OPEC Faces A Mortal Threat From Electric Cars

Telegraph (UK) - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The oil cartel is living in a time-warp, seemingly unaware that global energy politics have changed forever

A charger stands on display next to a Toyota hydrogen-powered vehicle in Tokyo Photo: Bloomberg

 OPEC remains defiant. Global reliance on oil and gas will continue unchanged for another quarter century. Fossil fuels will make up 78pc of the world’s energy in 2040, barely less than today.

There will be no meaningful advances in technology. Rivals will sputter and mostly waste money. The old energy order is preserved in aspic.

Emissions of CO2 will carry on rising as if nothing significant had been agreed in a solemn and binding accord by 190 countries at the Paris climate summit.

OPEC’s World Oil Outlook released today is a remarkable document, the apologia of a pre-modern vested interest that refuses to see the writing on the wall.

The underlying message is that the COP21 deal is of no relevance to the oil industry. Pledges by world leaders to drastically alter the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions before 2040 - let alone to reach total "decarbonisation" by 2070 - are simply ignored.

Global demand for crude oil will rise by 18m barrels a day (b/d) to 110m by 2040. The cartel has shaved its long-term forecast slightly by 1m b/d, but this is in part due to weaker economic growth.
One is tempted to compare this myopia to the reflexive certainties of the 16th Century papacy, even as Erasmus published in Praise of Folly, and Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church.
The 407-page report swats aside electric vehicles with impatience. The fleet of cars in the world will rise from 1bn to 2.1bn over the next 25 years – topping 400m in China – and 94pc will still run on petrol and diesel.
“Without a technology breakthrough, battery electric vehicles are not expected to gain significant market share in the foreseeable future,” it said. Electric cars cost too much. Their range is too short. The batteries are defective in hot or cold conditions.

OPEC says battery costs may fall by 30-50pc over the next quarter century but doubts that this will be enough to make much difference, due to "consumer resistance".
This is a brave call given that Apple and Google have thrown their vast resources into the race for plug-in vehicles, and Tesla's Model 3s will be on the market by 2017 for around $35,000.
Ford has just announced that it will invest $4.5bn in electric and hybrid cars, with 13 models for sale by 2020. Volkswagen is to unveil its "completely new concept car" next month, promising a new era of "affordable long-distance electromobility."
The OPEC report is equally dismissive of Toyota's decision to bet its future on hydrogen fuel cars, starting with the Mirai as a loss-leader. One should have thought that a decision by the world's biggest car company to end all production of petrol and diesel cars by 2050 might be a wake-up call.
Goldman Sachs expects 'grid-connected vehicles' to capture 22pc of the global market within a decade, with sales of 25m a year, and by then - it says - the auto giants will think twice before investing any more money in the internal combustion engine. Once critical mass is reached, it is not hard to imagine a wholesale shift to electrification in the 2030s.

Goldman is betting that battery costs will fall by 60pc over the next five years, driven by economies of scale as much as by technology. The driving range will increase by 70pc.
This is another world from OPEC's forecast. Even this may well be overtaken soon by further leaps in science. A team of Cambridge chemists says it has cracked the technology of a lithium-air battery with 90pc efficiency, able to power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge. It promises to cut costs by four-fifths, and could be on the road within a decade.
There is now a global race to win the battery prize. The US Department of Energy is funding a project by the universities of Michigan, Stanford, and Chicago, in concert with the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories. The Japan Science and Technology Agency has its own project in Osaka. South Korea and China are mobilising their research centres.
A regulatory squeeze is quickly changing the rules of global energy.The Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics counts 800 policies and laws aimed at curbing emissions worldwide.
An electric car is charged in Oslo, Norway Photo: Alamy
Goldman Sachs says the model to watch is Norway, where electric vehicles already command 16.3pc of the market. The switch has been driven by tax exemptions, priority use of traffic lanes, and a forest of charging stations.
California is following suit. It has a mandatory 22pc target for 'grid-connected' vehicles within ten years. New cars in China will have to meet emission standards of 5 litres per 100km by 2020, even stricter than in Europe.

Beijing's pilot scheme to promote electric cars has fallen short - chiefly because there are not yet enough charging sites - but this will change soon with drastic rationing of permits for petrol cars. If you want a car as the authorities grapple with 'airpocalypse', it may have to be electric.
China's Geely Automobile aims to generate 90pc of its sales from electric vehicles by 2020. Bill Russo from Gao Feng Advisory in Shanghai says China is about to "leapfrog" the rest of the world and become the epicentre of the electrification drive.
OPEC does not deny that the Paris accords change the energy landscape, but they view this as a problem strictly for the coal industry. There will be a partial switch from coal to gas, with a little nuclear thrown in, along with a risible contribution from wind and solar.
Their own charts seems to show that coal, gas, and oil will together emit a further 1,200 gigatonnes of carbon by 2040. This would blow through the maximum carbon budget deemed allowable by scientists if we are to stop temperatures rising by more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100 - let alone to achieve the 1.5 degree 'ambition' agreed by world leaders in Paris.
Saudi Arabia's belief that it can carry on with business as usual into the mid 21st Century is what informs the current OPEC strategy of flooding the crude market to eliminate rivals.
The report admits that this is proving to be a costly undertaking. Tight oil and shale in North America has not buckled - as presumed in last year's forecast - and OPEC now expects it to keep rising slightly in 2016 to 4.5m b/d, and again to 4.7m in 2017.

In the meantime, OPEC revenues have crashed from $1.2 trillion in 2012 to nearer $400bn at today's Brent price of $36.75, with fiscal and regime pain to match.
This policy has eroded global spare capacity to a wafer-thin 1.5m b/d, leaving the world vulnerable to a future shock. It implies a far more volatile market in which prices gyrate wildly, eroding confidence in oil as a reliable source of energy.
The more that this Saudi policy succeeds, the quicker the world will adopt policies to break reliance on its only product. As internal critics in Riyadh keep grumbling, the strategy is suicide.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are lucky. They have been warned in advance that OPEC faces slow-run off. The cartel has 25 years to prepare for a new order that will require far less oil.
If they have any planning sense, they will manage the market to ensure crude prices of $70 to $80. They will eke out their revenues long enough to control spending and train their people for a post-petrol economy, rather than clinging to 20th Century illusions.
Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister, warned in an interview with the Telegraph fifteen years ago that this moment of reckoning was coming and he specifically cited fuel-cell technologies.
"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones."
They did not listen to him then, and they are not listening now. 

It's Not Easy Being Green On The ASX

AFR - Patrick Commins

The powerful mood for change following this month's historic Paris climate accord may have left you, as an investor, itching to get involved.
Well, you'll be hard-pressed to find opportunities on the local stock exchange.
To recap: for the first time nations have committed to "pursue efforts to stop warming beyond 1.5C" – before the target was 2 degrees. According to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to achieve that target energy-related emissions would need to be cut to zero by around 2050.
Serious steps towards achieving those goals would clearly also force businesses all over the world to sharply reduce their use of fossil fuels.
The agreement has "absolutely" moved us forward towards a lower-carbon future, says Australian Ethical Investment chief investment officer David Macri.
"The fact that they mentioned the need to stick to a 1.5-degree limit is a huge step forward," Macri says. "Increasing more than 2 degrees would be pretty catastrophic for large parts of the world."

Wasteland for renewable energy
 So for the far-sighted investor, putting some of their long-term savings into companies set to benefit from "clean and green" future would make sense.
But where?
"Australia has been a bit of a wasteland for renewable energy," Macri says. "Most of the clean energy exposure we have is via international shares; it's a big part of our international equities portfolio."
Thanks to an abundance of cheap coal in our country, the economics of clean energy have been particularly unfavourable in the absence of legislated penalties for carbon emissions.
More recently, industries such as wind and solar power generation endured a period of actively antagonistic government policies under the prime ministership of Tony Abbott. The change of government has brightened the prospects of more favourable policy support.
"Renewable energy listed plays on the ASX are few and far between, but obviously [wind power business] Infigen is going to be one," Macri says.
He also points to two Kiwi hydroelectric companies he holds in his portfolio: Mighty River Power and Meridian Energy. The dual-listed utilities-style stocks will satisfy investors looking for a clean energy investment, but it's doubtful they will benefit from a move towards lower emissions: New Zealand already derives most of its power from renewable sources such as hydro and geothermal.
Energy-efficient technology But there are other ways to play the theme, such as "cleantech" businesses. These do, however, tend to be small and in the early stages of development, limiting their appeal to more mainstream investors.
"We would be happy to invest in those sorts of things, but it's often the case they are not profitable," says Nathan Parkin, who runs Perpetual's SRI Ethical Australian shares fund.. "If it's unproven technologies, we'd prefer to wait and see how they go."
Macri is more open.
"There are a lot of names, you just need to be prepared to go into the small cap space," he says. "We love that space, that's where we generate our outperformance."
A big area of interest for Macri is in technology that helps businesses become more energy-efficient. He points to companies such as Energy Action, which specialises in helping businesses monitor and manage their energy use.
Macri also mentions a business which has just listed on the ASX, Building IQ, which uses CSIRO software to predict temperature changes in buildings using weather data and to ensure the most efficient operation of air-conditioning systems.
"The first thing you can do is underweight the high carbon emitters," Macri adds. "There are a lot of high intensive industries that are still on the ASX which we call 'old economy', and in this low carbon world that Paris has committed the world to, you really don't want to be exposed to the old economy."

Companies that fit the vibe
 Parkin's ethical fund uses what is called a "negative screen" that removes not only high carbon-emitting businesses but also removes other stocks that investors may believe are involved in industries that have negative effects on the community or environment.
But based solely on the size of a company's carbon footprint, Perpetual's screen would remove around 16 per cent of the ASX 300 by market cap. That's the other way to play the green theme, if more indirectly, by avoiding those companies that are going to come off second best in the move to a more clean and green future.
Freedom Foods is a company that is not directly tied to the low carbon theme but fits "the vibe".
Parkin says it's a major holding in his ethical fund. The firm produces nut-free, gluten-free and allergan-free muesli bars and cereals. Freedom Foods has gone from strength to strength, and the share price has tracked that success all the way. After a period of consolidation, the company has "grown into its share price", Parkin says.
"We're quite confidence about the company's future prospects," Parkin says. "They have been investing a lot in growth projects and efficiencies."
"From here on, we'll start to see some interesting results from all the work they've done over the past three years.
Freedom Food, he says, "is operating the right way producing a product that people genuinely see as helpful".
That might not save the world, but for Aussie investors starved of options, it might have to be enough for now.

Australia's Carbon Emissions Are Increasing, Government Report Shows

The Guardian

A report quietly released on Christmas Eve shows Australia’s emissions rose by about 1% in 2014-15, compared with the previous year

Loy Yang coalmine in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, which supplies emissions-intensive brown coal to nearby power plants. Australia’s energy market increased its brown coal use in 2014-15, environment department figures show. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2014-15, a report released with obscure timing by the Australian government has shown.
The December 2015 quarterly update of carbon emissions, which covers the period to the end of June 2015, was released with no fanfare on Christmas Eve. The quarterly update forms part of Australia’s international reporting of its emissions.
It shows that Australia’s emissions increased by 0.8% last financial year compared with the previous one, and 1.3% when land use and deforestation were taken into account. Australia generated 549.3 mega-tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2014-15.
The Australian government promised at the Paris climate talks to reduce emissions by 26% to 28% by 2030 and will likely come under pressure to do more after the world agreed to work to keep the global temperature rise to 2C.
The report points to increases in electricity, stationary energy (excluding electricity), transport, fugitive emissions, and industrial processes and product use. However it says there was a steep decline – 3.8% – in emissions from agriculture.
Emissions from electricity generation rose 3% in 2014-15, despite demand from consumers remaining flat in 2014-15. Power generation from black coal increased by 1.4%, and brown coal generation increased by 9.7%.
Electricity from wind and other renewables (excluding small-scale solar) increased 12.2% on the previous 12 months, but hydroelectric generation fell by 30.3%.
Electricity generation was the largest source of emissions, accounting for 34% in 2014-15.
Prof Will Steffen from the Climate Council told Fairfax Media the December figures showed Australia needed to urgently wean itself off coal to meet its global commitments.
“If we’re putting more into the atmosphere than the year before, than we’re heading in the wrong direction,” he said. “We’ve got to drop emissions fast. We’ve got to get out of fossil fuels very quickly, coal first – there can no new coalmines anywhere in the world.”

Links

• What does the Paris climate agreement mean for Australia?
• Australia could increase emissions 26% and still meet Kyoto pledge, says climate group
• Greg Hunt says overseas emissions credits will 'probably' be allowed
• Welcome to the wonderful world of climate talks, where less means more
• Australia to claim success on climate target, with help of accounting rules
• Shorten: Coalition rightwingers forcing Australians to 'pledge loyalty' to coal

Why Addressing Climate Change Is Not Enough

Huffington Post - Mariajosé Aguilera*

The celebratory mood accompanying the recent Paris Accord, in which the entire UN membership agreed to hold global temperature increases to no more than 2°C, is quickly dissipating. As the Accord itself acknowledges, there is a "significant gap" between countries' climate change mitigation pledges and the 2°C goal (not to mention the more aspirational 1.5° C limit). This means that promised reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, even if realized, will be insufficient to stave off major consequences of climate change.
Yet bolder pledges alone will not prevent impending failure because the Paris Accord reproduces the flaws of the Kyoto Protocol. Although reporting is binding, countries face no penalties for missing their targets. Most of all, market-based schemes for emissions reductions enable wealthy countries and corporations to continue "business as usual" by paying low emitters for their pollution rights, ultimately stalling real and equitable progress. As we write, environmental groups across the world are gearing up to challenge these shortcomings.
But before this struggle -- and the planet -- gets even more heated, it is worth examining the larger context of environmental stewardship. The central issue, which goes beyond climate change, is degradation -- that is, the depletion and contamination of the earth's resources.
Climate change both exacerbates environmental degradation, and results from a growth-at-all-costs economic system that makes certain groups -- especially indigenous peoples and marginalized and low-income populations -- particularly vulnerable to both climate change and resource scarcity and contamination. Recognizing this fact can help climate-related activism and policymaking do a better job of protecting the planet and all who depend on it.
Focusing on single temperature-change targets (and the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions levels required to achieve them) is a handy, unifying strategy for social movements and governments, but it sidesteps other important environmental problems and their underlying, economic, social, and political determinants.
The most pressing environmental degradation problems, leading to a colossal 10 million deaths and untold illness each year, include:

• Depletion, contamination, and unfair distribution of water
  Two-and-a-half-billion people lack access to safe water and adequate sanitation, resulting in up to 3 million annual deaths. Meanwhile, the agricultural sector, dominated by large agribusiness, is responsible for 70% of world water consumption.
• Threats to air quality
  The important focus on industrial and vehicular emissions overlooks the problem of indoor air pollution. According to the World Health Organization, three billion people use open stoves burning biomass (wood, dung, and crop waste) to cook and heat their homes. Smoke and soot inhalation causes a staggering 4.3 million annual deaths from cardiovascular and lung diseases, including half of all childhood pneumonia mortality. 
• Ongoing deforestation and contamination of ecosystems
  Forests are essential to livelihoods, ecosystems, and mitigating climate change and other environmental damage (such as soil erosion), but they are severely threatened by corporate interests such as agribusiness (e.g. massive palm oil plantations in Indonesia and West Africa), mining, and oil and gas development. Worldwide, net forest coverage declines by about 5.2 million hectares per year, concentrated in loss of tropical forests.
• Chemical contamination
  Since World War II, over 85,000 new chemicals have been manufactured and released into the environment. When the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act was enacted in 1976, the powerful chemical industry ensured that 62,000 existing chemicals were "grandfathered" into the program without health or environmental impact assessments. To this day, only a fraction of chemicals have been assessed. In the farming sector, about 2 million tons of pesticides are used annually, causing 7 million non-fatal poisonings and 70,000 fatalities each year among farmworkers across the globe.
• Toxic waste disposal
  Hundreds of millions of people, especially in low-income countries, are exposed to toxic waste, leading to outcomes such as cancer and acute poisonings. High-income countries are perpetrators of this injustice (and consumers, accomplices) by illegally exporting millions of tons of chemical hazards. For example, each year, 50 million metric tons of e-waste (e.g. cell phones, computers) end up in landfills in Ghana, Nigeria, China, and other low-income settings, where surrounding environments and local populations are contaminated with toxins.

Underpinning all of these problems is an unfair economic system that privileges profits over people's lives, exploiting the environment and humans alike.

Those concerned about the long-term sustainability and health of humans and the planet need to look beyond reducing greenhouse gas concentrations and adapting to climate change impacts, and recognize the role of the extraction, production, and consumption processes that drive all aspects of environmental degradation and cause tremendous social injustice.

*This post was coauthored by Anne-Emanuelle Birn, MA, ScD, Ben Brisbois, MES, PhD and Timothy H. Holtz, MD, MPH:

• Anne-Emanuelle Birn is Professor of Critical Development Studies and Global Health at the University of Toronto. She is the lead author of Oxford University Press's Textbook of Global Health (forthcoming 2016). In 2014, she was recognized among the top 100 Women Leaders in Global Health.
• Ben Brisbois is a postdoctoral fellow in the Healthier Cities and Communities Hub of the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He does research on community-based climate change adaptation, and the effects on health of large-scale agriculture and mining.
• Timothy H. Holtz, MD, MPH, FACP, FACPM is an adjunct associate professor of global health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and has taught courses in TB and health and human rights. Dr. Holtz trained in primary care medicine at Harvard University/Cambridge Hospital, and is board certified in internal medicine as well as preventive medicine.

With Kids For Climate Action, Strength ‘Is Going To Come From Numbers’

The Globe and Mail - Mike Hager

Members of Kids for Climate Action sing a climate-change themed Christmas carol during a flash mob at the Pacific Centre food court in Vanouver. (DARRYL DYCK For The Globe and Mail)

As a precocious and sensitive Grade 9 student, Kate Hodgson was hit with a wave of fear and then anger when she was taught about how humanity is hurting the Earth's climate.
"They were telling me that there was this huge issue of climate change and they were telling me that I was to blame for it, and that was a very scary thing," she recalls. "No one around me seemed to care. It was very isolating and I felt really alone in my activism.
"I felt like I was a very small person facing a very huge problem and I didn't really have the tools to address it."
What she felt able to do was begin nitpicking through her family's consumption habits as a way to counter this increasing anxiety about the role they were playing in the warming of the world.
The problem was her parents had a relatively responsible carbon footprint: They had already switched their home in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood over to thermal heating and solar power, biked to work and bought organic groceries.
Ms. Hodgson didn't begin training her focus on the structural problems driving climate change until she decided "off the cuff" to join a 2012 anti-Enbridge rally outside Premier Christy Clark's MLA office in her former Vancouver riding.
"I remember walking down the street holding a protest sign chanting, 'The people united will never be defeated!'" she said in an interview recently. "That was the first time I felt like I could make a difference."
She became the director of the activist group Kids for Climate Action in Grade 11, and organized other Vancouver-area students to protest against regional economic activity they felt was hurting the environment, such as Surrey Fraser Docks proposal to expand a terminal for exporting thermal coal.
Now, as a first-year University of British Columbia arts student, Ms. Hodgson is one of roughly two dozen core members of UBCC350, the campus club pushing the institution to fully divest its $1.3-billion endowment of all firms producing fossil fuels. After helping organize debates for local candidates and drumming up the youth vote on campus during the federal election, her immediate goal is to help the group mobilize people to respond in the event that the university's board of governors votes against divesting $100-million of its investments.
A seasoned veteran of campaigning by the age of 18, Ms. Hodgson says social media "provides a really powerful and really helpful tool for mobilizing people." But she eschews the "clicktivism" of some of her peers for "real action," such as protesting in person, which she said helps people truly learn about an issue.
"It's really important to think about climate change as a movement," she says. "Our strength is going to come from numbers."
Still, forgoing the normal activities of a typical frosh student is not an easy task.
"I never asked to have to spend my evenings organizing forums and meetings," she says. "But I knew that this was my responsibility, that this was so much more important.
"I've had to sacrifice a lot for this fight and I wish I hadn't had to."
She says to be a "climate activist is to feel pain and disappointment so powerfully," but she chalks up her resilience to these "troughs" of hopelessness to her Anglican religion.
"I don't know how people without faith are able to continue to fight because I find so much of my hope, so much of my ability to soldier on, through the hope that is promised by Christianity," she says.
Ms. Hodgson plans to get a geography degree in environmental sustainability, and says she is inspired by writer and activist Naomi Klein and politicians Elizabeth May and David Eby.
Asked what she will do after her studies, all she knows is "that environmental and social work is where my career lies."

Links

• Climate change: How Canada measures up against the world's top emitters
• Can we beat climate change without killing the economy?
• MINING How the collapse of coal is hitting home in Western Canada
• British Columbia finally updates its eight-year-old climate change plan
• Energy, climate issues give hope for thaw in B.C.-Alberta relations
• Environment Changes to B.C.'s climate-change law to depend on national targets

Solar Technology: The Us And China Look To Australian Innovators For Solutions

The Guardian - Annie Kane

Australian-owned and operated Infratech Industries has sold and will export its ground-breaking floating solar system to Holtville City in California. Similar floating solar system currently in place in Jamestown South Australia Photograph: Infratech

In the last fiscal year, Australia earned $172bn from international sales of its natural resources. But earnings are decreasing. The office of the chief economist estimates that energy commodities earnings declined by 6% to $67bn last year because of a decline in revenue from coal exports, and that exports of refined petroleum products have declined by an average of 11% a year over the last decade.
There are hopes however, that Australia could bolster its position by developing its exports of renewable energy – especially those generated through solar technology. The opportunity is there. China – one of Australia's major coal buyers – has committed to increase its share of non–fossil fuels as part of its primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030.
Keith Lovegrove, head of solar thermal at the IT Power Group, who is currently helping to develop a roadmap on solar fuels for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), said: "Here we are in a world where, as of COP21, we're shooting to keep global warming below 2C, and we'll all have to decarbonise. Exporting coal as our major export earner has a limited future. We need to talk about swapping that coal export for a renewable export."
With more than 200 partly sunny days a year, and more than 8m square metres of land mass, solar seems like an obvious direction for Australia to take.
One company that's been successful in this regard is Infratech Industries, an Australian–owned sustainable infrastructure company, which sold and exported its innovative floating solar system – similar to the one currently in operation in Jameson, South Australia that generates around 57% more power than a fixed, land-based system – to the city of Holtville in California earlier this month.
Manufactured to mitigate the need for solar installations to be built on valuable farmland, the 1MW floating solar assembly will float on the surface of water reservoirs at the city's new water treatment facility next year. It will include 276 rafts and 3,576 solar panels, which are fitted with mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the panels and generate more power.
As well as powering the water treatment processes, the array has the added advantage of reducing surface evaporation of the water. It diminishes the penetration of sunlight below the water surface and limits the growth of blue green algae and consequently the need for chemical treatment. And it's also able to withstand earthquakes due to the assembly's ability to shift on the surface of the water, which is handy given Holtville is situated near the San Andreas fault line.
Dr Rajesh Nellore, chief executive officer of Infratech Industries, says that there is a huge market for the technology – for the anti-evaporation aspects as well as the power generation.
"Practically every water reservation is an opportunity and this could be valued in the billions of dollars," he says, adding that Los Angeles' department of power and water recently purchased 96m rubber balls at a cost of US$34.5m (AU$48.2m) to prevent water evaporation.
"With this kind of renewable infrastructure [acting as] an alternative to rubber balls, the market potential is gigantic."
The US isn't the only market investing in Australian concentrated solar photovoltaic technology (CSPV). China's state-owned power company Three Gorges corporation signed a memorandum of understanding with Australian company RayGen earlier this year for the deployment of 500MW of utility-scale CSPV power over the next five years, which could deliver approximately $1bn of sales for the solar technology provider and its Chinese partners, JuYe Solar.
Dr Nellore believes that more government action is needed to establish confidence in the renewable energy export market.
He says there has historically been "limited [government] support for such decentralised infrastructure and especially for small- and medium-sized companies, which form the backbone of the Australian economy." He calls on the federal government to "change its paradigm to become an exporter of renewable energy."
"The federal government could start to value and monetise water savings [to] encourage local governments to do the same. Policies must support and encourage water savings in view of the changing climate.
With the global climate deal resulting in increased ambition to decarbonise the energy sector worldwide, it may not be long before Australia's renewable energy export takes off.
Ian Kay, acting CEO of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which invested $1.7m in RayGen's CSPV Australian pilot project, said: "The Australian market is relatively small in the global context. By tapping into overseas markets, Australian renewable energy innovation can be rolled out to a much larger customer base to bring down costs and become more competitive."

Links

• Solar energy: Australia is not an innovation nation, it's an inertia nation
• 'Game-changing' perovskite solar tech could be cheaper and more efficient
• Solar energy: Australia is not an innovation nation, it's an inertia nation
• Government must shake off hangover of mining to unleash true innovation
• Small is beautiful: the community solar projects taking on big energy

Climate Change Means One World’s Death and Another’s Birth

Wired - Lizzie Wade

Fadil/Corbis

A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedlings of 10 tropical tree species in small, geodesic greenhouses. Some he allowed to grow in the kind of environment they were used to out in the forest, around 79 degrees Fahrenheit. Others, he subjected to uncomfortably high temperatures. Still others, unbearably high temperatures—up to a daily average temperature of 95 F and a peak of 102 F. That’s about as hot as Earth has ever been.
It’s also the kind of environment tropical trees have a good chance of living in by the end of this century, thanks to climate change. Winter wanted to see how they would do.
The answer came as a surprise to those accustomed to dire warnings that climate change will turn the Amazon into a desert. The vast majority of Winter’s seedlings didn’t die. In fact, most thrived at significantly warmer temperatures than they experience today, growing faster and larger. Just two species succumbed to the heat, and only at the very highest temperatures. The trees’ success echoes paleontological data, which hints that warmer temperatures can be a boon for tropical forests. After all, the last time Earth experienced average temperatures of 95 F, there were rainforests in Michigan and palm trees in the Arctic.
That doesn’t mean climate change won’t affect tropical forests of today. It already is. And it definitely doesn’t mean humans needn’t worry about global warming. Climate change will be the end of the world as we know it. But it also will be the beginning of another.
Mass extinctions will open ecological niches, and environmental changes will create new ones. New creatures will evolve to fill them, guided by unforeseen selection pressures. What this new world will look like, exactly, is impossible to predict, and humans aren’t guaranteed to survive in it. (And that’s if civilization somehow manages to survive the climate disasters coming its way in the meantime, from superstorms to sea level rise to agriculture-destroying droughts). Still, experiments like Winter’s offer a glimpse.

A warmer forest
Adapting to a warmer world will be long and painful process for the rainforest, and many species won’t make it through. Even so, “there will still be tropical forests in 2100,” says Simon Lewis, a plant ecologist at University College London and the University of Leeds. They will probably even contain many of the same species ecologists know today, including some of the trees in Winter’s experiments.
It’s the relationships between those species, and the role each plays in the ecosystem, that will change—and, in turn, transform the entire forest. “The forests that come out of this change are probably going to be much different than the kinds of forests we have today,” says Christopher Dick, an evolutionary geneticist who studies tropical trees at the University of Michigan.
Winter’s data hints at one such change in forest structure. The three species that did the best under the highest temperature regime were the coralwood tree (Adenanthera pavonina) a species of fig tree called Ficus insipida, and the balsa tree (Ochroma pyramidale). Each is what Winter called “pioneer species,” fast-growing trees that can quickly move into cleared areas and take over. (F. insipida ups the ante, beginning life as vine that climbs up dead trees—and also living ones, eventually strangling them.)
These kinds of species are vital to a healthy rainforest, helping it regenerate after destructive events like a flood or the death and collapse of a large tree (when those things fall, they take out everything around them). But a mature rainforest needs the species that show up later, too. Those tend to be larger and longer-lived, stabilizing the forest and serving as ecological linchpins for insects, birds, monkeys, vines, and the rest of the ecosystem for decades or even centuries. And it was those so-called “climax species” that suffered the most under higher temperatures in Winter’s experiments.
That suggests that as climax tree species die in a warmer forest, they won’t be replaced. “One would expect that tropical forests of the future would be dominated by those nimble species that can disperse very well,” Lewis says. Pioneer trees that will put down roots anywhere, vines that grow into every nook and cranny, small rodents that reproduce quickly and scurry far, birds that can fly over vast swaths of land and aren’t too picky about where they nest. But that’s a small subset of the thousands of species found in tropical forests today. Without the rest of them, the rainforest will be a much simpler place.

An acidic ocean
Disturbingly, scientists have observed something similar happening in the ocean. Much of the carbon dioxide humans release into the atmosphere is eventually absorbed by the sea, gradually making the water more and more acidic. This process of ocean acidification can wreak havoc on marine invertebrates, dissolving their shells and then their fragile bodies.
But just like in the tropical forest, “there are always the winners as well as the losers of climate change,” says Ivan Nagelkerken, a marine ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. To get an idea of which species might thrive under ocean acidification, he headed to two places where underwater vents already spew carbon dioxide into the sea: Vulcano Island in Italy and White Island in New Zealand. “These CO₂ vents are natural laboratories where you can get a peek into the future,” Nagelkerken explains.
As in Winter’s experiment, that future was far from lifeless. But the kind of life it supports has Nagelkerken worried. Carbon dioxide vents can occur in any marine ecosystem, from coral reefs to kelp forests to seagrass plains. But no matter where you are, life in the most acidic pockets looks strikingly similar. Immediately around a vent, all ecosystems “transform into systems that are dominated by turf algae—very short, fleshy algae with very little structural complexity,” Naglekerken explains. What’s more, “we did not observe a single predator on those vents.”
As a result, the food web is dramatically simplified, the number of fish species drops, and the ecosystem becomes “much less valuable and productive.” Small grazing fish that love turf algae will probably excel in the acidic oceans of the future. But as they take over, “everywhere will start to look like everywhere else,” Nagelkerken says.
The new, homogenous ocean won’t be good for humans. The fish that are likely to thrive in the oceans of the future—small, adaptable species such as gobies and blennies—are, simply, not fish people like to eat. And even if human tastes evolved, those fish wouldn’t fill us up; most gobies clock in at fewer than 4 inches long. Humans like to eat big predators, like tuna and marlin—exactly the kind of species that had disappeared from the CO₂ vents Nagelkerken studied. As ocean acidification restructures marine ecosystems, the first to go will be the fish that people rely on for money and food.

A new pecking order
Of course, Homo sapiens may be the ultimate generalist, nimble enough to survive in almost every environment. “We’re like cockroaches,” Dick says. “I think we’ll stick around. We’ll see the disaster we’ve created.” But the recovery? Maybe not. For the oceans to adapt to the new climate and regain a level of productivity they enjoy today, “it’s not going to be in a few generations,” Nagelkerken says. “You could wait around for 10,000 years.” Similarly, we might be long gone by the time the Amazon looks anything like the complex forest of today.
The flip side of mass extinction, however, is rapid evolution. And if you’re willing to take the long view—like, the million-year long view—there’s a ray of hope to be found in today’s rare species. The Amazon, in particular, is packed with plant species that pop up few and far between and don’t even come close to playing a dominant role in the forest. But they might have treasure buried in their genes.
Rare species—especially those that are only distantly related to today’s common ones—“have all kind of traits that we don’t even know about,” says Dick. Perhaps one will prove to thrive in drought, and another will effortlessly resist new pests that decimate other trees. “These are the species that have all the possibilities for becoming the next sets of dominant, important species after the climate has changed,” Dick says.
That’s why humans can’t cut them all down first, he argues. If rainforests are going to have a fighting chance of recovering their biodiversity and ecological complexity, those rare species and their priceless genes need to be ready and able to step into the spotlight. It might to be too late to save the world humanity knows and loves. But it still can still do its best to make sure the new one is just as good—someday.