Lethal Heating: 08/04/21

04/08/2021

(AU Canberra Times) Public Sector Informant: Reducing Greenhouse Emissions Will Take A Group Effort - Including From Australia

Canberra Times - Stephen Bartos

A firefighter passes a burning home as the Dixie Fire flares in California. Picture: AP

Author

Stephen Bartos is a Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University.
He was Professor of Governance and Director of the National Institute of Governance at the University of Canberra, and is a former deputy secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Finance.
Stephen Bartos is the author of Against the Grain - The AWB Scandal and Why it Happened.

In recent weeks we have seen extreme climate events, from devastating wildfires in the United States to widespread flooding in Europe.

They are linked to climate change - further support, if any were needed, to the determination of most of the world to address the climate crisis.

It is almost obligatory to note that it is not possible to attribute an individual event to climate change; but that's not the point. Climate change is making extreme weather events like these more frequent and more extreme. That applies both to the US wildfires (we call similar events bushfires) and to Europe's floods.

The same will apply as extreme events - including cyclones, drought, flooding and bushfires - affect Australia with greater frequency in the future.

There are however four outlier countries whose policies, according to the Guardian, differ: China, Russia, Brazil and Australia. The report suggests that if the rest of the world followed these countries' policies the global temperature would rise by 5 per cent: a catastrophic outcome.

That conclusion was based on the non-partisan Paris Equity Check website developed by the University of Melbourne. This country grouping is not a club Australia would normally be comfortable joining. We have more in common with countries like the UK and US whose climate change policies and programs are far more ambitious than ours.

Their main talking point is that Australia contributes only 1.3 per cent of global carbon emissions, so nothing we do will make a significant difference. That argument is wrong. It needs to be put down.

If Australia is concerned that the rest of the world should take action on climate change, the most effective way to ensure that happens is ourselves to take action - helping establish a global norm.

Does this mean that countries with lower emissions should not bother? The argument is often raised in the context of what is asserted to be relative inaction by China (although the Chinese government would dispute that). It is a complicated story.

Moreover, the second highest emitter, the US, is engaged in serious efforts to reduce emissions, as is the third, the European Union.

There is a long history of analysis of collective action problems in economics. They are common. Examples include: taxation - why bother to pay tax, your tax payment is not going to make much difference to the country, it is only a tiny percentage of the total; voting - your vote makes hardly any difference to the result, so why bother; vaccination - if you get vaccinated it will make only a small difference to the total percentage of the population who are: yet that collective number of small impacts means the difference between a vulnerable or a relatively safe population.

Additional carbon emissions will worsen the impacts of climate change. Picture: Shutterstock

One of our major insurers runs an advertisement showing commuters lifting a train off a person trapped underneath (based on a real incident at Stirling railway station in Perth). They all contributed. It would have been easy for smaller commuters to stand back and say "there's a couple of big, strong blokes over there whose efforts will make more of a difference than mine" (you can call them China and the US). The people on that platform all pitched in to help. The same applies with climate change.

This is already happening in Australia. Despite relative inaction by governments, households have the world's highest uptake of rooftop solar power; financial institutions are increasingly demanding commitment to action on climate change before investing in a company; corporations themselves are adopting renewables and reducing emissions.

Does that apply internationally? Absolutely it does. Global norms about how countries should behave influence what governments do. They become institutions. In many cases international treaties and agreements emerge long after the institution. For example, norms on how to treat diplomats were in place well before they were formalised in the 1961 Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations.

There are other arguments as to why the 1.3 per cent argument is misleading, including that Australia has one of the highest per capita emissions rates in the world, and that coal exports mean our actual contribution to climate change is far higher. They are valid, but we don't need them.

The nature of climate change as a collective action problem provides a full and sufficient reason to reject the 1.3 per cent argument. For collective action problems to be solved, everyone has to contribute, small as well as large.

Links

(AU The Age) ‘We Need More Urgency’: Top Renewable Group Warns Against Paying To Keep Coal Alive

The Age - Nick Toscano

The head of the nation’s top renewable energy group has urged legislators to reject a proposal to pay coal and gas-fired power stations to keep operating in order to avoid the shock of sudden closures.

Powering Australian Renewables (PowAR) – a consortium of power giant AGL, the Future Fund and the Queensland Investment Corporation – is the latest clean-energy developer to speak out against a contentious recommendation by the nation’s Energy Security Board that could see fossil fuel generators paid to guarantee future capacity.

A consortium of power giant AGL, the Future Fund and the Queensland Investment Corporation this week takes control of Tilt Renewables’ Australian wind and solar farms. Credit: Joe Armao

Chief executive Geoff Dutaillis warned the move would deter the very investment needed for a smooth transition to a zero-emissions grid.

He told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald there were better ways to redesign the market and support renewables during periods when weather conditions were unfavourable.

“The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow; there will be renewable droughts,” Mr Dutaillis said.

“If we get a diverse pool of resources and an interconnected system linking Queensland, NSW, Victoria, and South Australia properly – and, dare I say, even Tasmania – we will have a diverse, resilient system which allows us to use resources from different parts of the country cost-effectively.”

Renewables

100 per cent renewables by 2025: Grid operator pushes clean energy revolution

Last week, the Energy Security Board sent its final recommendations for a redesign of the energy market to the national Cabinet.

The recommendations include a “capacity mechanism” to pay power generators to guarantee they can dispatch power when required. State and federal ministers are expected to decide on the rule changes within months.

PowAR on Tuesday will become Australia’s largest operator of renewable energy when it assumes control of Tilt Renewables’ wind and solar operations across the country following a $2.7 billion takeover deal earlier this year.

Mr Dutaillis said the consortium was eager to realise the full potential of Tilt’s outstanding development pipeline of energy projects, including more than 3500 megawatts of wind, solar, battery storage and peaking capacity.

However, he expressed dismay at the state of energy politics in Australia and said he believed the Morrison government was overly focused on prolonging the lives of ageing coal generators and expanding the use of gas power to support the shift to renewables.

Energy

Origin Energy takes a $2.2b hit as green shift hurts, coal costs bite

“Scientific assessment and lived experience are telling us every day that we need to act with more urgency, yet we are still in the midst of a debate in Australia where we are talking about subsidising increasingly ageing and unreliable generation beyond their useful life,” he said.

“We need a significant amount of flexibility and dispatchable generation, but that can happen in a renewable world – we’ve got battery technology evolving quickly, we’ve got pumped hydro being talked about every day.”

Mr Dutaillis also called for a greater focus on delivering improvements to the nation’s outdated, coal-based grid, where poor transmission infrastructure is hindering the delivery of clean power around the grid and across state lines.

Although coal still accounts for the majority of the country’s energy supply, an influx of renewable energy into the country’s main power grid in recent years has placed enormous pressure on coal generators by driving down daytime electricity prices to levels where they are unable to compete, threatening early closures.

EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn brown coal plant in Victoria this year announced it would shut down in 2028, four years earlier than planned, and there are expectations across the industry of other plants’ closure dates being brought forward.

Because electricity production is a dominant source of Australia’s emissions, reducing output from coal plants would help sharply reduce the national carbon footprint.

However, the Morrison government and some energy industry leaders are ramping up warnings that unexpectedly early shutdowns of coal-fired generators could raise the danger of blackouts or power bill spikes in the future.

Power plant owners including EnergyAustralia have expressed support for a proposal that would ensure there was always adequate capacity to meet consumer demand and keep the lights on.

“Our market is not providing the right investment signals for the flexible dispatchable capacity the system needs as ageing thermal baseload generation retires and Australia transitions to a low-emissions future,” EnergyAustralia head of markets Ross Edwards said.

Links

(DeSmog) Scientists Who Issued ‘Climate Emergency’ Declaration In 2019 Now Say Earth’s Vital Signs Are Worsening

DeSmog - Nick Cunningham

A rapid and urgent phaseout of fossil fuels is needed, scientists warn, in order to avoid crossing dangerous climate tipping points.

Wildfires in Chubut, Argentina, March 2021. Credit: Greenpeace Media

From devastating wildfires to rising methane emissions, Earth’s vital signs are continuing to deteriorate, scientists warn.

An urgent global phaseout of fossil fuels is needed, they say, reiterating calls for “transformative change,” which is “needed now more than ever to protect life on Earth and remain within as many planetary boundaries as possible.”

The warning comes roughly a year and a half after a global coalition of 11,000 climate scientists declared a climate emergency, warning that global action was needed to avoid “untold suffering due to the climate crisis.”

The new paper examining Earth’s vital signs, published in the journal BioScience, is authored by some of the same scientists who helped spearhead the climate emergency declaration.

“There is growing evidence we are getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system, including warm-water coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets,” William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University (OSU) and one of the paper’s lead authors, said in a statement.

The team of researchers and scientists, collaborating from Massachusetts in the U.S., Australia, the U.K., France, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Germany, took stock of 31 variables that collectively offer a gauge for the planet’s health. Many of those metrics have worsened since the group originally declared a climate emergency in 2019.

Both methane and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have reached new record highs, the study reveals.

Sea ice has dramatically shrunk, and so too has the ice mass in Greenland and Antarctica.

Wildfires in the U.S. are burning more acreage.

And deforestation in the Amazon is occurring at its fastest rate in 12 years.

Ruminant livestock — cows, sheep and goats — now exceed 4 billion, and their total mass exceeds that of humans and wild animals combined.

Cows in particular are huge contributors to climate change due methane emissions released from belching, and deforestation resulting from clearing land for livestock.

Forests cleared in Brazil for agriculture. Credit: CIFOR. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The global pandemic offered only a modest and brief respite from some of these trends, the scientists note, such as a short drop in the use of fossil fuels as the world went into lockdown, but a quick rebound in oil and gas consumption demonstrates that the world remains stuck on a dangerous track.

The worsening vital signs “largely reflect the consequences of unrelenting business as usual,” the authors said in a statement.

Not every data point was negative, however, and there were some signs of hope. The level of fossil fuel subsidies has declined since 2019, although part of that was due to the collapse of energy use and market prices during the pandemic.

Fossil fuel divestment also picked up pace, increasing by $6.5 trillion between 2018 and 2020. And a growing number of governments have officially recognized the climate emergency — pledging to cut emissions and accelerate a push towards clean energy.

The authors also note that the share of global greenhouse gas emissions coming under some form of carbon pricing — a way of discouraging unchecked greenhouse gas emissions — also increased from 14.4 percent to 23.2 percent, largely due to expanding carbon pricing in China.

While that offered some hope, the scientists found that the global average carbon price under these programs stood at around US$15.49 per ton, much too low to ratchet down emissions.

The authors said global carbon pricing needs to increase “severalfold to be highly effective” in cutting the use of fossil fuels, and it should be linked to a “socially just green climate fund to finance climate mitigation and adaptation policies in the Global South.”

The scientists said the world needs to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, scale up carbon pricing programs at the global level, and develop climate reserves to protect natural carbon sinks such as forests, wetlands, and mangroves.

“Policies to alleviate the climate crisis or any of the other threatened planetary boundary transgressions should not be focused on symptom relief but on addressing their root cause: the overexploitation of the Earth,” the authors wrote in their paper.

The warning comes as politicians continue to drag their feet on ambitious climate action.

On July 22, a report from BloombergNEF was released, finding that G20 countries — the richest nations in the world — subsidized fossil fuels by roughly $3.3 trillion between 2015 and 2019.

The following day, the environment ministers of G20 countries met in Naples, Italy.

They failed, however, to reach a consensus on calling for a global phaseout of coal, and they also could not agree on tightening up the climate goals laid out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

The summit in Naples is meant to lay the groundwork for the much more important climate negotiations to be held in Glasgow later this year.

Flood damage in Germany. Credit: Greenpeace Media.

The Ponina Fire in Oregon, April 2021. Credit: National Interagency Fire Center.

Meanwhile, governments are also not following global calls to shift their pandemic-related economic recovery programs to forms of “green stimulus.”

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said only 2 percent of global fiscal stimulus is being funneled into clean energy.

“Not only is clean energy investment still far from what’s needed to put the world on a path to reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century, it’s not even enough to prevent global emissions from surging to a new record,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said.

The lagging response to a worsening climate crisis comes despite the destruction from disasters becoming more pronounced, with record heat in the Pacific Northwest, wildfires across the American West and in Siberia, and horrendous floods in China, Belgium, and Germany.

“Climate change is not abstract right now. It is in our face,” Ripple of OSU told DeSmog. “Just seeing the suffering around the fires, the floods, the heat waves and the drought … it’s accelerating a lot faster than I personally thought even two years ago when we made our scientist warning of a climate emergency declaration.”

“I think we’re all sitting back and reassessing,” Ripple said. “A lot of us are shocked about the speed and magnitude of what’s happening right now.”

Links