31/05/2019

Australia Keeps Voting For Coal, But Investors Are Quietly Abandoning Plans For New Mines

Quartz - Akshat Rathi

Numbers don't add up
Nowhere to go… for now. Reuters/Jason Reed
On May 18, Australians surprised the pollsters.
At the federal election, the expectation was for the incumbent coalition to be thumped by the pro-climate Labor party.
Instead, citizens of Queensland, Australia’s coal-rich province, swung hard to support the coalition backing the construction of new coal mines.
It was enough to ensure the coalition remains in power.
Queensland’s Carmichael coal mine lies at the heart of the debate. Many political campaigns were focused on the mine, using hashtags like #StopAdani or #StartAdani.
Adani, the Indian conglomerate that has an exploration license for the coal mine, plans to build it into one of the world’s largest.
Emissions from the process of mining at Carmichael, and the burning of the coal produced, would each separately be more than emissions produced by entire countries like Austria, Denmark, and Norway.
But Adani has struggled to first get the environmental licenses it needs, as well as the financing to pull off the project.
Last year, the company announced that it would move ahead with a scaled-down version of the Carmichael mine, producing only 10 million metric tons of coal each year of the possible annual capacity of 60 million metric tons.
Environmentalists around the world see the Adani mine, located in the Galilee basin, as a bellwether for the future of the dirtiest fossil fuel.
That’s because the basin has potential to provide a lot more coal beyond the Adani mine, at a time when Australia (and the world) is struggling to cut its emissions and hit ambitious climate goals.
Among rich nations, Australia is expected to suffer the most damages because of the climate crisis.
In the past few months, the country has experienced its hottest summer on record, extreme flooding in Queensland, and mass die-off of a million fish in New South Wales.
While the Australian elections didn’t go as environmentalists wanted, they do have something, perhaps even bigger, to celebrate.
On May 23, Australian broadcaster ABC found that investors have abandoned plans to build a much larger mine that was supposed to be located only 30 km away from the Carmichael mine.
The China Stone project, run by MacMines AustAsia and wholly owned by the Meijin Energy Group, which is China’s largest producer of metallurgical coke, was expected to produce 38 million metric tons of coal each year.
The A$6.7 billion ($4.6 billion) mine would have supported 3,000 jobs and contributed A$188 million to the Queensland government’s coffers each year for the 25 years the mining was expected to last.
All that now seems to be up in the air.
ABC revealed that MacMines terminated the process of acquiring mining leases from the government in March. Though the company wouldn’t comment on why it did that, analysts believe that the coal mine is neither financially viable nor in China’s interests any more.
“China has made it very, very clear it wants to progressively reduce exposure to highly polluting coal-fired power generation. That won’t happen overnight, it will take decades to come,” Tim Buckley of the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis told ABC.
“But if you are moving in that direction, the last thing you want to do is introduce a whole lot more expensive imported thermal coal.”
Notably, the China Stone mine’s financial viability is expected to be similar to the Carmichael mine.
David Fickling, a Bloomberg columnist, did the math on the latter.
After taking into consideration the cost to build the mine, the railway line, the operating expenses, and the interest payments on the loans taken, he found that each metric ton of coal would cost about $88.
That’s much higher than the open-market cost for the same quality of coal, which can be bought from Indonesia’s Adaro Energy for as little as $66 per metric ton.
MacMines still owns an exploration license for the China Stone project, so no other company can develop it.
That means, for now, the China Stone coal will stay in the ground.

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Australians Could Have Saved Over $1 Billion In Fuel If Car Emissions Standards Were Introduced 3 Years Ago

The Conversation -  |  | 

Legislative action regarding vehicle emissions is overdue, and needs urgent attention by the federal government. Shutterstock
When it comes to road transport, Australia is at risk of becoming a climate villain as we lag behind international best practice on fuel efficiency.
Road transport is one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions and represented 16% of Australia’s total carbon dioxide emissions in 2000, growing to 21% in 2016. Total CO₂ emissions from road transport increased by almost 30% in the period 2000-16.
Fuel efficiency (CO₂ emission) standards have been adopted in around 80% of the global light vehicle market to cap the growth of transport emissions. This includes the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan, China, South Korea and India – but not Australia.
If Australia had introduced internationally harmonised emissions legislation three years ago, households could have made savings on fuel costs to the tune of A$1 billion.
This shocking figure comes from our preliminary calculations looking at the effect of requiring more efficient vehicles to be sold in Australia.
A report, published yesterday by Transport Energy/Emission Research, looked at what Australia has achieved in vehicle fuel efficiency and CO₂ standards over the past 20 years. While Australia has considered and tried to impose standards a number of times, sadly these attempts were unsuccessful.
Legislative action on vehicle CO₂ emissions is long overdue and demands urgent attention by the Australian government.
Australian consumers are increasingly buying heavier vehicles with bigger emissions. Shuterstock
How did Australia get here?
The most efficient versions of vehicle models offered in Australia are considerably less efficient than similar vehicles in other markets.
Australia could increasingly become a dumping ground for the world’s least efficient vehicles with sub-par emissions performance, given our lack of fuel efficiency standards. This leaves us on a dangerous path towards not only higher vehicle emissions, but also higher fuel costs for passenger travel and freight.
Australia has attempted to impose CO₂ or fuel efficiency standards on light vehicles several times over the past 20 years, but without success. While the federal government was committed to addressing this issue in 2015, four years later we are still yet to hear when – or even if – mandatory fuel efficiency standards will ever be introduced.
The general expectation appears to be that average CO₂ emission rates of new cars in Australia will reduce over time as technology advances overseas. In the absence of CO₂ standards locally, it is more likely that consumers will continue to not be offered more efficient cars, and pay higher fuel costs as a consequence.

Estimating the fuel savings
Available evidence suggests Australian motorists are paying on average almost 30% more for fuel than they should because of the lack of fuel efficiency standards.
The Australian vehicle fleet uses about 32 billion litres of fuel per year.
Using an Australian fleet model described in the TER report, we can make a conservative estimate that the passenger vehicle fleet uses about half of this fuel: 16 billion litres per year. New cars entering the fleet each year would represent about 5% of this: 800 million litres per year.
So assuming that mandatory CO₂ standards improve fuel efficiency by 27%, fuel savings would be 216 million litres per year.
In the last three years, the average fuel price across Australia’s five major cities is A$1.33 per litre. This equates to a total savings of A$287 million per year, although this would be about half the first year as new cars are purchased throughout the year and travel less, and would reduce as vehicles travel less when they age.
The savings are accumulative because a car purchased in a particular year continues to save fuel over the following years.
The table below shows a rough calculation of savings over the three year period (2016-2018), for new cars sold in the same period (Model Years 2016, 2017 and 2018).
Author provided (No reuse)
As a result, over a period of three years, A$1.3 billion in potential savings for car owners would have accumulated.

Policy has come close, but what are we waiting for?
The Australian government is not progressing any measures to introduce a fuel efficiency target. In fact, it recently labelled Labor’s proposed fuel efficiency standard as a “car tax”.
But Australia has come close to adopting mandatory vehicle CO₂ emission standards in the past.
In late 2007, the Labor government committed to cutting emissions to achieve Australia’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. The then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, instructed the Vehicle Efficiency Working Group to:
… develop jointly a package of vehicle fuel efficiency measures designed to move Australia towards international best practice.
Then, in 2010, the Labor government decided mandatory CO₂ emissions standards would apply to new light vehicles from 2015. But a change in government in 2013 meant these standards did not see the light of day.
The amount of fuel that could have been saved is A$287 million per year. Shutterstock
Things looked promising again when the Coalition government released a Vehicle Emissions Discussion Paper in 2016, followed by a draft Regulation Impact Statement in the same year.
The targets for adopting this policy in 2025, considered in the draft statement, were marked as “strong” (105g of CO₂ per km), “medium” (119g/km) and “mild” (135g/km) standards.
Under all three targets, there would be significant net cost savings. But since 2016, the federal government has taken no further action.
It begs the question: what exactly are we waiting for?

The technical state of play
Transport Energy/Emission Research conducted preliminary modelling of Australian real-world CO₂ emissions.
This research suggests average CO₂ emission rates of the on-road car fleet in Australia are actually increasing over time and are, in reality, higher than what is officially reported in laboratory emissions tests.
In fact, the gap between mean real-world emissions and the official laboratory tests is expected to grow from 20% in 2010 to 65% in 2025.
This gap is particularly concerning when we look at the lack of support for low-emissions vehicles like electric cars.
Given that fleet turnover is slow, the benefits of fuel efficiency standards would only begin to have a significant effect several years into the future.
With continuing population growth, road travel will only increase further. This will put even more pressure on the need to reduce average real-world CO₂ emission rates, given the increasing environmental and health impacts of the vehicle fleet.
Even if the need to reduce emissions doesn’t convince you, the cost benefits of emissions standards should. The sale of less efficient vehicles in Australia means higher weekly fuel costs for car owners, which could be avoided with the introduction of internationally harmonised emissions legislation.

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The Environmental Aftermath Of Australia's Federal Election

Independent Australia -

In the wake of the Federal Election, not much seems to have changed with the Government's stance on climate change, writes Sue Arnold.
Cartoon by Mark David
SEMANTICS PLAYED a major role in the Federal Election. Climate change became “the environment” and “environment” was code for “greenie”, thus allowing shock jocks to crow over the “greenies vs rednecks” battles so typified by the Stop Adani convoy reception in Rockhampton.
The National Party environmental vandals were also happy to keep the message simple. In NP terms, protecting the environment means Left wing radical greenies running the country, losing your jobs and being forced to give up your ute.
The catastrophic loss of biodiversity was not discussed by Morrison, his ministers or mainstream media. Instead, the environmental focus was always on climate change, despite the release of the U.N. report indicating the looming loss of one million species and irrefutable evidence of the strong interrelationship.
The IPBES Assessment showed climate change has been identified as a primary driver of biodiversity loss, already altering every part of nature. Likewise, the loss of biodiversity contributes to climate change, for example when we destroy forests we emit carbon dioxide, the major “human-produced” greenhouse gas.
IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson, said:
‘We cannot solve the threats of human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity in isolation. We either solve both or we solve neither.’
Also adding:
“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

“Biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people are our common heritage and humanity’s most important life-supporting ‘safety net’. But our safety net is stretched almost to breaking point,” said Professor Sandra Diaz, who co-chaired the Assessment.
Australia is home to between 600,000 and 700,000 native species, many of which are unique to Australia. More than 1,700 species and ecological communities are known to be threatened and at risk of extinction.
Evidence of why these ongoing catastrophic environmental crises are happening in Australia is not hard to find.
The Community and Public Sector Union's (CPSU) submission to the Senate Inquiry into faunal extinction detailed extraordinary criticism of the Federal Government’s environmental record. The union employs Department of the Environment staff who are responsible for enforcing the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act).
Australia also leads the world on mammal extinctions, with 27 confirmed extinctions since European settlement. In many cases, the follow-on impacts of extinction events are poorly understood, however, it is known that losing species out of ecosystems can have wide ranging ramifications for ecosystem function.

 Despite this, there is a lack of effective monitoring and long-term reporting on biodiversity. It has been raised in every jurisdictional report and multiple other reports and papers as a major impediment to understanding the state and trends of Australian biodiversity.

 Resources for managing and limiting the impact of key species mostly appear inadequate to arrest the declining status of many. New approaches and major reinvestments will be required across long timeframes to reverse deteriorating trends and prevent the accelerating decline in many species. This makes the role the Commonwealth plays in protecting biodiversity and conservation even more important.
Professor Hugh Possingham at a Sustainable Population Australia workshop in April at Griffith University underlined the ramifications of the Government’s failure to protect biodiversity:
“The key problem is simply that the EPBC act doesn’t work, 7 million plus hectares of habitat that contains listed species were destroyed without referral to the Federal Government.”
CPSU members were surveyed about the Commonwealth Government’s performance regarding faunal extinction.
93% thought the Government was doing poorly or very poorly in fulfilling international and domestic obligations in conserving threatened fauna.
87% believed the adequacy of Commonwealth environmental laws was poor and very poor.
Over 77.2% thought the Government was doing poorly or very poorly when it came to prioritising the protection of fauna and their habitat to prevent extinction.
In May 2018, department staff lost 60 full time staff from the Biodiversity and Conservation Division, nearly a third of the staff. Funding cuts have affected the department’s ability to support programs that protect critical habitats for threatened fauna and enforce environmental legislation.
As one CPSU member stated:
More than 1,700 species of animals and plants are listed by the Australian Government as being at risk of extinction, yet Government deems it fit to reduce the number of staff in the threatened species section of the Department of Environment and Energy. About 85% of the country's plants, 84% of its mammals and 45% of its birds are found nowhere else, yet the Federal Government does nothing to stop the incessant clear felling in Queensland. Marine Protected Areas have become ‘Marine Parks’ where bottom trawling is allowed. The list goes on.
According to the Budget Statements, program expenses for the conservation of Australia’s heritage and environment shrank from $47.740 million in 2014-15 to a projected $35.745 million in 2021-22.
The Australian Academy of Science in their submission made the crises abundantly clear:
Given the vast majority of Australian species are unique to our continent and not found anywhere else on the planet, the Academy considers that ensuring the survival of these species is the responsibility of the Australian Government and the Australian people. Indeed, several extinct or threatened species represent significant parts of the tree of life.

 The situation is especially dire for our globally unique mammals, 10% of which have become extinct since European colonisation and a further 21% now classified as threatened.

 The major threatening processes in Australia today are invasive species, broad scale ecosystem modification, inappropriate fire management, habitat clearing for agriculture and climate change.
In spite of this IPBES report being published during the campaign, together with the considerable evidence provided to the Senate Inquiry into faunal extinction, Morrison managed to ignore all the findings.
Was it because Melissa Price, his Environment Minister, didn’t brief Morrison? Or did he ignore the mountain of evidence ensuring that biodiversity loss was confined to the electoral closet? Will Morrison continue to ignore the mounting evidence?
Significant and successful efforts were made to ensure his Minister for the Environment was invisible, thus providing no target for any environmental questions. The mainstream media followed suit. Murdoch’s propaganda machine focused on creating division, eradicating wildlife and ensuring that anyone who mentioned forests, rivers or ecosystems was never given a centimetre of media space.
Not only was biodiversity a forbidden subject during the Election, a number of articles chastised any politician or member of the public who raised the issue of the PM’s Pentacostal faith. Yet his beliefs are critical to the future survival of Australia’s rapidly disappearing iconic wildlife.
In the Pentacostal statement of faith, the following can be found:
‘We believe the Bible, comprised of the Old and New Testaments, to be the inspired, infallible, and authoritative Word of God.’
This is what the Bible has to say about Creation:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.
There’s little doubt that the PM is doing a great job of subduing the Earth, with potential Pentacostal members lurking in Sydney and Brisbane Premiers’ offices.
But the real question remains. How can any leader of an educated Western nation ignore the writing on the environmental wall? And at what cost to our children and their future survival?
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