(UK) How Grassroots Schemes Across UK Are Tackling Climate Crisis

The Guardian - Matthew Taylor

Thinktank calls for more support for local initiatives ranging from heating to flood schemes

Ambition Lawrence Weston’s solar farm. Photograph: Bristol Energy Cooperative/Youtube

Communities across the UK are tackling the climate crisis with hundreds of local schemes ranging from neighbourhood heating to food co-ops, community land ownership projects and flood defences, according to a report.

A study from the IPPR thinktank found that community projects, often set up with the primary aim of reducing poverty and improving people’s day-to-day lives, were also reducing emissions and restoring nature.

Luke Murphy, the lead author of the report, said: “Under the radar there are already flourishing and transformative community initiatives to pool resources and create shared low-carbon energy, housing and natural assets … These groups have shown that they can increase community wealth and create thriving places while addressing the climate crisis.”

The report identifies hundreds of initiatives, including:

• Social housing schemes such as the Goodwin development in Hull, which has renovated 60 abandoned houses to create affordable family eco homes that require little or no energy to heat or cool. The community has also brought a water recycling system into collective ownership, and the trust is developing 40 more social homes.
  
  
• Reclaiming derelict land such as the Malls Mire woods on the south side of Glasgow, which was plagued by litter and fly-tipping. It has now been transformed into a thriving woodland and community gardens to grow vegetables and fruit, and hosts school clubs and holiday programmes.
  
  
• Repair cafes that are popping up around the country. In Derbyshire alone there are 16 that offer a free meeting space, tools and materials to help people make repairs to clothes, furniture and electrical appliances, reducing their consumption of new products and therefore their emissions.
  
  
• Renewable energy projects such as the Ambition Lawrence Weston community group, based in an area of Bristol with high levels of fuel poverty. It is establishing community-owned renewable energy projects, with a solar farm and plans for a giant wind turbine that, once complete, will power 3,850 homes, saving 1,965 tonnes of CO₂ and return a profit to the community of between £50,000 and £400,000 a year.

Mark Pepper, the development manager of Ambition Lawrence Weston, said that although many people in the area would “not put climate change at the top of the list”, the group had realised it could meet the community’s needs “while simultaneously adding climate value through … energy-efficient new homes, sustainable public transport or setting up our own community-owned wind turbine”.

He said: “These are things our residents benefit from, while also ensuring a positive climate impact at the same time. Putting our community’s needs first empowers local people to engage and take action on climate change, rather than feeling like they’re being told what’s best for them.”

The report found that because many of these schemes were not being properly assessed and measured little was known about their collective environmental impact – which the authors say is likely to have been underestimated by policy makers for years.

IPPR is calling for widespread devolution to support and fund similar schemes, and says a third of new onshore green energy should be community-owned “to share benefits of net zero transition”.

It wants new legislation to make it easier for communities to set up, run, own and reap the benefits of these new “climate commons”, which should be supported through a new “thriving places” fund.

“These groups have shown that they can increase community wealth and create thriving places while addressing the climate crisis,” said Murphy. “Now the government needs to act to enable all communities to have meaningful control of how their area adapts and benefits from the transition to net zero.”

Links

• Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
• Eco-homes become hot property in UK's zero-carbon ‘paradigm shift’ 
• Schemes boosting cycling and walking accelerate across the UK
• UK citizens' climate assembly to meet for first time
• COP25 climate summit: put children at heart of tackling crisis, says UN
• Tackling degraded oceans could mitigate climate crisis - report
• UK to host crucial global talks on tackling climate emergency
• Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds

(AU) More Than 100 Australian Faith Groups Have Teamed Up To Demand Greater Action On Climate Change

SBS - Jarni Blakkarly

A protest outside Prime Minister Scott Morrison's electoral office on Thursday. Source: Supplied.

Faith leaders around the country have held protests urging the Morrison government to commit to more action on climate change, as part of a global movement.

Faith leaders across Australia have held a day of protest for more government action on climate change.

A group of a dozen people sat in meditation outside New South Wales Parliament house in Sydney on Thursday morning, as part of a silent protest calling on the Morrison government to submit higher emissions reduction targets.

Director of the Buddhist Council of NSW Gawaine Powell Davies said that while some protests are loud, others "draw attention by being very quiet”.

“What we are wanting to do is lend the voices of faith to demands that governments and others move quickly on the climate catastrophe before it’s too late,” he said.

“As a Buddhist, I have a strong sense that we are connected to all of creation and that we need to have a care for everything, and if we don’t we will all suffer."

A protest outside a church in Melbourne. Supplied.

The event was one of over 100 protests that took place around Australia on Thursday morning at religious locations and offices of senior federal politicians. 

It was part of a multi-faith climate justice event called ‘Sacred People, Sacred Earth’ coinciding with faith events around the world.

In Australian capital cities, church bells cities rang their bells, Islamic calls to prayer rang out and Jewish Rabbi’s blew the Shofar horn.

One of the key demands of the movement is that Australia sets a target to reach net zero emissions by 2030.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has previously said that our goal is "to reach net zero emissions as soon as possible, and preferably by 2050".

However, he has declined to formally set the target, unlike other nations like the United Kingdom and Japan.

In a statement to SBS News a spokesperson for Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor said Australia was on track to meet and beat its 2030 Emission Reduction Target.

“Our emissions have fallen faster than many other countries, and significantly faster than the OECD or G20 averages,” they said.

“This is thanks to the Morrison Government’s real and practical action to reduce emissions while maintaining a strong economy.

“Action and outcomes are what matter, and our track record is one that all Australians can be proud of."

Links

• Roles of religion and ethics in addressing climate change
• Australian Religious Response to Climate Change
• Morality of Climate Change
• Catholics on Climate Change
• What do the world's religions have to say about sustainability?
• Religion and Climate Change | Council on Foreign Relations
• Climate change 'the biggest security threat ever faced by modern humans', David Attenborough warns

(AU) Outcry At Australia's Coal Plant Closures Misses The Point: Change Is Coming

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Trying to heavy owners won’t hold back the renewables tide. It’s time to plan, and the blueprint exists

‘With so much solar energy in the middle of the day, coal plants are barely making money, and Yallourn has been hit harder than most.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Author Adam Morton is Guardian Australia’s environment editor

If ever there is a case where the headline doesn’t tell the full story it is the news that Victoria’s Yallourn power generator – one of Australia’s oldest and dirtiest coal plants – will shut earlier than planned. 

The basic facts are clear: the owner, EnergyAustralia, had previously said the Latrobe Valley generator would close in 2032, and now it will be gone by 2028.

Despite the seven-year-notice period, much of the initial reaction to the announcement focused on fears of electricity price hikes and blackouts at a distant future date.

To some extent, it masked what had really happened. In reality, EnergyAustralia had made a deal with the Victorian government to keep the plant open longer than it almost certainly otherwise would have been.

Analysts have long expected Yallourn to shut early partly because it keeps breaking down, and partly because it is too inflexible to compete with the extraordinary influx of cheap renewable energy into the grid.

With so much solar energy being generated in the middle of the day, wholesale electricity prices in Victoria have dropped 70% over the past year. This has been good for consumers and the climate, but bad for coal plant owners, who are struggling to stay viable. Yallourn has been hit harder than most.

Modelling for the Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo) that assumed a slower grid transformation that that now underway had previously suggested the plant could close by about 2026. Some workers at Yallourn expected it to shut even earlier, and were relieved on Wednesday to learn they might get seven years work before it goes.

EnergyAustralia linked its closure announcement to the global push to address the climate crisis, noting investors were moving away from thermal coal, and stressed shutting Yallourn would immediately cut the company’s emissions by 60%.

But the company was open to sweating the plant a little longer when it approached the Victorian government to make a deal on the closure. The government says it will not release details of the agreement, citing commercial confidentiality, but it doesn’t deny there may be public support to ensure it remains available until that date.

Victorian taxpayers could reasonably ask what they are spending to keep a 50-year-old plant online, and why the Andrews government thinks it will be needed that long.

The Morrison government’s response included raising concerns about what a closure in seven years would mean for grid reliability and energy affordability, urging the industry to build some form of replacement and leaving open the possibility it would step in if the private sector didn’t.

It was a less aggressive echo of the Coalition’s response when AGL announced it would shut the Liddell coal plant in NSW by 2023. Then, the government pressured the owner to extend its life before warning the taxpayer-funded Snowy Hydro may build a gas-fired generator if energy companies were too slow to commit.

The near repeat performance prompted some in the electricity industry to wonder: is this what substitutes for energy policy now?

Based on estimates put forward by plant owners, eight coal plants are due to shut over the next 20 years. Most experts believe that will prove a conservative timeline given the pace at which solar energy is pushing coal out.

A recent analysis found up to five plants including Yallourn could be unviable within the next four years. Dylan McConnell, from the University of Melbourne’s Climate and Energy College, has suggested we just bring the expected closure date of every coal plant forward by half a decade.

Energy policy in Australia is rife with contradictions. State governments are increasingly backing renewable energy and, in NSW, long-duration energy storage through underwriting and price guarantees. It is starting to drive the sort of transformation in electricity, if not the rest of the economy, that climate scientists warn must happen more quickly across the globe. But few in power publicly acknowledge coal closures could come in a rush.

Rather than introducing policy to accelerate the inevitable shift, the Morrison government criticises the state plans and rejects calls for a national policy framework that would guide private investment in the flexible energy needed to fill the gaps around a system that the energy security board says could be 60% solar and wind by the end of the decade.

The Coalition, of course, abolished a national carbon price in 2014 and spent the years following fighting itself over a series of failed potential replacements, losing a prime minister along the way. Scott Morrison has gone to great lengths to avoid re-opening an internal battle over energy, including promising to pay for a feasibility study into a new coal plant in central Queensland to placate local MPs and Senators.

It is the same split that has stopped the government from at least giving lip service to a target of reaching net zero emissions, a goal backed by more than 100 countries.

The energy solution devised by the energy minister, Angus Taylor, is an ad hoc mix of policies that include promising, but so far failing, to change the Clean Energy Finance Corporation so he can direct it to underwrite “grid reliability” projects, such as new gas and pumped hydro plants.

Federal and state governments are funding new grid connections between the states. And there has been an initial wave of announcements of privately backed grid-scale battery announcements.

But there is no overarching plan to to ensure a smooth transition if there is a run of coal closures. Business leaders and the energy security board have warned the private sector is less likely to build the new back-up capacity needed when governments are interfering in the market.

Amid all this, there is a model for what a transformed electricity system will need. Aemo last year released a blueprint for an optimal grid that found renewable energy could at times reach 90% within 15 years, and between six and 19 gigawatts of new flexible energy capacity should be in place by 2040 to support it.

This could come from batteries, pumped hydro, demand management programs and gas, but Aemo suggests new gas power – favoured by the Morrison government, and the only fossil fuel on the list – is likely to be more expensive than other options.

The market operator describes the blueprint as an “actionable roadmap” that prioritises the public. It might be worth dusting off and re-considering before anyone expresses concern about the next announcement of an early coal exit.

Links

• Yallourn, one of Australia's last brown coal power stations, to close early in favour of giant battery
• Australia needs to cut emissions by at least 50% by 2030 to meet Paris goals, experts say
• Australian farmers call for renewable energy zones as Nationals push coal and nuclear
• Renewable energy could render five of Australia’s remaining coal plants unviable by 2025
• Yallourn, one of Australia's last brown coal power stations, to close early in favour of giant battery
• EnergyAustralia to close Yallourn coal plant in 2028, to build massive big battery
• Renewable energy could render five of Australia’s remaining coal plants unviable by 2025
• Scott Morrison’s ‘gas-led recovery’: what is it and will it really make energy cheaper?
• We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
• Federal Coalition MPs raise fresh concerns about NSW clean energy commitment
• Australia kills off carbon tax
• Energy prices: large users could be paid to reduce demand at peak times