01/12/2021

(AU The Guardian) ‘Vandals’: Victoria, Queensland Fume Over Federal Climate Intervention

The Guardian - 

The Commonwealth has used new powers to cancel States’ participation in global climate action

The latest move on emissions is ‘a global embarrassment’ for the federal government, says Victoria’s energy, environment and climate change minister, Lily D’Ambrosio. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

The Morrison government has used sweeping new powers to override state and territory government support for an international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The federal government has deployed recently passed laws to overturn the participation of five states and territories in the global Under 2 Coalition.

In an email dated 23 November, an official with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told his counterpart in the Victorian government that its participation in the coalition was “no longer in operation”.

The email warned the Victorian government that under the new Foreign Relations (States and Territories) Act 2020, sign up to the agreement was now illegitimate.

The email said Victoria had 14 days to tell the global organisation it had “failed to properly classify” the state’s involvement in a 2015 Memorandum of Understanding.

Two-hundred-and-sixty sub-national governments worldwide have signed up to the Under 2 coalition, representing 1.75 billion people and 50% of the global economy.

Members commit to keeping global temperature rises to well below 2C, with efforts to reach 1.5C.

Thirty-five states and regions in the coalition have committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 or earlier.

“[T]he MOU has also been invalidated for a number of other states and territories,” the official said, naming the ACT, Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia. He did not cite NSW, which has lately signed up.

Lily D’Ambrosio, Victoria’s energy, environment and climate change minister, said DFAT had used a technicality that was “illogical” to cancel her state’s participation.

“It’s just a really ridiculous technicality,” D’Ambrosio said. “It’s egregious. They are vandals.”

The move came less than a fortnight after the Glasgow climate summit ended. The Morrison government had weathered extensive criticism at the event for being among the few rich nations to avoid raising their 2030 emission reduction targets.

“This is going to be a global embarrassment, not for the Victorian government but the federal government that has already covered itself in ridicule on the climate change stage,” D’Ambrosio said. “Rather than addressing the urgency of climate change, they are actually putting forward more barriers.”

A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne said the Under 2 Coalition MOU had not come to the minister for a decision.

“The MOU was not properly notified by the relevant states and territory under the Foreign Relations Act 2020 and was therefore automatically invalidated by operation of the Act,” the spokesperson said.

DFAT was also approached for comment, as was energy minister Angus Taylor.

The DFAT official suggested in the email if Victoria wanted to sign up to the Under 2 coalition’s 2021 MOU, his department would consider approving it. He also said Victoria should join with other jurisdictions to make a single submission.

“Under what conditions would they be prepared to consider an application?” D’Ambrosio said. “Are they saying that if there’s one or two states that maybe hadn’t wanted to pursue it or have delayed it, then everyone else will be held up?”

Meaghan Scanlon, Queensland’s minister for the environment and the Great Barrier Reef, said her state had also received the cancellation advice.

“Clearly, the Morrison government aren’t content with their own failures on climate change, they’re now trying to stop the states from taking action.” she said.

“Surely their time would be better spent funding renewable energy projects or delivering a credible policy on reducing emissions, than on playing silly bureaucratic games,” Scanlon said.

Queensland intends to re-apply “because it is an important and useful coalition of like-minded sub-national governments that want to act on climate action”.

Shane Rattenbury, the ACT’s climate change minister, said his government is yet to told of the cancellation, and continued to work with the global group, most recently this week on zero-emission vehicles.

“The Under 2 coalition is a helpful network of sub-national governments to work together on climate action,” he said.

NSW is understood to be discussing with DFAT the application of the new act on its involvement in the coalition.

Chris Bowen, federal Labor’s climate spokesperson said the intervention would probably viewed internationally as another blow to Australia’s reputation.

“The states are doing their best to fill the federal climate vacuum but this demonstrates the need for national leadership,” Bowen said.

“It’s a blight on Scott Morrison that he hasn’t updated the medium-term targets the coalition government agreed to revisit,” he added.

Polly Hemming, an adviser in the Australia Institute’s Climate and Energy Program, said local governments had played an important role in advancing climate action.

Examples include California lifting its ambitions to cut emissions during the Trump years in the US, and in Australia where states have long led the way.

“While the commonwealth government is the only level of government that can commit Australia to a foreign treaty, it’s the state governments that will face the full costs of climate change induced disasters,” she said.

“The ACT legislative assembly and Sydney city council have endorsed a global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty,” Hemming added.

“We can only wonder if they will be getting emails from federal bureaucrats in the near future as well?”

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(RenewEconomy) Coal Power Plants Are Killing Millions With Air Pollution And Must Be Closed, Research Find

RenewEconomy - 

New research says up to six million early deaths could be avoided through the strategic closure of the worst polluting power stations. (Credit: Canva).

The early and strategic closure of the world’s worst polluting power stations, including inefficient fossil fuel and biomass plants, could avoid the premature deaths of up to six million people by 2050, new research has found.

The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that retiring the most polluting and most harmful power stations – by focusing on addressing air pollution concerns as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions – would save millions of lives.

The research has been led by professor Qiang Zhang, of Tsinghua University in Beijing, who modelled the potential impacts of both greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution caused by power generation, particularly coal.

The research identified several power stations that were disproportionately responsible for air pollution and poor health – and it found that policies based on climate change concerns alone were not sufficient to protect public health.

“Our detailed and dynamic analysis of climate, pollution and health impacts from the future power systems at the level of individual generating units reveals that air pollution deaths are not an automatic and fixed co-benefit of all climate mitigation,” the research paper says.

“Rather, pollution controls and strategic retirements of the most-polluting and harmful power plants may ultimately determine the extent to which health co-benefits are realised.”

The research found that between 2010 and 2018, 91 per cent of the premature deaths caused by power station pollution occurred in lower-income or emerging economies.

These included India, China and other countries across Southeast Asia where softer regulatory controls, closer proximity of power stations to densely populated regions and higher industrial activity caused smog and other particulate pollution.

The worst offenders were smaller coal generators, especially those below 300MW in generation capacity, which are more likely to be found in developing countries, which accounted for more than half of air pollution related deaths.

Coal plants made up 46 per cent of the world’s generation capacity, but were responsible for 80 per cent of power generation-related air pollution deaths.

“Even assuming successful climate change mitigation and strong pollution controls, implementing our data-driven approach to targeting super-polluting units for retirement and replacement could save millions of lives worldwide by the middle of the century,” the report says.

The research challenges the assertions of some within the Morrison government that Australia’s ongoing exports of fossil fuels were helping to alleviate poverty and improve health across the Asian region.

The research is the latest addition to a growing body of evidence that the ongoing use of fossil fuels is not just a global environmental concern due to global warming, that it is also a significant public health concern, contributing to substantial increases in air pollution that causes major health problems and premature deaths.

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(AU Bloomberg Green) These Australian Coal Mines Are Methane Super-Emitters

Bloomberg Green - 

New estimates based on satellite data show Glencore’s Hail Creek mine spewed 230,000 tons of the powerful greenhouse gas a year in 2018 and 2019.

A satellite image of Glencore's open cut Hail Creek coal mine in Australia's Bowen Basin.
Source: Maxar

Just inland of Australia's east coast, roughly 200 miles from the Great Barrier Reef, a single coal mine run by Glencore Plc emitted so much super-warming methane in a year that it had the same climate warming impact as the annual pollution from more than 4 million U.S. cars.

The Hail Creek coal mine leaked an estimated 230,000 tons of methane a year in 2018 and 2019, according to researchers with SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, who analyzed satellite data from the European Space Agency. Because methane traps over 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in its first two decades in the atmosphere, the mine had the same short-term warming impact as roughly 19 million tons of CO₂ a year.

The report is one of the first efforts by researchers to quantify just how much methane is coming from individual mines in Australia. Coal itself produces the most CO₂ emissions out of all fossil fuels and nearly 200 countries have agreed on the need to reduce its use to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The new study shows that there's an added danger: disastrous amounts of methane emitted during the mining process.

The Hail Creek mine is among a handful of coal operations in Australia’s Bowen Basin identified by the researchers as super-emitters, including mines run by BHP Group and Anglo American Plc. Hail Creek, which Glencore took over from Rio Tinto Group in August 2018, was the biggest offender.

It accounts for 20% of Australia’s methane emissions from coal mining even though it produces just 1% of the nation’s coal output, according to the report, published Monday in the Environmental Science & Technology journal.

The researchers grouped five other mines in the Bowen Basin into two clusters because it was difficult to distinguish their individual contributions due to their close proximity. Broadmeadow, owned jointly by BHP and Mitsubishi Corp., and Anglo’s Moranbah North and Grosvenor mines released 190,000 tons of methane annually in 2018 and 2019, according to the report. Glencore's Oaky North and Anglo's Grasstree mines emitted an estimated 150,000 tons of methane a year.

Glencore said its Bowen Basin coal business reports emissions in line with Australia's requirements. Anglo American said it submits methane emissions annually, by location, to the country's clean energy regulator and also makes disclosures at a business level in its annual report. A spokesperson for BMA, BHP’s joint-venture with Mitsubishi, said the company publishes emissions from its Australian operations in accordance with the country’s standards.

None of the operators said how much methane comes from the individual mines identified by the Dutch researchers. BHP spokesman Ben Dillaway told Bloomberg in July its Broadmeadow and Goonyella Riverside mines cumulatively emit an average of about 32,000 tons of methane a year.

The new analysis underscores just how big a problem coal is for Australia, which lags other developed nations in tackling climate change. Although it’s extremely vulnerable to the impacts of rising temperatures, Australia was among the last advanced economies to set a target to zero out emissions, has been criticized over the credibility of its plan, and refused to join a global pledge to reduce methane emissions 30% by 2030.

Learn more about the planet-warming power of methane.
The cheap and easy climate fix that can cool the planet fast.
 See the graphic

The findings suggest there may be “a large underreporting of methane emissions in the national inventory,” authors including Pankaj Sadavarte and Ilse Aben wrote. They speculated that the outsize releases from Hail Creek could have come from surface mining operations and efforts to drain gas when expanding the facility.

The research underscores the wide range of climate impacts from different mines. According to the International Energy Agency, the world’s dirtiest coal emits as much as 100 times more methane than cleaner operations. Most of the methane reductions from coal should come from a “drastic fall” in its use, the IEA said in an October report, though steps to minimize leaks “need to happen in parallel.”

The Dutch researchers estimated that all six mines spewed a combined 570,000 tons of methane a year over the study period, accounting for roughly 55% of the reported methane emissions from coal mining in Australia — despite only contributing about 7% of the nation's production.

A closer view of Hail Creek coal mine.
 Source: Maxar

Australia’s Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources said in a March report that it’s “premature to use satellite data to quantify emissions from methane sources.’’ The Dutch scientists used observations from the ESA's Sentinel-5P satellite to estimate daily methane flux rates from the mines and compared those with emissions from global inventories and figures used in Australia’s reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The main caveat with this approach is that the Sentinel-5P “is designed for quantifying methane over large regions rather than precise attribution to individual facilities,” said Riley Duren, chief executive officer of Carbon Mapper. The nonprofit has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

But Duren said that the findings — that just a handful of mines appear to be responsible for a disproportionate amount of emissions — broadly align with what his team has found studying U.S. coal mines in southwest Pennsylvania using instruments with much higher spatial resolution. Just four underground mines in that region appear to be responsible for 22% of total U.S. methane emissions from underground mines, or about 300,000 tons.

The Dutch research is also similar to another analysis by Kayrros SAS. The French geoanalytics firm found earlier this year that for every ton of coal produced in the Bowen Basin, an average of 7.5 kilograms of methane is released. That was 47% higher than the average global methane intensity estimated by the IEA, according to Kayrros.

Geologically older and deeper coal deposits tend to contain more methane than shallower seams, according to the IEA, which is why emissions from surface mines such as Hail Creek tend to be lower than underground mines. But it’s harder to mitigate leaks from open pit reserves, where emissions are often spread over larger areas and more diffuse.

Ilse Aben, one of the Dutch researchers, said they were surprised by the large methane emissions coming from Hail Creek. “I hope getting attention for this forces people to explain what is happening there,” said Aben. “It requires an explanation.”

— With assistance by Anjali Cordeiro, and Jane Pong

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