Lethal Heating: 09/23/20

23/09/2020

(AU) Taylor Favours Fossil Fuels And Farmers As Roadmap Picks Five Technology Winners

RenewEconomy - Michael Mazengarb

The Morrison government has picked five technologies that will receive prioritised support under its Technology Roadmap launched on Tuesday, a plan which includes no new emissions reduction targets but which it supposed to form the basis of its climate and energy policy.

Federal energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor launched the Technology Roadmap during a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday, with the focus firmly on technologies that favour fossil fuels, farmers and big energy users such as steel and aluminium users.

The Technology Roadmap is the latest energy policy from the Coalition, which has gone through more than 20 iterations during seven years of government, and continues its trend of preferring to direct taxpayer funding into preferred technologies, rather than policies that place a price on emissions.

“Let’s be clear – there are only two ways to reduce emissions,” Taylor said in a speech to the National Press Club on Tuesday.

“You either suppress emissions intensive economic activities – usually through some version of taxation – or you improve them. There is no third way. Australia can’t and shouldn’t damage its economy to reduce emissions.”

Taylor said that the government will focus on five priority technologies that will receive targeted government investment, being “clean” hydrogen, energy storage, low carbon steel and aluminium, carbon capture and storage, and soil carbon.

The government’s list of technologies under the Technology Roadmap, obtained by RenewEconomy. LARGE IMAGE

The focus on “clean hydrogen”, rather than specifically renewable hydrogen, and the renewed embrace of CCS are of particular concern as they will likely favour legacy fossil technologies. Other technologies such as electric vehicles and batteries are now second order priorities, will wind and solar are lumped with coal and gas as “mature technologies” that will receive no further support.

“Priority technologies are those expected to have transformational impacts here and globally and are not yet mature,” Taylor told the National Press Club.

“They are priorities where Government investments can make a difference in reducing costs and improving technology readiness.”

“Technologies where we, as a Government, will not only prioritise our investments but where we will streamline regulation and legislation to encourage investment,” Taylor said.

Under the Technology Roadmap, the Morrison government will monitor a number of emerging technologies, including small modular nuclear reactors, which may also receive government support pending future developments overseas.

Taylor said that the Technology Roadmap would be used to guide up to $18 billion in investment, but it is unclear how much of this – if any – is new funding, and how much will actually be able to be deployed by the main agency, the Clean Energy Finance Corp.

“The roadmap will guide the deployment of the $18 billion that will be invested, including through the CEFC, ARENA, the Climate Solutions Fund and the CER,” Taylor said.

“This will turn that into at least $50 billion through the private sector, state governments, research institutions and other publicly funded bodies. That will drive around 130 000 jobs to 2030.”

CEFC already manages $10 billion in funds, along with an additional $1 billion set to be allocated under the Grid Reliability Fund, ARENA already manages a $2 billion in grant funding, with an additional $1.9 billion set to be given to the agency and the Clean Energy Regulator already manages the $2 billion Climate Solutions Fund.

Taylor said that the government expects the plan to “support” 130,000 jobs by 2030 and to “avoid” 250 million tonnes of emissions per year by 2040, but it is also unclear how these figures have been calculated.

The government has set itself a series of four ‘stretch goals’, which do not include an emissions reduction target, but set goals for reducing the cost of the government’s ‘priority technologies’.

These stretch goals include achieving long-term (at least eight to ten hours) energy storage at an equivalent cost of less than $100 per MWh, carbon dioxide storage at less than $20 per tonne, low emissions steel below $900 per tonne and aluminium below $2,700 per tonne and the ability to measure soil carbon content at below $3 per hectare per year.

With no additional emissions reduction targets specified under the roadmap, the government appears set to present the roadmap, and a series of future ‘Low Emissions Technology Statements’, as its future action pledge in international climate talks.

Taylor suggested that the government would wind back support for investments in wind and solar projects, lumping them together with coal and gas, but would consider intervening in the market when there are market failures.

“There is no doubt that existing, proven technologies like coal, gas, solar and wind will play important roles in Australia’s energy future,” Taylor told the Press Club.

“The Government will continue to invest in mature technologies where there is a clear market failure, like a shortage of dispatchable generation.”

Prime minister Scott Morrison has already indicated that he may use government-owned Snowy Hydro to build a new gas generator in the Hunter Region, a market intervention that ha not been received well by the rest of the energy market.

Labor’s shadow minister for climate change and energy, Mark Butler, said that the technology roadmap lacked the policies needed to actually drive investment and the guide Australia’s energy transition.

“This is typical Scott Morrison – another plan to have a plan but no actual policy,” Butler said. “No policy to help reduce power prices. No policy to give investors the confidence to build new generation and ensure reliable energy.”

“This technology roadmap is useful as far as it goes but there is no shortage of reports lining government bookcases about energy technology, all of which confirm that the cheapest and the cleanest way to renew our ageing, increasingly unreliable electricity system is renewable energy and storage.”

“What Australia has desperately needed is a genuine energy policy to drive investment in affordable, reliable, clean power.”

Taylor said that the government will establish an ongoing advisory council, the Technology Investment Advisory Council, to advise in the development of the ‘Low Emissions Technology Statements’, which will be chaired by chief scientist Dr Alan Finkel.

Membership of the council will include the heads of the CEFC, ARENA and the Clean Energy Regulator, along with those that advised on the creation of the technology roadmap.

This group includes former Origin Energy CEO Grant King, CEO of Australian Gas Infrastructure Group Ben Wilson, the group managing director of Coca-Cola Amatil Alison Watkins and CEO of Macquarie Group Shemara Wikramanayake.

The advisory group will not include any representatives of the clean energy sector, outside those appointed by the government to head the three government agencies.

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The Tipping Points At The Heart Of The Climate Crisis

The Guardian - Michael Marshall

Many parts of the Earth’s climate system have been destabilised by warming, from ice sheets and ocean currents to the Amazon rainforest – and scientists believe that if one collapses others could follow

The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, where ice is now melting on a massive scale. Photograph: Nasa/OIB/Jeremy Harbeck/EPA

The warning signs are flashing red. The California wildfires were surely made worse by the impacts of global heating. A study published in July warned that the Arctic is undergoing “an abrupt climate change event” that will probably lead to dramatic changes.

As if to underline the point, on 14 September it was reported that a huge ice shelf in northeast Greenland had torn itself apart, worn away by warm waters lapping in from beneath.

That same day, a study of satellite data revealed growing cracks and crevasses in the ice shelves protecting two of Antarctica’s largest glaciers – indicating that those shelves could also break apart, leaving the glaciers exposed and liable to melt, contributing to sea-level rise. The ice losses are already following our worst-case scenarios.

These developments show that the harmful impacts of global heating are mounting, and should be a prompt to urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But the case for emissions cuts is actually even stronger.

That is because scientists are increasingly concerned that the global climate might lurch from its current state into something wholly new – which humans have no experience dealing with. Many parts of the Earth system are unstable. Once one falls, it could trigger a cascade like falling dominoes.

Tipping points

We have known for years that many parts of the climate have so-called tipping points. That means a gentle push, like a slow and steady warming, can cause them to change in a big way that is wholly disproportionate to the trigger. If we hit one of these tipping points, we may not have any practical way to stop the unfolding consequences.

The Greenland ice sheet is one example of a tipping point. It contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by seven metres, if it were all to melt. And it is prone to runaway melting.

This is because the top surface of the ice sheet is gradually getting lower as more of the ice melts, says Ricarda Winkelmann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. The result is familiar to anyone who has walked in mountains.

“If we climb down the mountain, the temperature around us warms up,” she says. As the ice sheet gets lower, the temperatures at the surface get higher, leading to even more melting. “That’s one of these self-reinforcing or accelerating feedbacks.”

We don’t know exactly how much warming would cause Greenland to pass its tipping point and begin melting unstoppably. One study estimated that it would take just 1.6C of warming – and we have already warmed the planet 1.1C since the late 19th century.

The collapse would take centuries, which is some comfort, but such collapses are difficult to turn off. Perhaps we could swiftly cool the planet to below the 1.6C threshold, but that would not suffice, as Greenland would be melting uncontrollably. Instead, says Winkelmann, we would have to cool things down much more – it’s not clear by how much.

Tipping points that behave like this are sometimes described as “irreversible”, which is confusing; in reality they can be reversed, but it takes a much bigger push than the one that set them off in the first place.

Satellite images of the disintegration of the Spalte glacier in northeast Greenland between 2013 and 2020. Photograph: EU Copernicus and Geus/Reuters LARGE IMAGE

In 2008, researchers led by Timothy Lenton, now at the University of Exeter, catalogued the climate’s main “tipping elements”. As well as the Greenland ice sheet, the Antarctic ice sheet is also prone to unstoppable collapse – as is the Amazon rainforest, which could die back and be replaced with grasslands.

A particularly important tipping element is the vast ocean current known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which carries warm equatorial water north to the Arctic, and cool Arctic water south to the equator. The AMOC has collapsed in the past and many scientists fear it is close to collapsing again – an event that was depicted (in ridiculously exaggerated and accelerated form) in the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow.

If the AMOC collapses, it will transform weather patterns around the globe – leading to cooler climates in Europe, or at least less warming, and changing where and when monsoon rains fall in the tropics. For the UK, this could mean the end of most arable farming, according to a paper Lenton and others published in January.

Tumbling dominoes

In 2009, a second study took the idea further. What if the tipping elements are interconnected? That would mean that setting off one might set off another – or even unleash a cascade of dramatic changes, spreading around the globe and reshaping the world we live in.

For instance, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is releasing huge volumes of cold, fresh water into the north Atlantic. This weakens the AMOC – so it is distinctly possible that if Greenland passes its tipping point, the resulting melt will push the AMOC past its own threshold.

“It’s the same exact principles that we know happen at smaller scales,” says Katharine Suding of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied similar shifts in ecosystems. The key point is that processes exist that can amplify a small initial change. This can be true on the scale of a single meadow or the whole planet.

However, the tipping point cascade is very difficult to simulate. In many cases the feedbacks go both ways – and sometimes one tipping point can make it less likely that another will be triggered, not more. For example, the AMOC brings warm water from equator up into the north Atlantic, contributing to the melting of Greenland.

So if the AMOC were to collapse, that northward flow of warm water would cease – and Greenland’s ice would be less likely to start collapsing. Depending whether Greenland or the AMOC hit its tipping point first, the resulting cascade would be very different.

What’s more, dozens of such linkages are now known, and some of them span huge distances. “Melting the ice sheet on one pole raises sea level,” says Lenton, and the rise is greatest at the opposite pole. “Say you’re melting Greenland and you raise the sea level under the ice shelves of Antarctica,” he says. That would send ever more warm water lapping around Antarctica. “You’re going to weaken those ice shelves.”

“Even if the distance is quite far, a larger domino might still be able to cause the next one to tip over,” says Winkelmann.

In 2018, Juan Rocha of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden and his colleagues mapped out all the known links between tipping points. However, Rocha says the strengths of the interconnections are still largely unknown.

This, combined with the sheer number of them, and the interactions between the climate and the biosphere, means predicting the Earth’s overall response to our greenhouse gas emissions is very tricky.

Into the hothouse

The most worrying possibility is that setting off one tipping point could unleash several of the others, pushing Earth’s climate into a new state that it has not experienced for millions of years.

Since before humans existed, Earth has had an “icehouse” climate, meaning there is permanent ice at both poles. But millions of years ago, the climate was in a “hothouse” state: there was no permanent polar ice, and the planet was many degrees warmer.

‘Hothouse’ conditions will make fires such as this one in the San Gabriel mountains above Azusa, California, in August more frequent. Photograph: Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images

If it has happened before, could it happen again? In 2018, researchers including Lenton and Winkelmann explored the question in a much-discussed study.

“The Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions – Hothouse Earth,” they wrote. The danger threshold might be only decades away at current rates of warming.

Lenton says the jury is still out on whether this global threshold exists, let alone how close it is, but that it is not something that should be dismissed out of hand.

“For me, the strongest evidence base at the moment is for the idea that we could be committing to a ‘wethouse’, rather than a hothouse,” says Lenton. “We could see a cascade of ice sheet collapses.”

This would lead to “a world that has no substantive ice in the northern hemisphere and a lot less over Antarctica, and the sea level is 10 to 20 metres higher”.

Such a rise would be enough to swamp many coastal megacities, unless they were protected. The destruction of both the polar ice sheets would be mediated by the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, which would also weaken the Indian monsoon and disrupt the west African one.

Winkelmann’s team studied a similar scenario in a study published online in April, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.

They simulated the interactions between the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets, the AMOC, the Amazon rainforest and another major weather system called the El Niño southern oscillation. They found that the two ice sheets were the most likely to trigger cascades, and the AMOC then transmitted their effects around the globe.

What to do?

Everyone who studies tipping point cascades agrees on two key points. The first is that it is crucial not to become disheartened by the magnitude of the risks; it is still possible to avoid knocking over the dominoes. Second, we should not wait for precise knowledge of exactly where the tipping points lie – which has proved difficult to determine, and might not come until it’s too late.

Rocha compares it to smoking. “Smoking causes cancer,” he says, “but it’s very difficult for a doctor to nail down how many cigarettes you need to smoke to get cancer.”

Some people are more susceptible than others, based on a range of factors from genetics to the level of air pollution where they live. But this does not mean it is a good idea to play chicken with your lungs by continuing to smoke.

“Don’t smoke long-term, because you might be committing to something you don’t want to,” says Rocha. The same logic applies to the climate dominoes. “If it happens, it’s going to be really costly and hard to recover, therefore we should not disturb those thresholds.”

“I think a precautionary principle probably is the best step forward for us, especially when we’re dealing with a system that we know has a lot of feedbacks and interconnections,” agrees Suding.

“These are huge risks we’re playing with, in their potential impacts,” says Lenton. “This is yet another compulsion to get ourselves weaned off fossil fuels as fast as possible and on to clean energy, and sort out some other sources of greenhouse gases like diets and land use,” says Lenton. He emphasises that the tipping points for the two great ice sheets may well lie between 1C and 2C of warming.

“We actually do need the Paris climate accord,” says Winkelmann. The 2016 agreement committed most countries to limit warming to 1.5 to 2C, although the US president, Donald Trump, has since chosen to pull the US out of it.

Winkelmann argues that 1.5C is the right target, because it takes into account the existence of the tipping points and gives the best chance of avoiding them. “For some of these tipping elements,” she says, “we’re already in that danger zone.”

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is not a surprising or original solution. But it is our best chance to stop the warning signs flashing red.

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(AU) Australia’s New National Preventive Health Strategy Must Include Climate Change, 30 Health Groups Say

NEWS.com.au - Charis Chang

A huge group of experts are going public with dire concerns the Federal Government is ignoring the biggest threat to Australians’ health.

Climate change must be acknowledged as a significant health risk in Australia, experts say. Source: News Regional Media

A new strategy aimed at improving the health of Australians must include the impacts of climate change, according to 30 prominent health groups.

Experts say the impact of climate change is being ignored despite predictions that it will lead to 85 deaths per 100,000 people globally per year by the end of the century – more than are currently killed by all infectious diseases across the world.

Climate and Health Alliance Executive Director Fiona Armstrong said climate change would see thousands more Australians suffer from infectious and cardiovascular diseases, respiratory illness, heat stress, mental illness, violence, food insecurity, poor water quality and poorer nutrition.

“If the government chooses to ignore the health impacts of climate change, they are refusing to prevent that,” she said.

The Federal Government is currently developing the National Preventive Health Strategy to identify areas of focus for the next 10 years that will improve the health of Australians and to address the complex causes of things like obesity, reducing tobacco use, or improving mental health.

It aims to looks at factors such as access to green space, nutritious food supply, sanitation, supportive community networks and how cultural influences can contribute to better outcomes.

But health groups, including three groups that are part of the expert steering committee advising the government on the strategy, have released a joint statement today criticising the failure of the consultation paper to mention climate change, or include it as part of its six focus areas.

The Public Health Association of Australia, Consumers Health Forum of Australia and the Australian College of Nursing are all now going public with their concerns.

“As with unhealthy food, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, and alcohol, it is critical that the role of vested interests in relation to climate change is identified as undermining efforts to prevent illness and promote health and wellbeing,” the statement says.

It notes that climate change can impact impact people’s health in many ways.

This includes the impacts of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods and bushfires, which pose a direct threat to people’s lives.

Images of the Sydney Opera House shrouded by smoke haze from bushfires over last summer went around the world. Picture: Steven Saphore/AAP

But there are also other indirect impacts. Worsening air quality from smoke can create health risks, and there can also be impacts due to changes in temperature, risks to food safety and drinking water quality, and effects on mental health.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has estimated 250,000 extra deaths a year are expected to be caused by climate change between 2030 and 2050.

This includes 38,000 extra deaths from heat stress as well as deaths from diarrhoea, malaria and malnutrition.

Elderly people in particular are susceptible to high temperatures, which can cause deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory disease.

Floods can contaminate freshwater supplies, heighten the risk of waterborne diseases, and create breeding grounds for disease-carrying insects such as mosquitoes. They can also disrupt the delivery of medical and health services.

Ms Armstrong said climate change was the biggest threat to health this century.

“The National Preventive Health Strategy must tackle climate change to protect and promote health. If we don’t, everything else risks being done for nought,” she said.

Other groups that have signed the statement include Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF), Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association (AHHA) and the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW).

The elderly are particularly susceptible to high temperatures. Source: Supplied

“A National Preventive Health Strategy that is fit for purpose in the 21st century must address climate change – or it will fail in its objectives,” the statement says.

“Preventing deaths, illnesses and injuries associated with climate change requires leadership from governments to tackle the root causes of climate change, support the health sector and the health professions to build climate resilience, and ensure the community is well informed and capable of taking health protective actions.”

A University of Melbourne study released this month found the annual economic damage of climate change in Australia, could be similar to the annual cost of the coronavirus pandemic by 2038.

Climate change is estimated to cost the Australian economy at least $1.89 trillion over the next 30 years if current emissions policies are maintained.

Health Minister Greg Hunt announced in June 2019 the government would develop the 10-year strategy and it is due to be completed by March 2021.

The consultation paper will set out what the strategy will aim to achieve and how it could be done. Rather than focusing on specific diseases, the strategy will focus on system wide, evidence-based approaches to reducing poor health.

The strategy’s consultation paper is open for feedback until September 28.

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