It holds a kind of wildcard for being able to increase the rate of sea-level rise quite rapidly if things unfold a certain way," said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Thwaites Glacier

How do you visit a location so remote?

Scambos said research into Thwaites' retreat started as early as the 1990s, as satellite data got better at tracking Antarctic ice sheets.

Scambos is part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a partnership between British and American scientists that studies the glacier's retreat up close.

"Satellites show the Thwaites region is changing rapidly, but to answer the key questions of how much, and how quickly sea-level will change in the future, requires scientists on the ground with sophisticated equipment collecting the data we need to measure rates of ice-volume, or ice-mass change," said William E. Easterling, assistant director for the National Science Foundation’s Geosciences Directorate, in a statement last year.

Dire projections

"The point is not so much is whether or not it’s going to happen, unless we really change how much heat-trapping gasses we’re putting in the atmosphere," said Scambos of the glacier's melting. "Eventually, we’re going to lose big areas of the Antarctic, big areas in Greenland. The important thing is how fast is this going to happen."

Melting from Greenland and Antarctica would not only bump up sea levels, but might bring more extreme weather and dramatic shifts in temperature, according to a study published in Nature in February.

Scambos said coastal cities in the U.S. and worldwide are looking ahead to how higher sea levels could impact them. If Thwaites' melting happens over centuries, then nations would have more time to get ready.

A faster rise in sea level, however, could force countries to act more urgently.

If that pace were to double or triple suddenly because glacier melt really picked up, "then that’s going to really throw a wrench into the ability for these nations to plan and prepare for the impacts of sea-level rise," Scambos said.

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100% Renewables Can Be Reached Quickly, But It Needs A Plan

RenewEconomy - Giles Parkinson

University researches and academics do not typically move this quickly: the cadence of their work is usually dictated by the need for detailed analysis, papers and conference presentations.
But when an ACT research team led by Andrew Blakers and Matthew Stocks this month announced the result of research about the shift to renewables and its impact on emissions, they were quick to respond.
Blakers and Stocks’ research came to two conclusions that are important to the current debate about the energy transition: mainly that shifting to 100 per cent renewables is technically feasible, and at the current rates of deployment, enough wind and solar could be built by 2032, just 13 years away.
They were not particularly controversial observations, but given the constant push back by conservatives, ideologues and fossil fuel promoters that a 100% renewables is impossible, and repeated assertions that wind and solar can never be built quick enough, they were important points to make.
What upset their colleagues, and which provoked such a rapid response in social and mainstream media, was the claim that this transition was largely achievable if the government “got out of the way” and could actually deliver the country’s Paris commitment for economy-wide emissions reduction targets 5 years early.
The colleagues argued that not only do they have their numbers wrong, it also gives the impression that the government could do nothing and still make their Paris targets. ANU climate change expert Frank Jotzo, in these pages, and Bill Hare, in The Guardian, both made this point forcefully.
Sure enough, within hours of the initial research, energy minister Angus Taylor and otherwise invisible environment minister Melissa Price had issued a statement claiming that the government was “on track” to meet its emissions reductions by 2025, thanks to an investment boom created by a policy mechanism that their government tried to kill.
This, from a government with no forward policy on renewables and emissions, and a minister seemingly determined to stop any new investment in wind and solar, was breath-taking hypocrisy even in a political word sadly inured to such lies and deception.
The researchers, including Blakers, Stock, Jotzo and more than 40 other academics, local and international experts, regulators and government representatives, have now grouped together – following a three-day symposium in Canberra – to argue that yes, a quick transition towards 100 per cent renewables is possible and it will play a central role in emissions reductions.
But, and this is a very big but, it does need a plan, and a carefully drawn one at that.
It is not sufficient, they say, to simply build enough wind and solar to meet the supply needs of the economy. Market reform is desperately needed to keep up with technology changes and reflect the different capabilities of the new equipment.
Obviously, more investment in storage is also needed, but this needs to be co-ordinated. More demand response is also required, and so too is investment electricity transmission, and there are emerging bottlenecks, and market settings are not delivering for consumers.
“In recent times the Australian energy sector has deployed solar and wind power at unprecedented rates,” the group of 45 researchers and energy experts say in a joint statement.
“While action is also required in other sectors of the economy to achieve deep emissions cuts, a sustained shift from fossil fuels to solar and wind power is absolutely necessary for Australia to meet and surpass our 2030 emissions target.
“The shift to 100% renewables will be accompanied by the inevitable phasing out of existing coal power plants. Achieving a smooth transition will require careful attention to coal power workers, their communities and energy consumers.”
Jotzo told RenewEconomy that the three-day symposium included a “stellar cast” of researchers, industry representatives, regulators, network operators, and international experts. (RenewEconomy contributor david Leitch, from ITK Consulting, was there for a couple of sessions and wrote this piece last week: “Why 50 per cent renewables by 2030 is such an easy target”.

It heard from the likes of Windlab’s technical director Dr Nathan Steggel, who described what the NEM would like now with a very high (more than 90 per cent) share of renewables. See the graph above.
He said wind could account for 40 per cent of Australia’s generation by 2040. “Without a energy policy, don’t expect a smooth ride.”
The symposium also heard from Stanford University’s Mary Cameron, who presented research on the global shift to renewables, using wind, solar and water for electricity, transportation, heating and cooling, and industry.
“Transitioning to 100 per cent WWS (water, wind solar,) in all energy sectors is technically and economically possible,” Cameron said. “The main barriers are social and political.”

"The symposium offered a very optimistic picture of what can be done,” Jotzo says.
“There is agreement among all these experts that renewables will carry the day in Australia, that’s for sure. The international experts are crystal clear about where the journey is going in australia … it is in renewables.”
Jotzo says the focus of the discussions was about what need to happen to bring these technologies together. There are bottlenecks in transmission investment (which regulators may be seeking to ease given their response to the latest proposal), and uncertainty about storage investments, with any decision on Snowy 2.0 to influence many investments.
But a major focus was about the regulatory environment and the need for reform of the National Electricity Market, whose rules still take no account of environmental outcomes.
“There were some strong views about the inadequacy of market and regulatory settings,” Jotzo says, noting that stable policy was also needed, either in the form of a modified National Energy Guarantee, an emissions intensity scheme, or a clean energy target.
“There were also some issues around market power around incumbent coal generators and how that may play out for the transition to renewables,” Jotzo says.
The conclusions were that it was not quite as simple as asking the government to get out of the way. If anything, a lack of action could impede progress and create particularly messy transition.
“The purpose of the statement was to make it clear publicly that the (transition to renewables) is not going to happen by itself. Most people are quite concerned that to make it clear can’t just sit back and relax and put a tick to it.”

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