04/05/2020

(AU) Want An Economic Tonic, Mr Morrison? Use That Stimulus Money To Turbocharge Renewables

The Conversation -  |  |  | 

Chris Fithall/Flickr


  • Elizabeth Thurbon, Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor in International Relations / International Political Economy, UNSW
  • , Associate professor, University of Newcastle
  • , Professor Emeritus, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University
  • , Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics & International Relations, Macquarie University
The chaos of COVID-19 has now hit global energy markets, creating an outcome unheard of in industrial history: negative oil prices.

With the world’s largest economies largely in lockdown, demand for oil has stagnated.

Essentially, the negative prices mean oil producers are willing to pay for the oil to be taken off their hands because soon, they will have nowhere to store it.

Federal energy minister Angus Taylor has proposed a partial solution: Australia will spend A$94 million buying up oil, to bolster domestic supplies and help stabilise global prices.

That strategy is a fool’s path to energy security.

Right now, the best way to shore up Australia’s future energy supplies is to invest economic stimulus money in renewables – essentially to manufacture our own energy security.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison with Angus Taylor, right, who wants Australia to buy surplus oil. Mick Tsikas/AAP


A flawed plan

Australia’s oil reserves have for years languished well below the International Energy Agency’s recommended 90 days. Taylor says his plan would address this, and help stabilise (read: push up) oil prices and restore faith in the global oil market on which Australia depends.

But the plan is undermined by a simple fact: unstable global oil prices have been a recurring problem for decades, largely for political reasons well beyond Australia’s control. We need look only to the price shocks triggered by the Yom-Kippur war of 1973, the Iraq war of 2003, and the Saudi drone attack of 2019 - to name just a few.

Price instability is all but guaranteed to increase in future, as climate change concerns drive insurers and investors away from fossil fuels and towards green energy.

The current chaos actually creates a much better opportunity for Australia: use the massive COVID-19 economic stimulus to manufacture real energy security in the form of renewables.

Buying large volumes of surplus oil will not ensure stable prices. Flickr


Renewables: a win-win

The price and supply of energy from fossil fuels is vulnerable to natural resource depletion, geopolitical tensions and climate change concerns. This is true not just for oil, but coal and gas too.

The only real path to energy security is manufactured energy such as solar panels, wind turbines, electrolysers, batteries and smart grids.

These technologies can turn infinite natural resources into energy, then store and distribute it to ensure stable supply.

Victoria and South Australia now enjoy higher levels of energy security thanks to large-scale stationary batteries that even out electricity peaks and troughs.

For example, a large-scale battery in Victoria stores energy produced by the Gannawarra solar farm. The battery provides energy during peak times when there is no sun.

Manufacturing energy is also important from an economic security perspective, promoting the creation of high-tech, high-wage industries.

These industries can create thousands of skilled jobs and open up massive new export markets – all while helping to mitigate climate change. This reality has been accepted by major East Asian economies, including China to South Korea, for more than a decade.

The Australian government must use its enormous stimulus to help local companies dramatically expand their wind, solar, hydrogen and energy storage investments. This would satisfy domestic energy needs and grow the new green export markets ready and waiting in Asia.

Asia presents huge export potential for Australia’s renewable energy. DAN HIMBRECHTS/AAP



A jobs boon

There is no shortage of projects waiting to be turbocharged. The government could start with Sun Cable, linking Australia’s and Singapore’s clean energy markets via an undersea cable.

It could also kickstart Australia’s clean hydrogen industry. According to the government’s own National Hydrogen Strategy, developing hydrogen would dramatically reduce Australia’s oil import reliance and energy costs and vastly expand its clean energy exports.

By simply following its own strategy, the government could create about 7,600 skilled and semi-skilled jobs and add about A$11 billion each year to Australia’s gross domestic product to 2050.

The cheaper energy prices that follow could help Australia revive its techno-industrial base by making energy-intensive manufacturing a viable proposition once again.

According to leading economist Ross Garnaut, Australia could then bring home its long-lost materials-processing industries and re-emerge as a world-leading exporter of (clean) steel and aluminium.

Geopolitical benefits would also flow from Australia becoming a green hydrogen superpower, such as reducing our worrying export dependence on China.

An investment injection in renewables would be a huge jobs boost. Flickr


Seize the moment

The idea of using the COVID-19 stimulus to turbocharge Australia’s clean energy shift is not pie in the sky. Indeed, doing so is the explicit recommendation of the International Energy Agency, which this week noted:
These huge spending programmes are likely to be once-in-a-generation in scale and will shape countries’ infrastructure for decades to come… Governments can … achieve both short-term economic gains and long-term benefits by making clean energy part of their stimulus plans.
COVID-19 has undoubtedly been disastrous for Australia and the world. But it creates new opportunities in energy, economic security and climate action. To seize these opportunities, the Morrison government must chart a new industrial course for the nation by manufacturing Australia’s energy security.

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'This Pandemic Is Nothing Compared To What Climate Change Has In Store'

TheJournal.ie - John Gibbons

John Gibbons lays out the stark climate facts and urges us to take coronavirus as a warning that it’s now time to act, or perish.

Protesters in Paris waiting for the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Source: Apaydin Alain

John Gibbons is an environmental writer and commentator who specialises in covering the climate and biodiversity emergency.
He is a contributor to The Irish Times, The Guardian and DeSmog.uk and is a regular guest environmental commentator on broadcast media.
He blogs at Thinkorswim.ie and also runs the website Climatechange.ie.
IMAGINE FOR A moment that our government and others around the world had been given detailed information and warnings about the coronavirus years, even decades before it finally erupted.

Imagine also that experts had shown the path to minimising or even avoiding this global disaster, but our political and business leaders, uneasy about the costs of taking action and possible disruption to commerce, chose to ignore the expert warnings as alarmist and carried on regardless.

In reality, full-blown pandemics are vanishingly rare. Almost no human is alive today who lived in the time of the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1918-19.

In the modern era, our collective cultural experience is that of taming, rather than being at the mercy of, nature in general and deadly diseases in particular. Consider smallpox: during the 20th century, it killed an estimated 300 million people worldwide. A global vaccination campaign eventually led to its eradication in 1980. Likewise, polio, another dreaded disease, has been almost completely vanquished by vaccination.

The damage done

Until very recently, premature death had been the norm for most humans. However, in the last five decades, largely freed from the threat of predators, large and small, our numbers on this earth have more than doubled, to over 7.8 billion, while average life expectancy in the same period has increased by well over a decade per person.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this unprecedented global expansion of the human footprint has brought the biosphere, our living planet, to the brink of collapse. There are many ways of measuring this, such as the precipitous decline in biodiversity, the average annual loss of 15 billion trees, many of them from razed ancient rainforests.

A major report on biodiversity and ecosystems published last May found that the natural world is declining globally ‘at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely’.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report concluded that around one million animal and plant species now face extinction in the coming decades. ‘The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed…this loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being’, the IPBES report warned.

The unavoidable warming

We face an equally daunting and arguably more intractable challenge from climate change. In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report on the likely impacts of global warming at and beyond 1.5ºC over pre-industrial temperatures.
Arising from this landmark report, it emerged that in order to keep global temperatures within relatively safe limits, carbon emissions would have to fall by at least 45% by 2030, which is just ten years from now.
This is in line with commitments made by almost all the world’s leaders, including Ireland, when we signed up for the 2015 Paris Agreement, which legally committed us to doing everything possible to avoid extremely dangerous climate change at 2ºC and beyond.

This commitment was underlined in January 2020 by the all-party Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action when it agreed a minimum targeted emissions reduction of 7%+ per annum and this, in turn, has become the Green Party’s key precondition for entering into a coalition government.

virus-outbreak-germany-fridays-for-future
Activists of the fridays for future movement placed a poster at a tree in Erfurt, Germany, April 24, 2020. Source: Jens Meyer

According to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the economic impact of the coronavirus is likely to see global carbon emissions fall by some 6% in 2020.
We need to flatten both the pandemic and climate change curves; we need to show the same determination and unity against climate change as against Covid-19”, according to WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. Action, he added, would be needed “for many generations ahead".
What this underlines is that to achieve a compound 7% annual emissions cut every year from now until 2030 would require the most radical rethink of how we organise our society and economy since the foundation of the state.

Can you see it happening?

Many are deeply sceptical. Former ‘Climate Action’ minister, Denis Naughten dismissed the 7% target as ‘unachievable’, claiming it would equate to banning every private car and slaughtering every (farm) animal in the country.

Naughten is at least being consistent. Back in 2017, he threatened to block implementation of the Paris Agreement at the EU level, claiming it was ‘unaffordable’ for Ireland to implement.

Since 2011, a succession of Fine Gael-led governments has stymied meaningful climate action. As a result, Ireland has now the third-highest per capita emissions in the EU, with the average Irish citizen accounting for more than double the emissions of their high-income Swedish counterparts.

As Sweden shows, ultra-low carbon solutions in transport, energy, home heating, agriculture and industry are indeed possible, but in Ireland, these have been held back by vested interest groups pursuing short-term agendas and TDs engaged in parish pump politics.

climate-change-protest-in-london-uk-14-feb-2020
A young environmentalists holds a placard during the protest at Parliament Square in London. Source: SIPA USA/PA Images

Even Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has had to concede he was “not proud of Ireland’s performance on climate…as far as I am concerned, we are a laggard”.

At what cost?

Apart from constant lobbying by commercial and agri-industrial groups, another reason politicians have run scared of climate action is that the issue is consistently framed in the Irish media in terms of the cost of tackling climate change. However, international studies have shown repeatedly that the price of inaction far outweighs the costs of addressing the crisis.

It is estimated that the cost of the coronavirus to the global economy is in the range of $2–$4 trillion this year. A 2018 report calculated that failure to rein in climate change would deliver a devastating $34 trillion hit to the global economy – many times greater than the economic chaos arising from the pandemic.

Other estimates are even less sanguine. An Australian study published in 2019 argues that ‘climate change represents a near to mid-term existential threat to human civilisation’.
Should global temperatures reach 3C over pre-industrial by mid-century, ‘the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end’, the report warns.
So, the next time someone asks if we can ‘afford’ to tackle climate change, a better question might instead be: what price isn’t worth paying to avoid the collapse of civilisation?

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How Modelling Articulates The Science Of Climate Change

The Economist




TO IMAGINE EARTH without greenhouse gases in its atmosphere is to turn the familiar blue marble into a barren lump of rock and ice on which the average surface temperature hovers around -18ºC.

Such a planet would not receive less of the sunlight which is the ultimate source of all Earth’s warmth. But when the energy it absorbed from the sunlight was re-emitted as infrared radiation, as the laws of physics require, it would head unimpeded back out into space.

Greenhouse gases block that swift exit. Transparent to incoming sunlight, they absorb outgoing infrared radiation, thus warming the atmosphere and, in so doing, the surface below. The result is an average surface temperature of some 15ºC—warm enough for open seas and oceans and a vibrant biosphere.

In the late 19th century the discovery of the ice ages led scientists to the conclusion that climate could change on a global scale. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, wondered if a weakened greenhouse effect might be to blame. Carbon dioxide was known to be a greenhouse gas: Eunice Foote, an American scientist, had found in the 1850s that the rate at which a sealed jar of air warmed up in sunlight depended on the level of carbon dioxide in that air. So Arrhenius—recently divorced, somewhat melancholy and in need of a project—began laboriously to calculate the effects on the climate of halving the atmosphere’s level of carbon dioxide.

Doing so required him to tackle a problem of the sort that most frustrates and most delights scientists who study the Earth system: a feedback loop through which a change in one factor affects another factor which, in turn, affects the first factor more.

Because water evaporates more slowly in cooler climes, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere falls with the temperature. And water vapour, like carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas. Cooling the atmosphere dried the atmosphere which cooled the atmosphere further. Many pencils and thousands of sheets of paper into his exploration of this, Arrhenius concluded that halving the carbon-dioxide level would cool the planet by 5ºC (9ºF).

He also noted that the same relation would hold the other way round: double the carbon dioxide and you would get 5ºC of warming. Industry’s coal burning could thus warm the world—but only, he thought, very slowly indeed. He never imagined that the carbon-dioxide level would increase by a third in just a century.

Around the same time as Arrhenius was pondering the climate, a Norwegian scientist called Vilhelm Bjerknes was working on the physics of how heat drives fluid flow. His students applied these insights to large scale flows in the atmosphere and the oceans, laying the foundations of 20th-century weather forecasting. In 1950 one of those students’ students, Ragnar Fjørtoft, was part of the team which first programmed a computer to forecast the weather by solving such equations.

The computer models central to today’s climate research bring together Arrhenius’s curiosity and Bjerknes’s techniques. Programmes developed from weather-forecasting software calculate how the level of carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases is likely to affect the world’s flows of heat, energy and water, and through them the future climate. To do so they use computers that can be some 25trn times faster than the one used in 1950.

These climate models do not treat the atmosphere as a whole. They divide it into millions of “cells”. The conditions in each of these cells depend on the conditions in its neighbours above, below and to the sides as well as on its own history. The idea is to calculate how conditions in each cell change over time.

Unlike a weather forecast, which tries to predict how a specific state of the atmosphere will evolve over a few days, these climate models simulate years, even centuries, of weather in order to discover the averages and probability distributions that define the climate—the envelope which constrains the norms and extremes of future weather.

Dozens of teams at meteorological and research organisations around the world run such models, each using different code to capture the climate’s underlying mechanisms and study everything from future peak rainfall to the tracks of storms to shifts in seasonality. Since 1995 the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP, has brought these teams together by providing standardised tasks for their models and then looking at the range of results.

Thus, for example, the 56 different models considered in the fifth of the CMIP projects, which concluded in 2013, found that doubling the carbon-dioxide level would, in time, bring about a warming of between 1.5ºC and 4.5ºC. The uncertainty in what the models suggest at smaller scales is greater still. Different models can provide very different pictures of the future of regional climates.

Rows and floes of angel hair

The wide range of outcomes is, for the most part, down to the fact that no two models represent the mechanisms of the climate—and particularly its feedbacks—in precisely the same way. Some ways of doing things can be ruled out because the models they produce fail to capture the behaviour of the climate as it is, or as it was in the past (studies of the low-carbon-dioxide ice ages provide useful calibration, which would have pleased Arrhenius).

But among models which reproduce past and current climates reasonably well, there is no clear way to say which one’s representations are most reliable. The differences between the models represent a basic level of uncertainty, given the current state of knowledge.

This endemic uncertainty, though, does not mean the models have nothing useful to say. Given how long modelling has been going on, it is now possible to compare predictions made decades ago with the way things have turned out.

A study published last year systematically assessed what models published between the 1970s and 2007 had said about the way the climate would respond to steady rises in carbon dioxide. It found that for 14 out of 17 models what had happened had been within the model’s error bars; of the other three, two had overshot, one had undershot. Taking the models seriously would have been a good bet.

The most important source of uncertainty in the models lies in the clouds. As greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere its humidity changes, as does the extent to which it cools with altitude. These changes affect how clouds develop; the clouds, in turn, change surface temperature. Most clouds warm the world; some cool it.

The problem is that the processes which control a cloud’s thickness, lifetime and other qualities work on pretty small scales. The models do not. Even if every layer of the atmosphere is represented by hundreds of thousands of grid cells, they still end up being hundreds of kilometres on a side—much too large to capture the processes responsible for individual clouds.

Not all the feedbacks sit squarely within the atmosphere; some extend beneath it. Various feedbacks link the atmosphere to the oceans, which store, move and release heat in ways that do a great deal to shape the climate. In the 1960s modellers began trying to capture these effects by “coupling” models of the ocean to models of the atmosphere, so that what they saw in the atmosphere reflected changes in the oceans and vice versa.

Feedbacks involving the land matter, too. Cold weather brings snow; snowy ground, especially under clear skies, reflects away more sunlight, cooling things further. Biology adds yet more complexity. A tropical forest pumps water vapour into the atmosphere with far greater efficiency than a savannah does.

In warmer oceans it is harder for nutrients to rise to the surface, which reduces the ability of plankton to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Melting permafrost produces copious microbial methane—a gas which absorbs infrared much more strongly than carbon dioxide does. Over the decades modellers have attempted to build more and more of these interrelationships into their models, adding greatly to their complexity.

Unfortunately increasing complexity does not always reduce uncertainty. A model which ignores, say, the instability of ice sheets—as most did until recently—is clearly missing something important. However, because there are always different ways to incorporate something new, two models updated to capture ice-sheet dynamics may diverge more after this “improvement” than they did when, unrealistically, they simply ignored the issue. In the CMIP6 process, which is currently winding up, preliminary results show a wider range of uncertainties than was seen in CMIP5.

The biggest source of uncertainty, though, lies not inside the models but outside them. Climate change is a problem because human activity is adding carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere at a rate that is both prodigious and impossible for the physics, chemistry and biology encoded in the models to predict.

To estimate how changes in policy might affect emissions a different family of models is used—“integrated assessment models” (IAMs) which import simplified results from climate models into models of the economy.

One of the things that CMIP5 asked climate modellers to look at is the way that the climate might evolve if emissions followed four standardised “pathways” developed from four particular IAMs in the 2000s. Three were generated from IAMs trying to simulate various types of climate policy. The fourth, RCP8.5, though often referred to as “business as usual”, was generated from an IAM run featuring high population growth, low technological progress and very large scale use of coal. As a result it shows emissions increasing at a spectacular rate, which makes it scary, but not a helpful baseline.

LARGE IMAGE

The uncertainties in what the models predicted was as striking as ever (see chart). But they all agreed that only the pathway embodying the strongest climate action—much stronger than what is seen and promised today—might allow the world to keep the temperature rise since the 18th century well below 2ºC in the 21st, the target enshrined in the Paris agreement of 2015.

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