Lethal Heating: 03/14/21

14/03/2021

(AU) Coal’s Retreat As Renewables Surge Is A Shock, But Not A Surprise

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

The coming period, Origin Energy boss Frank Calabria told shareholders last month in what looks today like sturdy understatement, was going to be “messy”.

Calabria was talking after Origin’s half-year profits had been slashed 98 per cent in large part due to power prices collapsing amid an accelerating influx of renewable energy into the grid.

EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn power station in the Latrobe Valley is to close early. Credit: Paul Jones

In this context Energy Australia’s announcement on Wednesday that it would bring forward the closure of the Yallourn Power Station by four years to 2028 was a shock, but hardly a surprise.

In January, Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that Australian industry and governments should co-operate as a matter of “absolute urgency” in developing a plan for the rapid retirement of coal, which she said was good for emissions but would prompt faster coal plant retirements.

Surprise coal plant closure fires Morrison government warning to industry

By then it was clear that the uptake of rooftop solar and grid-scale renewable energy projects in Australia was in line with the Australian Energy Market Operator’s fastest modelling scenario, anticipating renewables will grow from 37 per cent of the energy mix in 2020 to 63 per cent by 2030 and 94 per cent by 2040.

Coal-fired power plants simply cannot compete with that much cheap renewable power, explains Frank Jotzo, director of Australian National University’s Centre for Climate Economics and Policy.

As a result the most vulnerable of them – the slowest, oldest and least reliable – are forced from the market, he says. In turn more renewables surge in to fill the void and the cycle repeats ever faster.

The problem is that the closure of a vast, old coal-fired power plant can shock the market, as the sudden abandonment of Hazelwood showed in 2017.

Yallourn Power Station produces about 22 per cent of Victoria’s electricity and 13 per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn is 5 per cent of Australia’s national annual emission output.

Move to build grid-scale solar on industrial rooftops across Australia

Though EnergyAustralia has ameliorated the potential for price shock by giving long notice of the closure, the industry, energy users and some regulators are crying out for governments to co-operate on national energy policy.

“It’s now time for tough, united decisions. If we keep kicking this further down the road, it’s going to cost us all more for electricity in the future,” Schott said in January.

That hasn’t happened.

Even in the absence of a national policy, Jotzo believes that the speed with which energy storage technology is being developed and introduced – everything from batteries to new pumped hydro – is such that the vacuum created by shutting a station the size of Yallourn can be filled in time with renewables backed by storage.

But he says the pace at which coal plants retire will only increase, with each new closure creating another wave of uncertainty.

It needn’t be so messy.

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(AU) First Hydrogen Produced From Latrobe Valley Coal Generates Export Hopes, Emissions Fears

ABC Gippsland - Jarrod Whittaker

The consortium is celebrating the beginning of production. (ABC Gippsland: Jarrod Whittaker)

Key Points

Hydrogen has been produced from coal in Victoria's Latrobe Valley
A Japanese consortium wants to test whether it is possible to export the emerging fuel source
But environmental groups are sceptical about the potential of hydrogen made using coal

A Japanese consortium hopes the production of hydrogen using coal from the Latrobe Valley in a world-first trial will prove it is possible to export the emerging fuel source.

The consortium has produced the first hydrogen at a plant at the Loy Yang mine, south-east of Traralgon, and plans to transport it to Japan from the Port of Hastings in a specially designed ship later this year.

The $500 million Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) project involves creating hydrogen gas at the plant and refining it for transport.

Hydrogen is touted as a clean energy source with a range of uses including in fuel cells and powering vehicles.

The project is in its pilot phase, and because producing hydrogen using coal creates greenhouse gases, it will not commercialise it unless it is able to capture and store the emissions.

Announced in April 2018, then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull attended the launch of the project, which received $50 million each from the Victorian and federal governments.

Professor Alan Finkel led the development of Australia's national hydrogen strategy. (ABC Gippsland: Jarrod Whittaker)

Professor Alan Finkel, the Commonwealth's special adviser on low-emissions technology, said hydrogen was part of a "world-changing transition". "Hydrogen is part of the future transition that around the world economies are going to go through towards zero emissions," he said.
"The world's going to need a lot of hydrogen, and so the more ways we can get that hydrogen the better."

'Very, very versatile'

A member of the consortium behind a project to export hydrogen made from brown coal says hydrogen exports have the potential to create large numbers.

Jeremy Stone from Japanese electricity provider J-Power said the pilot project had created about 400 jobs in Victoria and could create "thousands more" if it was commercialised.

"Hydrogen is a very, very versatile fuel so it can be used to make energy, electricity, but also can be used as storage, can be used as transportation, it can be used in industry," Mr Stone said.

"In full production, this project would save around about 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 per year, which is the equivalent of the emissions of around about 350,000 cars."

Jeremy Stone believes there is a lot of potential in the technology. (ABC Gippsland: Jarrod Whittaker)

The consortium's plan is to use the Victorian government's carbon capture and storage project, Carbon Net, to store the emissions. Carbon Net is investigating the feasibility of storing greenhouse gas emissions in Bass Strait and last year drilled its first test well.

Mr Stone said there were 20 carbon capture and storage sites in operation across the world and more were in development.

"Carbon Net, which is very close by here and Gippsland, would be the perfect place to safely store that CO2 underground," he said.

Hydrogen is being produced from brown coal, but is it green?

Environment groups sceptical

But there are doubts about whether carbon capture and storage is viable and whether hydrogen produced from coal has a long-term future.

Environment Victoria campaigns director Nick Aberle said the world wanted hydrogen which produced no emissions, and the best way to do that was to make it using renewables.

"The challenge that this [HESC] project has is trying to get rid of those greenhouse gases, because turning coal into hydrogen produces enormous amounts of greenhouse gases — as much as burning the coal, essentially," he said.

"Our understanding is that even your best-case scenario, this project at a commercial scale wouldn't be able to capture all of the greenhouse gases."

Dr Aberle said carbon capture and storage was a "mirage" which had "been 10 years away for decades".

Nick Aberle is sceptical hydrogen produced from coal has a long-term future. (Supplied: Nick Aberle)

Welcome jobs potential

The HESC project's launch came just days after Energy Australia announced it would close the Yallourn coal-fired power station in the Latrobe Valley in 2028, four years early

Yallourn's closure will result in the loss of 500 jobs and it will become the second Latrobe Valley plant to close after Hazelwood shut down in 2017.

Committee for Gippsland chief executive Jane Oakley said the hydrogen industry's potential offered hope to the region amid the job losses.

"It's encouraging and it will make us very buoyant in terms of the potential that it has to offer," Ms Oakley said.

"The export opportunities are pretty significant, and jobs [it creates] in turn will be really encouraging for the region to see this sort of industry evolve."

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(USA) Is There Anything Funny About The Climate Crisis?

New Yorker - Bill McKibben

Aminah Imani is one of the four comedians in “Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave,” a standup special inspired by the environmental-justice situation in Norfolk, Virginia. Photograph courtesy Hip Hop Caucus

Author

Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s newsletter on the environment.

Norfolk, Virginia, is one of seven cities in the region known as Hampton Roads, which is among the metropolitan areas most vulnerable to coastal flooding in the world. Like New Orleans, Norfolk sits extraordinarily low to the sea—just seven feet above it in some places—and Hampton Roads, where three big rivers converge and the Chesapeake Bay flows into the Atlantic, floods regularly. When a big storm hits, watch out. Also, Norfolk suffers from much the same patterns of racial inequity that made Hurricane Katrina such a disaster for the Crescent City. So you might be excused for predicting that a standup-comedy show about the impact of global warming on Norfolk’s African-American neighborhoods would bomb.

But no. As the theologian James Cone once insisted, “Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to oppression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury.” A new standup-comedy special, “Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave,” which premières next week at the (virtual) D.C. Environmental Film Festival, is an attempt to prove Cone’s point.

Born of a collaboration between the Hip Hop Caucus (see my interview below with the executive producer, Antonique Smith) and American University’s Center for Media and Social Impact (C.M.S.I.), it features four standup comics from across the country: Clark Jones, Aminah Imani, Mamoudou N’Diaye, and Kristen Sivills. They studied the environmental-justice situation in Norfolk with local experts, wrote some jokes, then staged a show for the community and its elected leaders at the historic Attucks Theatre. (The theatre is named for Crispus Attucks, a man of African-American and Native American descent who was one of the first patriots to die in the Boston Massacre, two hundred and fifty-one years ago last week.)

A report, produced jointly with C.M.S.I., documents the whole process. Charles (Batman) Brown, the Caucus’s Virginia leadership-committee coördinator, explained the logic: “The social-justice and community activists are really good at organizing in their sphere,” while entertainers can spread information easily via social media. “And, in the political world, you have to be invited into that world. It’s always best, I think, when those three worlds can come together and partner up. I think the problem is that doesn’t happen as much as it should.” Happily, the Norfolk experiment seems widely replicable—there are lots of comedians, and lots that need poking fun at.

Including, it must be said, the C.E.O.s of various oil companies and banks, who, with the advent of the Biden Administration, are lining up to make ever more earnest-sounding climate commitments. Within the past few days, Goldman Sachs joined the recent convert Citi in following Bank of America and Morgan Stanley in a promise to achieve “net-zero emissions” by 2050 with its financing, and Wells Fargo did the same, on Monday. (Chase, the biggest fossil-fuel lender of all, has promised to follow Paris guidelines.)

It’s good to see the banks acknowledging the new Zeitgeist—that climate change is something we need to show we care deeply about—and good to see them ruling out some of the most egregious potential clients, but it’s hard to escape the idea that, in too many cases, the pledges are mostly a kind of performance. For one thing, no one is specifying how the emissions caused by the loans will be measured. It’s tricky math, at best—even the arguably most important leader in reforming climate finance, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, had to walk back his recent claim that the six-hundred-billion-dollar portfolio of the asset manager Brookfield, where he is a vice-chair, was carbon-neutral because it was investing enough in renewable energy to offset its holdings in the fossil-fuel industry.

Writing in the Guardian, the environmental campaigners Tzeporah Berman and Nathan Taft dismissed moves by various banks, because many banks and oil companies are using vague pledges as cover to increase their emissions in the next few years. Enbridge Corporation has announced plans to be a net-zero emitter, but that hasn’t stopped it from continuing construction on the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline in Minnesota—and, indeed, last week a consortium of banks announced that they would give the company an eight-hundred-million-dollar “sustainability loan,” angering Indigenous leaders, who called it classic greenwashing.

Royal Dutch Shell said that it would go to net zero, too, but also announced plans to ramp up production of natural gas, while employing “nature-based offsets”—which translates to planting trees. Even ExxonMobil said last week that it was “supportive” of zero-emissions goals. American University is tracking the pledges from dozens of companies intent on following this route. But, as Bloomberg’s Kate Mackenzie points out, “the total volume of offsets they rely on will quickly exceed the ability of the planet to provide them”—there is only so much ground for planting trees.

These pledges seem to be a way of saying, to quote St. Augustine, “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.” Augustine feared Hell; if we’ve moved past that, we should at least worry about a future with a similar temperature.

I don’t think that these banks and oil companies can keep this act up for five years, much less thirty, because the fires and floods that roll across the planet will make them not the butt of jokes but the focus of rage. (New data this week show that going beyond a 1.5-degree-Celsius global temperature increase may make much of the tropics uninhabitable.)

The way to avoid that is to do, right now, what needs to be done: if you’re a bank, stop messing with complicated dodges about carbon offsets and cease lending to oil companies. No kidding.

Passing the Mic

Antonique Smith is, among other things, the singing voice of the climate movement. Since she covered Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” for the Hip Hop Caucus’s “Home” album, in 2014, she has performed at hundreds of rallies and events, and is an original host of the weekly climate podcast “Think 100%: The Coolest Show.” She has also earned Grammy nominations and plays Aretha Franklin’s young mother in the new “Genius” miniseries from National Geographic.

Bill McKibben and Antonique Smith in conversation. It has been edited for length.

Bill McKibben: Can you describe Norfolk—what its divisions are like and how they set the background for this film? Did people there care about the climate crisis, and did that change as the filming progressed?

Antonique Smith: While the entire region, including the world’s largest Navy base, is threatened by rising sea levels, the threat is not the same for every community. Black people and communities throughout the region are at greater risk for flooding, disaster, and toxic pollution. The city of Norfolk is about half Black, half white, but the St. Paul’s district, home to a predominantly Black public-housing community, is representative of the economic disparity that has fallen squarely on racial lines; racist urban policies and climate gentrification posed as redevelopment are hitting the Black community the hardest.

Getting to create “Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave” has been such a powerful experience. Community leaders, organizations, and activists are working day in and day out on a bunch of issues. Flooding, from sea-level rise brought on by climate change, is one of them. What we’ve been able to do is to bring together local leaders and talk about the climate crisis in terms of racial justice, housing, transportation, and food security. It’s all about communicating and working on the climate crisis in ways relevant to people’s lives.

Bill McKibben: People might instinctively say, “There’s nothing funny about global warming.” But we make comedy about many of the most painful things in our lives. What can comedians bring to this fight?

Antonique Smith: Certainly, there’s nothing funny about suffering, dying, and possible extinction, but I’m so grateful for comedians and for comedy in itself. What would life be like without joy and laughter? Science gives us the facts, but most people aren’t inspired, moved, or touched on an emotional level by science. Infuse that same information with comedy, and you have a magic combination of enjoyment and fun, while learning and being inspired to action. Another magical component of comedy is that it feels very personal and relevant.

The best comedians tell stories in a way that makes you feel like they’re telling your story. You identify with it even if it hasn’t actually happened to you. Unfortunately, most people of color can identify with the issues surrounding climate and environmental injustices.

Bill McKibben: Though you’re very much of the moment, you’ve spent a lot of time in an earlier era, too: singing Marvin Gaye, helping portray the story of Aretha Franklin and the civil-rights movement. What lessons should we take from those days, and what new lessons have we learned since?

Antonique Smith: If you listen to the lyrics of Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me,” the things he’s saying are not only still happening—they’re worse. “Poison is the wind that blows,” “oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas, fish full of mercury,” et cetera. He wrote that more than forty years ago! I believe the lessons we can learn from the past is that the fight isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. People sacrificed their lives and suffered greatly for the progress that was made so that we can have the rightful freedom and liberties that we sometimes take for granted today.

The sad lesson we have learned since that era is that we still have so far to go. Until the communities of people of color are no longer considered the sacrifice zones and a dumping ground for billion-dollar polluters; until we all have clean air, clean water, and access to fresh, healthy food; until the systems that allow for Black people to be murdered by police and the systems designed to keep people of color from gaining wealth are dismantled; until white supremacy is destroyed and all Black lives truly matter, then we have to keep on fighting.

Warming Up

Antonique Smith has a voice. Here it is, in four different moods: “Let It Be,” “And I Am Telling You,” “All We Really Have Is Now,” and “Hold Up Wait a Minute.”

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