01/05/2019

Life After Solving Climate Change: Not Mud Huts And Gruel But Clean Air And Warm Homes

USA Today - 


President Trump’s pick for leading a climate change panel is notorious for denying the science behind human-caused global warming. We dive into the counter-arguments on climate change. USA TODAY

President Trump’s pick for leading a climate change panel is notorious for denying the science behind human-caused global warming. We dive into the counter-arguments on climate change.
What will life be like after we've solved climate change? Better than today or worse? Mud huts and gruel, or flying cars and the Jetsons?
Comfy homes, good food, whip-smart appliances and robots hopping around on farms all seem pretty likely, experts queried by USA TODAY said. All in all, our living standard will be the same, only a lot greener and more efficient.
That view is in stark contrast to a common complaint by critics who object to making global warming-based changes to the economy, suggesting such changes would destroy America’s standard of living and force everyone to “live in yurts and eat tofu,” as one commenter put it.

EARTH DAY
80 beautiful photos from around the world for Earth Day
The group of monuments at Hampi in India consist of ruins of several beautiful Dravidian temples and palaces - the last remnants of the Vijayanagar kingdom.

“Every single proposed solution will simultaneously improve life and decrease carbon emissions,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of climate science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who has provided testimony and scientific expertise on climate change to the White House, the governor of California and U.S. congressional offices.
These predictions presume the shift to carbon-neutral energy, industrial and transportation systems happens in time to slow and eventually reverse the effects of global warming the planet is already beginning to experience: rising oceans, more flooding, worse storms and increase heat waves and droughts.
That means that whatever happens next, experts say, depends entirely on how quickly we act. Many of these technological and policy changes are already underway, but need to be sped up. Today, humans pour 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually. People must shift away from those carbon emissions within the next 20 years to avoid "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
For Earth Day, let’s presume we've successfully made that shift to a carbon-neutral world and you, your children or your grandchildren are waking up on a crisp fall morning sometime between 2050 and 2100. What’s the day like?
An image of "The Jetsons," the futuristic classic cartoon. (Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution)
When do you need those dishes?
Houses won’t look all that different, though homes will almost certainly have solar power included if it's appropriate for the area. This will be especially important in hot and sunny parts of the country, to decrease the pressure on power production for cooling during the day. California already has a law requiring that all new homes built after 2020 include solar panels.
Homes will still have heat and cooling, electric lights, lots of electronics and big windows. But the systems and appliances will be much more efficient and much smarter.
This shift is already happening — today's refrigerators are about 20% larger but use one-quarter the electricity compared to those sold 20 years ago. The LED lightbulbs you buy at the grocery store use 20% of the energy the incandescent bulbs of a decade ago did, said Jay Apt,  a physicist and professor who directs the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
When occupants get out of bed, the house will likely be a comfortable temperature. Properties will probably still have a furnace or an electric heat pump. But they won’t be used as much because homes will be much better insulated, with windows that keep heat and cold in and out.
The systems used to heat buildings will likely look different than the ones we know today. One example already being used in some U.S. buildings involves pre-heating or chilling water when power is cheap, and then using it during the day when power is more expensive.
A vision of what the German city of Berlin might look like as carbon neutral. (Photo: Courtesy: The Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance.)
“It’s like radiators. In the ceiling of each floor you have a cold-water air heat exchanger, the cold water sits in a series of pipes, the air blows across it and becomes quite cold and it blows in to cool the room,” said Apt.
After getting out of bed, the next step might be to check the dishwasher to get out a cup for coffee. The dishwasher, along with most appliances, will likely be tied to a smart system in your house that knows the power cost at different times of the day. If the local power company gets significant power from wind turbines, the cheapest power may be at night. If it’s from solar, it might be cheapest during the day.
“Your dishwasher may very well communicate with the electric power grid and say ‘OK, Mr. Smith has decided that he only wants to run his dishwasher only when the price of power is less than 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, so your dishwasher may decide to run at 2:00 in the morning,” says Apt.
Or you might set an override to tell the appliance that whatever the price, the dishes have to be done by 6 p.m., in time for dinner.
Another infrastructure change will likely be the more common use of geothermal heat pumps. These take advantage of the fact that the ground beneath our feet tends to stay about 50 degrees Fahrenheit in summer or winter.
That means if you run pipes down 6 to 8 feet below a house or apartment building, you can cool or heat a liquid in those pipes to around 50 degrees. That liquid can then be piped up to the building and used to bring the temperature inside to 50 degrees.
If it's a cold winter day and it's 20 degrees outside, the house is already up to 50 degrees and you only need to heat it another 15 degrees to be comfortable. If it's a hot summer day of 90 degrees, you cool the temperature down with no energy needed, said Apt.

Here a turbine, there a turbine
Coal, oil and many natural gas-fired power plants will have long ago closed. Instead, the nation will likely be powered by a mix of nuclear, wind, solar, hydroelectric and some natural gas.
The power grid will have been rebuilt to accommodate more periodic power inputs, with the positive effect of also allowing it to be protected against physical and cyber attacks.
Driving across America, the sight of large solar arrays or wind turbines will be common, much as seeing oil rigs is an everyday sight in much of the United States now. You might also run across tall arrays that pull carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into fuel and the raw material for industrial uses.
Charging of the electric car. Businessman's hand holding the electric cable to the car. Car features have been changed. (Photo: Getty Images)
Fun cars, fast charging
The car of the future will be electric. That’s because electricity is easy to generate from carbon-neutral sources such as wind, solar and nuclear. It’s a shift that’s already underway. In Norway, 58% of all cars sold in March were electric, according to Norway’s Road Traffic Information Council.
That’s a far cry from the fewer than 1% of cars in the United States that are electric today, but most experts presume the shift will happen relatively quickly. It also won’t be wrenching, said Chris Field, director of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
“The electric car I have right now is the best car I’ve ever had. It’s a Chevy Bolt. It’s very practical, well thought out and fun to drive. It’s a really great car,” he said.
Those future cars will have a range between charges that will likely be much more than today’s 225 miles. Many estimates put it at 400 miles by 2028. There will likely be fast charging outlets nationwide, just as there are gas stations today. Already, new homes in Atlanta must be built to accommodate electric vehicles.
Cities of the future will likely have mostly apartment buildings and townhouses that are walkable and with bike paths built in. (Photo: Tourism Calgary)
Walk to the gym
More and more people will live in cities, which produce dramatically fewer greenhouse gasses per person than suburbs. But the cities will be designed with the kind of human-friendly density that already is being incorporated into city planning across the globe.
They’ll have mostly apartment buildings and townhouses that are walkable and with bike paths built in. Excellent mass transit will be available on electric buses and vans. Businesses and office buildings will be interspersed rather than plunked down miles out of town in office parks and malls.
That shift away from far-flung suburbs is already apparent in today’s generation. “Young people want to be able to walk to the grocery store and the office and the gym,” said Fields.
Others will choose space to spread out or cheaper land and housing, preferences made more sustainable due to the increasing ability to work from home or commute by electric vehicles.
People walk by the co-working space WeWork in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn on March 26, 2019 in New York City. WeWork, which lets freelancers and other non-traditional workers to become members in a shared or flexible office space, has expanded globally over the last year. (Photo: Spencer Platt, Getty Images)
Telecommuting for fun and profit
Work will be more integrated with living areas. But wherever it is, the office will have been built to very high standards to reduce waste, save water and conserve energy. Already more than 33,000 buildings in the United States have gotten LEED certification, marking them as highly efficient.
Not that everyone will still go to an office every day. Telecommuting all or part of the time will become more common as the tools for doing so — fast Internet and good video connections — become cheaper, better and easier to use. More people will also work from communal workspaces near where they live.
Big U.S. companies are already beginning to do this. Amazon, Apple and Google have dozens of offices across the nation where people can work, so they don’t all need to move to Silicon Valley in California or to Seattle. Many young people are already used to working from shared office spaces such as WeWork and ImpactHub.
High-speed train model at the Capitol in Sacramento, California, in 2015. (Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
NYC to Chicago in 5 hours
For travel within the United States, a network of high-speed electric trains will likely crisscross the country, making rapid travel easily accessible. San Francisco and Los Angeles are three hours apart by rail, Chicago to New York five hours.
We’ll still fly places, but it will likely be more expensive than some of today’s rock-bottom prices. Jet fuel has to be very energy dense, so electric planes are out of the question. Instead, they’ll use fuel produced from carbon dioxide pulled out of the air or industrial waste gases, or from aviation biofuel made from organic waste from trash or leftover biomatter from agricultural fields.
Both are already being used. In 2018, Virgin Atlantic flew a Boeing 747 from Orlando to London using fuel made in part from captured greenhouse gas emissions.

A Virgin Atlantic VS16 flight preparing for take off at Orlando International Airport in Florida on October 2, 2018. (Photo: Doug Peters, PA Wire)
Is that a robot in that field?
What’s old will be new again in many ways when it comes to food and farming, experts say. The nation's food supply is likely to be fresher and more wholesome as growers and sellers become better at managing logistics to minimize travel time and loss.
We’ll eat more seasonably than we do now because we’ll be paying more for energy and farmers will be thinking harder about water and energy usage.
“We’ve gotten into this mode that we expect to see blueberries and oranges every week of the year. As energy costs go higher and water becomes even in more short supply in the future, not every type of food will be available at every moment,” said Robert Myers, a professor of agriculture at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, and an expert on climate change and sustainable agriculture.
Not that kiwis won’t be available from New Zealand, or tomatoes in December, but they’ll be more expensive.
Amanda Little, author of the forthcoming book “The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World,” said mankind will likely be eating the same kinds of food we eat today, but it will be produced differently and much more efficiently.
That's especially true of meat, which she predicts will be either plant-based faux meat or tissue grown in vats that is identical to meat on a cellular level.
“It’s very inefficient to raise an entire animal just to eat the edible parts of it,” she said.
Meat from animals will still be available, what we’ll call “craft” or “specialty” meat, but a far bigger portion of the meat industry will come from either plant- or cell-based meats.
Little says cell-based meat is closer than we realize. She had some vat-grown duck just last week.
“It was chewy and greasy but it tasted very meaty. For a very early stage lab meat product, it was very convincing.
Robert Blair bought this multirotor hexacopter, an unmanned aircraft, to monitor his farm in Kendrick, Idaho. (Photo: Robert Blair via AP)
Farms will likely look the same driving by, but a closer look will show differences. Older practices, like planting clover and other cover crops during the winter, will be more common to improve soil health, making it more able to withstand floods or drought and decrease the amount of fertilizer needed. Complex crop rotations, aided by computers, will make farming more efficient and cheaper because they will require less fertilizer and pesticides.
Those fields will likely also incorporate wind turbines or solar panels to give growers additional income. That’s already happening today. Many farms in the Midwest are getting rents of $3,000 to $5,000 per year to put turbines on their land, Apt says.
Fields also might have drones buzzing over them or small robots running down the rows, stopping to test the soil for moisture, nutrients and image the crops for weed or insect infestations. That information will be automatically fed to the farmer, who can use it to precisely water and care for each small land unit as required, rather than needlessly wasting expensive water and chemicals.
Ranchers and dairy farmers can use similar technology to move their cows and cattle from one paddock to another on an almost daily basis, mimicking what a buffalo herd would have done. Called intensive management grazing, it results in healthier land and better forage for the animals, ultimately bringing costs down.

Energy for everyone
The world’s air and water will be cleaner as we stop using polluting energy sources. The planet's resources will also become more equitable, as carbon-neutral energy sources become cheaper and more efficient, making them available to people in parts of the world where energy is currently expensive and difficult to obtain.
And it’s all doable, no breakthroughs required, said Stanford's Diffenbaugh. “The knowledge necessary for getting on that path is available,” he said.

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Climate Change Poses A Clear Financial Risk To Australia

The Guardian - Chris Barrett* | Anna Skarbek*

With our world-class solar and wind energy resource base, Australia stands to benefit from a successful – and rapid – low-carbon transition
Cars sit in flood waters outside in south-east Queensland. ‘How much financial risk are we exposed to from the effects of climate change, or from a delayed, bumpy transition to a low-carbon future?’ Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP
Climate policy has never been easy in Australia. But despite the debates of the past, Australians are pretty used to many of the policies that seek to regulate carbon emissions in our everyday lives. We know how to purchase green power for our homes; that our buildings are regulated for the energy they use; and that our household appliances come plastered with energy-efficiency star ratings.
But what about our bank accounts, our super, our insurance policies and investment funds? How does our money contribute to causing – or preventing – dangerous climate change? How much financial risk are we exposed to from the effects of climate change, or from a delayed, bumpy transition to a low-carbon future? What are policymakers and regulators doing about those risks? Climate Risk and the Finance System, a new report from the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, addresses these fundamental questions.
This second type of climate risk and opportunity – the massive implications of climate change for the financial system – is a fairly new frontier in climate policy. It has developed rapidly over the last three to four years internationally, and is now reaching Australia, where both the potential risks and opportunities raised by finance sector and regulatory reforms to address climate change are immense.
These reforms have their roots in the last financial crisis and a growing determination by international policymakers to avoid climate change being the cause of any future crisis. Two events pushed them to the top of the agenda: the landmark speech of highly respected Bank of England governor Mark Carney in September 2015 on the potentially grave risks to financial markets from climate change; and the Paris agreement in December of the same year, which firmly and for the first time placed a key responsibility upon the finance sector to shape the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Both raised the clear risk of trillions of dollars of high-emitting assets – including coalmines, power stations, oil rigs and gas plants – becoming “stranded” (ie devalued or worthless) assets in a world shifting rapidly out of high-carbon activities.
Australia is disproportionately exposed to such risks due to its highly carbon-intensive economy and its rebounding levels of emissions since 2013. Yet Australia also stands disproportionately to benefit from a successful low-carbon transition, with a world-class solar and wind energy resource base, mineral resources critical to battery production and a large and sophisticated funds management industry on hand to provide financial services to realise these opportunities.
This makes it all the more important for Australia to study the rapid progress made on the international sustainable finance policy agenda in recent years, and to draw on this experience for its own reform process.
For example, central bankers and financial supervisors have started to tackle the risks of climate change, establishing the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) in 2017. From an initial founding coalition of eight members, the network has grown within 18 months to number 35, including the Reserve Bank of Australia. Each has committed itself to “contribute to the development of environment and climate risk management in the financial sector, and to mobilise mainstream finance to support the transition toward a sustainable economy”. This is new terrain for traditionally conservative institutions, speaking to a growing urgency behind this agenda.
Further, Europe has embarked on a comprehensive sustainable finance policy reform agenda. Initiated in late 2016, and moving to policy design and implementation from early 2018, it includes important down payments in reforming sustainability benchmarks, disclosure regulations, investor duties and in defining a “taxonomy” of sustainable activities. These will have a large impact also beyond Europe’s shores, both since they apply to businesses operating in the vast European Union capital market, but also because of the best practice example they offer for others to copy.
The United Kingdom ran its own related policy reform process, reporting in March 2018. Government has yet to respond, but the process signals an interesting pro-green finance direction at odds with fears that the UK would turn in a deregulatory direction once freed from European frameworks. Both Canada and New Zealand have convened similar expert panels to push sustainable finance reform.
Intriguingly for Australia, our largest trading partner China has moved with speed on the same agenda, mandating liability insurance for environmental pollution and disclosures of environmental information. The potential size of China’s green finance sector gives these reforms an international resonance beyond their domestic impacts.
In conclusion, Australia has numerous positive reform examples to draw on. The recently announced Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative brings together finance sector leaders to develop a roadmap for the sector to address climate risk. Key industry players are aligned, domestic regulators have done solid groundwork, and there is a well-defined set of international best practices and international fora within which best practice can rapidly be transmitted. All the ingredients are there for Australia to catch up with the rest of the world, and quickly.

*Chris Barrett is executive director, finance strategy, at the European Climate Foundation and former Australian Ambassador to the OECD. 
*Anna Skarbek is CEO of ClimateWorks Australia.
They are the authors of Climate Risk and the Finance System.

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Australia Can Be Powered 100% By Renewables By Early 2030s, Says Garnaut

Renew Economy - 

Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash
Leading economist and climate change policy expert Professor Ross Garnaut says that Australia could be powered 100 per cent by “intermittent” renewables by the early 2030s, and have a grid that is both reliable and secure and cheaper than it is now.
In the third of a series of six public lectures being delivered by Garnaut in the lead up to the next election, Garnaut says a grid powered by wind and solar, and backed by storage and demand management, could be achieve quite quickly, but it would require the “train wreck” of regulatory failures to be fixed.
“I now have no doubt that intermittent renewables could meet 100 per cent of Australia’s electricity requirements by the 2030s, with high degrees of security and reliability, and at wholesale prices much lower than any experienced in Australia over the past decade,” Garnaut says in his talk last week at the University of Melbourne (a video of which can be seen here).
“More importantly, I now have no doubt that with well designed policy support, firm power in globally transformative quantities could be supplied to industrial locations in each State at globally competitive prices.
“That is around $45 to $50 per MWh today, whenever the power is required. No other developed country has a comparable opportunity.
 “That means that we can contribute our fair share to the global effort to contain temperature increases as close as possible to 1.5°C, even if it takes time to make strong headway in other sectors.”
Garnaut sees the electricity sector as the key to cutting emissions across the economy, and for securing Australia’s long-term economic future and as a global base for low-cost industry.
That’s because decarbonising the grid is the quickest and cheapest option, and in turn can lead to zero, or near zero emissions in transport, much of industry and fugitive emissions.
In turn, the decarbonisation of Australia’s electricity grid can play a big role in global decarbonisation efforts, because it could lead to exports of renewable energy in the form of hydrogen or ammonia to north Asia, and then other economies, and through sub sea cables to Indonesia and beyond.
“Australia’s renewable energy is a path to low cost emissions reduction in the rest of the world,” Garnaut says. “And before that, if wet our act together, we can going to find ourselves as the natural home of energy intensive industry.”



In a series of slides, Garnaut illustrates how this is possible. This slide above is probably the most stunning, because it compares the total cost of solar compared to just the operating costs of coal generation over the past 10 years, and looking forward to 2025.
Garnaut notes that solar was significantly more expensive than coal a decade ago, it is now cheaper than just the operating costs of coal.
Further falls in the cost of solar, to around $30/MWh by 2025, and further rises in the operating costs of coal, would mean it would make no sense to make new investments in coal generation from now on. Even with firming and storage, solar and wind beat fossil fuels, as the CSIRO and the Australian Energy market Operator have recognised.
This, he notes, has come as something of a surprise to most of the major global and national institutions, who have been consistently wrong in their estimations of technology costs.
These next two graphs illustrate how.



First is the cost of solar. International forecasts are the shaded blue and green in the middle. The forecasts from Australian institutions, including the Australian Energy Market Operator and even recent ones from the highly conservative Electric Power Research Institute, are ridiculously out of the ball-park.
The actual cost of solar – as reflected in recent power purchase agreements (PPAs) is revealed in yellow. It is far below even the most optimistic forecast. And it will continue to fall.



The same is true of wind energy (above), where the IEA and the global wind lobby were quite conservative in their forecasts, but in Australia the AEMO and EPRI were again out of the ballpark.
Garnaut worries that AEMO – despite its good work in putting together the Integrated System Plans over the last two years – may still be underestimating the cost falls in solar particularly.




He noted this graph which shows that AEMO’s forecasts have been significantly wrong over the last decade, and even with the major adjustments to the starting point every two years, it still downplays the possibility of future cost falls.
Garnaut says the evidence is clear – for each doubling in capacity, there has been a 24 per cent reduction in costs. This has been happening for the better part of four decades, and there is no reason to expect it would stop now,
“The story of the fall in solar PV prices is a triumph for climate policy,” Garnaut says, pointing to the policies in Germany and Europe at the start of the century that underpinned the growth in manufacturing and scale and the subsequent fall in costs.
Garnaut lamented the policy and political debate over renewable energy in the past decade, and the “train wreck of regulatory failure” that would need to be cleared to make room for the underlying economic forces.
This is particularly significant, because it is now widely recognised that it is not economics, or even engineering that is holding back the clean energy transition, but regulatory hurdles that are looming large as the major impediment.
This goes to the wholesale regulatory capture of regulator by the industry, although Garnaut did note the positive influence of AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman and AER chief Paul Conboy.
“Whoever did those appointments should be recognised as Australian heroes,” he said, adding that regulatory agencies are starting to “do their job” and shifting from the old thinking around the synchronous energy system that had dominated perspectives.
Garnaut noted the state-wide blackout in South Australia, and lamented the fact that rather than being seen as a call to action on climate change, it was used – within hours – by Coalition politicians to argue against the use of renewables.
Thankfully, Garnaut said, it did lead to some forward thinking by then South Australia premier Jay Weatherill, who put in his plans that saw the construction of the highly successful Tesla big battery, and the back-up generators that have been used once, but very successfully since then.
“Since the summer of 2016-17, the Tesla big battery, other batteries, the Government’s gas turbines, and more attentive regulatory agencies have made South Australia possibly the most secure region within the National Energy Market,” Garnaut said.
 He noted that the one area that former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was able to move forward was in the promotion of the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme, probably because it “looked like technology that came from the 1950s”.
However, Garnaut said he was concerned about both the expense of the project, and the potential market power. He suggested taking the Snowy 2.0 scheme and putting it into a separate government owned entity that would provide “reliability services” at minimum cost.
Garnaut concluded his lecture by focusing on the opportunity of a zero carbon grid, powered by wind and solar.
“Australia emerged as a major player in global energy in the later decades of the fossil economy. Australia is by far the world’s biggest exporter of coal when you take thermal and metallurgical coal together. It is currently the second biggest exporter of gas, and is headed soon to be the biggest—at great cost to Australian consumers and industry.
“Australia became the world’s biggest exporter of aluminium in the late twentieth century after the Japanese industry, responding to environmental concerns at home, moved to importing metal, and Australia’s low coal costs made it the logical location for new production.
“Australia lost its old advantages in the fossil energy world economy in the twenty first century through developments discussed this evening.
“The rich natural endowment of potential for renewable energy means that when the whole world has low or zero emissions energy, Australia potentially has the lowest cost energy.
“If we secure the new opportunity, unlike the last, it will be sustainable.”

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