Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has lashed the Liberal Party’s response to dealing with climate change.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull speaks to media after delivering an address at the NSW Smart Energy Summit. Source: AAP
Malcolm Turnbull has lamented the Liberal party’s failure to act on
climate change saying it has proven 'incapable' of reducing greenhouse
gas emissions.
In an interview with The Australian, Mr Turnbull
revealed his biggest regret as prime minister was the rejection of his
national energy policy.
He said climate change scepticism from a
group of denialists had influenced his party and led to Australians
paying higher power bills and more emissions.
Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull conducts his farewell press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. AAP
“The
Liberal Party has just proved itself incapable of dealing with the
reduction of greenhouse gases in any sort of systemic way,” he said in
the interview.
“The consequence … is without question that we are paying higher prices for electricity and having higher emissions."
Malcolm
Turnbull’s own plan for a national energy policy would have provided a
framework for mixing traditional generators and renewable energy sources
but was scrapped after his ousting as prime minister last August.
However, the Morrison government insists it is on track to meet its greenhouse reduction commitments under the Paris agreement.
At
the UN General Assembly last month, Prime Minister Scott Morrison
strongly rejected criticism of his government’s action on climate
change, despite the nation’s total emissions rising year on year since
2015.
“Australia is doing our bit on climate change and we reject any suggestion to the contrary,” Mr Morrison said.
"We
are successfully balancing our global responsibilities with sensible
and practical policies to secure our environmental and economic
future."
In his interview, Mr Turnbull called for the science behind climate change to be recognised.
“Conservatives are practical,” he said.
“There
is nothing conservative, for example, [in] denying the science of
climate change. That’s not a conservative position. That is just, well,
that is just denying reality. You might as well deny gravity.”
He
said a national energy policy was needed to deal with the increasing
transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
“We
[need to] have an effective set of rules to govern our energy market and
ensure a low cost and stable transition from burning fossil fuels to
renewable energy.
“We are paying higher prices for electricity
than we should and we are having [more] emissions than we should, so it
is a lose-lose. And if you talk to anybody in the industry, the energy
sector, they will confirm what I just said to you.”
When Mr Turnbull
was ousted as Prime Minister, his national energy policy was seen as one
of a series of flash-points clashing with ‘conservative’ elements
within his party.
Why do people still think climate change isn’t real?
Even people who accept the science of climate change sometimes resist it because it clashes with their personal projects.www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-ND
At its heart, climate change denial is a conflict between facts and
values. People deny the climate crisis because, to them, it just feels
wrong.
As I’ve argued elsewhere,
acknowledging climate change involves accepting certain facts. But
being concerned about climate change involves connecting these facts to
values. It involves building bridges between the science of climate
change and peoples’ various causes, commitments and convictions. Denial
happens when climate science rubs us up the wrong way. Instead of
making us want to arrest the climate crisis, it makes us resist the very
thought of it, because the facts of anthropogenic global heating clash
with our personal projects.
It could be that the idea of climate change is a threat to our worldview. Or it could be that we fear society’s response to climate change, the disruption created by the transition to a low-emissions economy. Either way, climate change becomes such an “inconvenient truth” that, instead of living with and acting upon our worries, we suppress the truth instead. Negating reality
Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna were the great chroniclers of denial. Sigmund described this negation of reality
as an active mental process, as “a way of taking cognisance of what is
repressed”. This fleeting comprehension is what distinguishes denial
from ignorance, misunderstanding or sheer disbelief. Climate change
denial involves glimpsing the horrible reality, but defending oneself against it.
Contemporary social psychologists tend to talk about this in terms of “motivated reasoning”.
Because the facts of climate science are in conflict with people’s
existing beliefs and values, they reason around the facts.
When this happens – as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt
memorably put it – they aren’t reasoning in the careful manner of a
judge who impartially weighs up all the evidence. Instead, they’re
reasoning in the manner of a defence lawyer who clutches for post hoc
rationalisations to defend an initial gut instinct. This is why
brow-beating deniers with further climate science is unlikely to
succeed: their faculty of reason is motivated to defend itself from
revising its beliefs.
A large and growing empirical literature is exploring what drives denial. Personality is a factor: people are more likely to deny climate change if they’re inclined toward hierarchy and against changes to the status quo. Demographic factors also show an effect. Internationally,
people who are less educated, older and more religious tend to discount
climate change, with sex and income having a smaller effect.
But the strongest predictor is one’s politics. An international synthesis
of existing studies found that values, ideologies and political
allegiances overshadowed other factors. In Western societies, political
affiliation is the key factor, with conservative voters more likely to
discount climate change. Globally, a person’s commitment to democratic values – or not in the case of deniers – is more significant.
This sheds light on another side of the story. Psychology can
contribute to explaining a person’s politics, but politics cannot be
entirely explained by psychology. So too for denial.
The politics of denial
As the sociologist Stanley Cohen
noted in his classic study of denial, there is an important distinction
between denial that is personal and psychological, and denial that is
institutional and organised. The former involves people who deny the
facts to themselves, but the latter involves the denial of facts to
others, even when these “merchants of doubt” know the truth very well.
It is well established that fossil fuel companies have long known
about climate change, yet sought to frustrate wider public
understanding. A comprehensive analysis of documentations from ExxonMobil
found that, since 1977, the company has internally acknowledged climate
change through the publications of its scientists, even while it
publicly promoted doubt through paid advertorials. The fossil fuel
industry has also invested heavily in conservative foundations and think tanks that promote contrarian scientists and improbable spins on the science.
All this is rich manure for personal denial. When a person’s
motivated reasoning is on the hunt for excuses, there is an industry
ready to supply them. Social media offers further opportunities for spreading disinformation. For example, a recent analysis of anonymised YouTube searches found that videos supporting the scientific consensus on climate change were outnumbered by those that didn’t.
Undoing denial
In sum, denial is repressed knowledge. For climate change, this
repression occurs at both the psychological level and social level, with
the latter providing fodder for the former. This is a dismal scenario, but it shines some light on the way forward.
On the one hand, it reminds us that deniers are capable of
acknowledging the science – at some level, they already do – even though
they struggle to embrace the practical and ethical implications.
Consequently, climate communications may do well to appeal to more
diverse values, particularly those values held by the deniers
themselves.
Experiments have shown that, if the risks and realities of climate change are reframed
as opportunities for community relationship building and societal
development, then deniers can shift their views. Similarly, in the US
context, appealing to conservative values
like patriotism, obeying authority and defending the purity of nature
can encourage conservatives to support pro-environmental actions.
On the other hand, not all deniers will be convinced. Some downplay
and discount climate change precisely because they recognise that the
low-emissions transition will adversely impact their interests. A
bombardment of further facts and framings is unlikely to move them.
What will make a difference is the power of the people – through
regulation, divestment, consumer choice and public protest. Public
surveys emphasise that, throughout the world, deniers are in the minority. The worried majority doesn’t need to win over everyone in order to win on climate change.
For
all their many virtues, wind and solar power have one major flaw: at
some point, even in the windiest, sunniest parts of the planet the wind
stops blowing and the energy-giving rays of the sun disappear over the
horizon. So as the world works to decarbonize its energy supply by
reducing its reliance on coal, natural gas and petroleum and increasing
its use of these variable renewable sources of electricity for the grid,
one technology in particular is experiencing a renaissance: the
stationary battery.
In a nutshell,
stationary batteries are devices that use chemical interactions between
materials to store electricity at a set location for later use. These
batteries make it possible to store the electricity generated when sun and wind are at their peak so it can be made available to the grid when electricity demand is at its
peak — such as when people get home from work and turn on their lights,
air-conditioning or heating, television, and kitchen appliances.
The class of battery
most modern electronics users and electric vehicle owners are familiar
with is the lithium-ion, or Li-ion, battery. Li-ion batteries also
predominate in the stationary battery market, mainly because they’ve
been around longer and have had more time to mature as a technology,
according to Jessica Trancik, associate professor of energy studies at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Institute for
Data, Systems and Society
But just because Li-ion
batteries are commonly used in consumer electronics and EVs, that
doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best option for storing electricity in a renewable energy–dependent grid.
Today’s lithium-ion batteries have their risks, costs and limitations.
And while they might be first out of the blocks on the battery market,
they will soon face stiff competition from a variety of alternatives and
amendments that aim to match or beat their efficiency, with greater
safety and sustainability.
As the incentives increase for the development of more large-scale
electricity storage and the business case for better battery storage
technology becomes evident, there’s plenty of innovation happening.
Li-Ion 101
Li-ion batteries
consist of a graphite electrode and a lithium-based electrode — most
commonly lithium-cobalt — immersed in a liquid. When the battery is in
use, charged lithium atoms (ions) flow from the graphite electrode to
the lithium-based electrode through the liquid, and that flow of charged
particles generates electricity. When the battery is recharged the flow
is reversed, sending the lithium ions back to the graphite anode where
they are stored ready for discharge.
The Li-ion made its
first commercial appearance in 1991 in Sony camcorders. Use has since
expanded into a huge range of small and large electronic devices,
electric vehicles, military and aerospace applications, and for
large-scale energy storage, such as the 100-megawatt lithium-ion Tesla
battery built to support the energy grid of South Australia in 2017.
“In terms of the voltage it can produce, lithium is really a champion,” says Jenny Pringle, materials engineer and senior
research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Materials at Deakin
University in Melbourne. Lithium is very good at driving a strong flow
of electrons, and therefore efficient at generating electricity, so has
offered the best bang for buck of battery materials to date.
However, lithium ion
batteries have their downsides as well. They contain toxic, volatile and
flammable fluids that have earned them notoriety for bursting into
flame or exploding. And lithium is a finite resource. Demand for this
so-called ‘white petroleum’ has skyrocketed in recent years, with one forecast
predicting demand will increase from 300,000 metric tons (330,000 tons)
per year in 2019 to at least 1.1 million metric tons (1.2 million tons)
per year by 2025, and another suggesting battery production will consume 70% of global lithium supplies by 2025.
Concerns about the
mineral’s availability have led to price spikes in recent years, but
with the number of lithium mines set to double, no one is yet talking about running out of the stuff.
However there are growing concerns about the environmental cost of
lithium mining and extraction in areas such as Tibet and Bolivia, where scarce water resources are being used to harvest the mineral from vast salt flats, and there are reports of local Tibetan water sources being contaminated with toxic by-products of mining.
Not only that, but
cobalt — another essential element in many Li-ion batteries — is a
conflict mineral. At least half the world’s supply is mined in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, where some of the workers — including
children — face appalling and dangerous conditions.
Solid State
Pringle says one option
to reduce the fire risk Li-ion batteries pose is to use ionic liquids —
non-flammable molten salts with low melting points — as the liquid
component. A more attractive idea is to use a solid, which sidesteps the
problem of volatile and flammable liquids. But the trade-off is that
electrically charged atoms don’t move as freely and easily through a
solid as they do through a liquid, so less electricity is generated.
Some early contenders
in the solid-state stationary battery space include those made with a
lithium-rich ceramic as a substitute for the liquid currently being
used. But these don’t avoid the other problems with lithium, such as its
finite availability and the justice issues associated with mining.
This raises the
question of whether cheaper and more abundant elements could be used
instead of lithium. There’s particular interest in elements such as
silicon, sodium, aluminum and potassium. But the electrochemical
potential of these metals is lower than lithium, so the energy density
of the battery might be reduced, Pringle says.
Sodium-Sulfur
Sodium-sulfur
batteries, in which the electrodes are molten sodium and molten sulfur
and the electrolyte is solid, have been a promising avenue of
investigation for large-scale energy storage for the grid because they
are highly efficient at producing electricity, and are long-lasting. One
challenge is that these batteries currently need to operate at very
high temperatures. But researchers at institutions including the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Wollongong
in Australia are now investigating the possibility of sodium-sulfur
options that can operate at room temperature.
Flow Batteries
Among the frontrunners
for large-scale stationary storage of wind and solar power are flow
batteries, which consist of two tanks of liquids that feed into
electrochemical cells. The main difference between flow and conventional
batteries is that flow batteries store the electricity in the liquid
rather than in the electrodes. They’re far more stable than Li-ion, they
have longer lifespans, and the liquids are less flammable. Not only
that, but a flow battery can be scaled up by simply building bigger
tanks for the liquids.
One type of flow
battery, known as the vanadium flow battery, is already available
commercially. A grid-scale 50 megawatt vanadium flow battery is planned for energy storage in the South Australian town of Port Augusta, and China is building the world’s largest vanadium flow battery,
expected to come online in 2020. There are two main downsides: the
liquids can be costly, so there’s a greater up-front cost for the
batteries, and flow batteries aren’t quite as efficient as Li-ion
batteries.
Plenty of Innovation
There are plenty of
other developments happening in this space, making it an exciting time
for battery research and development, Trancik says.
For example, researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne are developing a proton battery
that works by turning water into oxygen and hydrogen, then using the
hydrogen to power a fuel cell. Several other research teams around the
world are exploring completely lithium-free ion batteries using
materials such as graphite and potassium for the electrodes and aluminum salt liquids to carry the charged ions. Researchers in China are looking at improving the existing technology of nickel-zinc
batteries, which are cost effective, safe, nontoxic and
environment-friendly but don’t last as long as Li-ion. There is even
work going on related to saltwater-based batteries, with one design already being used for residential solar storage.
“Now we see a lot more
incentive, we see falling costs for lithium-ion batteries, we see the
stationary energy storage market benefiting from growth of electric
vehicles,” Trancik says. “It’s definitely still early days, particularly
for stationary energy storage, but it’s a really important area and I
think people are starting to realize that.”
