Australian Musicians Band Together To Invest In Solar Farms

The Guardian - Andrew Stafford

Exclusive: Midnight Oil, Cloud Control, Vance Joy and Regurgitator join FEAT., a new platform encouraging their industry to back sustainability

‘There’s no reason why this couldn’t go global,’ says Heidi Lenffer from Cloud Control, pictured at FEAT.’s first solar farm. Photograph: Ulrich Lenffer

In the spring of 2017, immediately after the release of the Australian band Cloud Control’s third album, Zone, the band’s keyboard player, Heidi Lenffer, was contemplating what their upcoming tour would cost.
But this time she wasn’t just thinking about the money; she was thinking about emissions.
Independent bands are used to running on a shoestring budget – a carbon-conscious Lenffer wanted Cloud Control to run a more environmentally efficient operation, too.
She began asking climate scientists in the field, and connected with Dr Chris Dey from Areté Sustainability. Dey crunched the numbers for Cloud Control’s two-week tour, playing 15 clubs and theatres from Byron Bay to Perth.
He found that it would produce about 28 tonnes of emissions – roughly equivalent to what an average household produces in a year. And that was just the national leg of an album tour that would take the band to the US three times.

The environmental movement often lacks a positive premise for action. It is exciting to own a piece of a solar farm

Heidi Lenffer, Cloud Control

“I had suspected that all of this flying, and all of the energy that goes into tours, can’t be very good for the environment – but there was no solution that existed beyond carbon offsetting,” Lenffer says.
Offsetting is essentially an attempt at equalisation: when you offset your flights, you try to compensate for the carbon by donating to a program to suck it out of the atmosphere, via tree planting or sequestration someplace else. Lenffer wanted to aim higher.

Partnering with the superannuation fund Future Super, and the developer Impact Investment Group, Lenffer has established FEAT. (Future Energy Artists): a platform that officially launches on Wednesday and will allow musicians to build and invest in their own solar farms.
Early signs are promising. As well as Cloud Control, other Australian bands already signed up include Midnight Oil, Vance Joy, Regurgitator, Big Scary, Peking Duk and Jack River.
The first solar farm being built with their help is Brigalow: an 80-hectare project near Pittsworth on Queensland’s Darling Downs.

Brigalow is the first solar farm to be built with the help of the music industry. Photograph: Patrick Wood

“At last, a project that takes the great passion many artists have for a healthy world powered by renewable energy, and makes it doable,” says Midnight Oil’s frontman, Peter Garrett.
Speaking to Guardian Australia, Paul Curtis, Regurgitator’s manager, talks about an “actively engaged citizenry embracing a more optimistic and progressive approach to the future”.
Lenffer wanted to tap into the creative drive of her industry to find a solution to a complex problem. “The environmental movement often lacks a positive premise for action,” she says. “It is exciting to own a piece of a solar farm. To do that collectively, we can leave a lasting, tangible infrastructure legacy and say, ‘We built that together.’”
Here’s how it works: money that artists invest in FEAT. is put into a portfolio which is managed by Future Super, and can be used to buy ownership stakes in solar farms or loaned to build their infrastructure.
 The land that Brigalow solar farm is being built on was previously used as a sorghum grain farm. It is now being leased from the land’s owner to build the solar project, whose progress is closely monitored by Impact Investment Group, which manages the underlying fund investing in Brigalow.
And artists can put forward as much as they can afford.
Perhaps they want to throw in a one-off lump sum, or offer a percentage of their touring income; the idea is that everyone should be able to invest in their financial and environmental future – which is why FEAT. set a floor price of just $5 to set up an account.
FEAT. says the 34.55-megawatt Brigalow solar farm could power the equivalent of 11,300 homes for 30 years. (Looked at another way, it could generate more than 2,000 Cloud Control tours in renewable energy.) That energy is then sold into the energy market, with a target return on investment for artists of 5% a year.

Heidi Lenffer was willing to gamble that ‘a progressive community like the music industry would have the guts and imagination to embrace change’. Photograph: Ulrich Lenffer 

The total emissions output of the global music sector is not well studied. A 2010 investigation into the UK industry found it was responsible for more than 540,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas every year, much of it from live music. Most of that was transport, not just of band members and equipment, but fans: audience travel alone accounted for 43% of emissions.

FEAT. takes the great passion many artists have for a healthy world powered by renewable energy, and makes it doable

Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil

A further 26% came from the lifecycle of CDs, which speaks to the age of the study.
But, according to researchers from the University of Glasgow, the streaming age hasn’t made for a cleaner product: the energy required to store and process music in the cloud makes for an even worse carbon footprint than manufacturing and distributing CDs and records.For artists, the pitiful royalty rates generated from streaming, and the crash in sales of physical product, means that live music makes up the bulk of revenue.
For Lenffer, going on tour meant contributing to the global climate emergency – but she was willing to gamble that “a progressive community like the music industry would have the guts and imagination to embrace change”

A tractor at Brigalow. Photograph: Ulrich Lenffer 

Lenffer says she was inspired by community movements overseas, particularly in Europe, where groups were banding together to buy investments in renewables.
“Sporting clubhouses would install solar panels on their rooftops purchased by the residents in the area, [who] would then be paid back through the energy generated over a period of time,” she explains. “I found about 70 groups in Australia doing it, as opposed to around 500 in Scotland and 1000 in Germany.”
But as well as being the biggest greenhouse gas emitters per capita, Australians also have the highest take-up of rooftop solar. Lenffer says this statistic “shows that people are driving the change where our government is not”. And, compared with Europe, there are far more abundant solar resources available in our sunburnt country.
Lenffer sees the potential for her idea to catch on.
“There’s no reason why this couldn’t go global,” she says.
“If we can demonstrate it works here – which I feel like we can, because we’ve already got a number of big-name and emerging artists signed up – if we can take ownership over building the solar assets that are going to power our future, which we need to do as quickly as possible, there’s no reason why this couldn’t be rolled out for every artist touring the world.”

Links

• FEAT.
• Glencore pressured to withdraw from new coalmines to prove climate change commitment
• When the sweet turns sour: Queensland split between sugar and solar
• Australia's solar future bright as households install record 3.5m panels
• Renewables roadshow: how Broken Hill went from mining to drag queens and solar farms
• Queensland's largest solar farm plugs into the grid a month early
• It’s time to invest in Indigenous carbon farming on Aboriginal lands
• Church roofs, solar panels and climate change

(British) Labour Would Force Firms To Fight Climate Crisis Or Lose Contracts

The Guardian - Fiona Harvey

Exclusive: Companies bidding for public sector contracts must ‘put people and planet before profit’

Labour was instrumental in having parliament declare a climate emergency. Photograph: Sopa Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Companies bidding for public sector contracts will be forced to take radical steps to tackle the climate crisis under new regulations being proposed by the Labour party, addressing energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and waste.
If elected, the party would force suppliers to “put people and planet before profit”, with the threat of losing contracts if they do not, in a stark redrawing of priorities for contract bidders.
The government buys goods and services worth about £284bn from the private sector every year, making it one of the biggest single customers for many private sector companies. The proposed changes would force companies to take a much greater role in combating the climate emergency, and have a knock-on effect across the business sector as they would be more likely to replicate those standards in other non-public sector work.
If it was elected, Labour would also ensure the public sector bodies that deliver goods and services, including the NHS, would have to adhere to higher green standards. Shadow ministers have already pledged to “insource” more goods and services to the public sector, rather than favouring private companies.
Standards on trade union recognition, late payments and tax compliance would also be updated and enforced.
Jon Trickett, the shadow minister for the Cabinet Office for the Labour party, said: “For too long large firms have enjoyed the immense benefits that come from public sector contracts, but have failed to protect the public good. There is no greater public good than our planet and the environment – businesses must deliver decisive action.”
Labour has pledged action on climate change to meet the “net zero carbon” target for 2050, recommended by the Committee on Climate Change in a recent landmark report. The party was also instrumental in having parliament declare a climate emergency. If followed through, both would require much greater action on carbon dioxide emissions across the economy but senior figures in politics and civil society are concerned they could be forgotten among other political priorities if pressure is not kept up.
Trickett said: “Labour will ensure that every firm providing goods and services to the public sector puts people and planet before profit. The stakes demand nothing less.”
The move may end up costing the Treasury and government departments more in the short term, because contracts are currently awarded largely to the lowest bidder, and cutting carbon dioxide emissions may require bidders to increase their investments. But Labour believes it will save money in the longer term and provide improvements in vital areas such as climate change, air pollution, health and other social benefits.
Aaron Kiely, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “The UK parliament has declared a climate emergency and all areas of government and business must respond to this crisis as quickly as possible. Making sure public money supports public good by only giving government contracts to green suppliers is a sensible start, and will lay down a clear marker for companies to comply.”
The party has examined the current standards for bidders to supply the public sector, and believes the new pledges could be delivered with relatively minor changes to regulations.
The proposals are part of Labour’s “green industrial revolution”, that has been championed by Corbyn, and would involve new investment in renewable energy such as solar panels, and cleaner forms of transport. It also follows mooted proposals to delist UK companies that fail to take action on the climate emergency, though that would be more complex. Public sector contracts are considered a good place to start because they are within the government’s control and many companies rely on the hundreds of billions they pay out each year.
Perhaps unusually for Corbyn, who has often been defined in opposition to former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, the new plans are a redrawing of previous attempts by Blair more than a decade ago to use public sector procurement to force suppliers to make changes to their practices. A taskforce was set up in 2006 on how to “green” public sector contracts. The initiative foundered, however, when it met resistance from suppliers and public sector procurement specialists, who argued it would force a rise in costs for the government. After the financial crisis, little more was heard of it.

Links

• MPs endorse Corbyn’s call to declare climate emergency
• Scotland faces climate 'apocalypse' without action to cut emissions
• Guardian spurs media outlets to consider stronger climate language
• ‘We need everyone’: Greta Thunberg calls on adults to join climate strikes
• Young people have led the climate strikes. Now we need adults to join us too
• 'I feel empowered and scared': pupils speak before climate strike
• Amazon workers demand Bezos act on climate crisis
• Much shorter working weeks needed to tackle climate crisis – study
• What if we covered the climate crisis like we did the start of the second world war?

The Climate Crisis Is Our Third World War. It Needs A Bold Response

The Guardian - Joseph Stiglitz

Critics of the Green New Deal ask if we can afford it. But we can’t afford not to: our civilisation is at stake

‘The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy’

Photograph: Press Enterpr/Rex/Shutterstock 

Joseph Stiglitz Joseph E Stiglitz is a university professor at Columbia, the 2001 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, a former chief economist of the World Bank and the author, most recently, of People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it.
They are right.
They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression.
An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.
Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.
Yes, we can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. The climate emergency is our third world war. Our lives and civilization as we know it are at stake, just as they were in the second world war.
When the US was attacked during the second world war no one asked, “Can we afford to fight the war?”
It was an existential matter. We could not afford not to fight it. The same goes for the climate crisis. Here, we are already experiencing the direct costs of ignoring the issue – in recent years the country has lost almost 2% of GDP in weather-related disasters, which include floods, hurricanes, and forest fires. The cost to our health from climate-related diseases is just being tabulated, but it, too, will run into the tens of billions of dollars – not to mention the as-yet-uncounted number of lives lost.
We will pay for climate breakdown one way or another, so it makes sense to spend money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until later to pay a lot more for the consequences – not just from weather but also from rising sea levels. It’s a cliche, but it’s true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy – just as the second world war set the stage for America’s golden economic era , with the fastest rate of growth in its history amidst shared prosperity.
The Green New Deal would stimulate demand, ensuring that all available resources were used; and the transition to the green economy would likely usher in a new boom. Trump’s focus on the industries of the past, like coal, is strangling the much more sensible move to wind and solar power. More jobs by far will be created in renewable energy than will be lost in coal.

The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy

The biggest challenge will be marshalling the resources for the Green New Deal. In spite of the low “headline” unemployment rate, the United States has large amounts of under-used and inefficiently allocated resources.
The ratio of employed people to those of working age in the US is still low, lower than in our past, lower than in many other countries, and especially low for women and minorities. With well-designed family leave and support policies and more time-flexibility in our labor market, we could bring more women and more citizens over 65 into the labor force.
Because of our long legacy of discrimination, many of our human resources are not used as efficiently as they could or should be. Together with better education and health policies and more investment in infrastructure and technology – true supply side policies – the productive capacity of the economy could increase, providing some of the resources the economy needs to fight and adapt to the climate breakdown.
While most economists agree that there is still room for some economic expansion, even in the short run – additional output, some of which could be used to fight the battle against the climate crisis – there remains controversy over how much output could be increased without running into at least short-term bottlenecks.
Almost surely, however, there will have to be a redeployment of resources to fight this war just as with the second world war, when bringing women into the labor force expanded productive capacity but it did not suffice.
Some changes will be easy, for instance, eliminating the tens of billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies and moving resources from producing dirty energy to producing clean energy. You could say, though, that America is lucky: we have such a poorly designed tax system that’s regressive and rife with loopholes that it would be easy to raise more money at the same time that we increase economic efficiency.
Taxing dirty industries, ensuring that capital pays at least as high a tax rate as those who work for a living, and closing tax loopholes would provide trillions of dollars to the government over the next 10 years, money that could be spent on fighting the climate emergency.
Moreover, the creation of a national Green Bank would provide funding to the private sector for climate breakdown – to homeowners who want to make the high-return investments in insulation that enables them to wage their own battle against the climate crisis, or businesses that want to retrofit their plants and headquarters for the green economy.
The mobilization efforts of the second world war transformed our society.
We went from an agricultural economy and a largely rural society to a manufacturing economy and a largely urban society.
The temporary liberation of women as they entered the labor force so the country could meet its war needs had long-term effects.
This is the advocates’ ambition, a not unrealistic one, for the Green New Deal.
There is absolutely no reason the innovative and green economy of the 21st century has to follow the economic and social models of the 20th-century manufacturing economy based on fossil fuels, just as there was no reason that that economy had to follow the economic and social models of the agrarian and rural economies of earlier centuries.

Links

• Climate Change Doomsday Report Predicts End Of Human Civilisation
• Will Climate Change Cause Humans To Go Extinct?
• Time To Flick Climate Emergency Switch: A Plea To Our New Parliament
• Climate Change: Australia's Election Has Far-Reaching Consequences
• Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Up For Four Years In A Row
• Climate Index Reveals A Summer Of Record Extremes
• Australia Keeps Voting For Coal, But Investors Are Quietly Abandoning Plans For New Mines
• Australians Could Have Saved Over $1 Billion In Fuel If Car Emissions Standards Were Introduced 3 Years Ago
• The Environmental Aftermath Of Australia's Federal Election
• Rising Seas Threaten Australia’s Major Airports – And It May Be Happening Faster Than We Think
• Australia Plans Coalfield The Size Of Britain In Climate Change U-Turn
• 'We Now Have A Clear Mandate': Coalition Holds The Line On Climate Plan
• Torres Strait Islanders Ask UN To Hold Australia To Account On Climate ‘Human Rights Abuses’
• War On Wind And Renewable Energy Must End
• Morrison Sprints To Adani Approval
• Graphic Design Could Be Holding Back Action On Climate Change – Here’s How 
• NSW Towns Including Dubbo And Tamworth Face Water Emergency Within Months
• 'We're Worried The Planet Is Dying': Thousands Of Climate Protesters Bring CBD To Standstill
• Horror 50C heatwave hits 200 million
• 2040: Hope And Action In The Climate Crisis
• Climate change is causing mass ‘die-offs’ in seabirds such as puffins
• Temperature passes 50C Celsius in northern India
• Climate change linked to childhood gastro, according to study