A growing Australian industry is set to create an employment boom over the next decade, with close to 60,000 jobs up for grabs.
Want the most satisfying job in the world?
A rapid shift to renewable energy wouldn’t just clean up electricity
generation, it would create an employment boom with as many as 60,000
new jobs.
And the total would at least match the numbers employed
in coal-fired electricity generation, new research released today has
found.
From 7300 to 12,500 jobs a year would be needed for
operation and maintenance of electricity generation without fossil
fuels, according to research by The Australia Institute.
And when
manufacturing of equipment is included, the employment pool could be
boosted by 18,000 to 59,000 jobs, the research found.
Source: The Australia Institute
The 2016 census found just over 8000 people worked in fossil fuel electricity generation.
“In
the decade to 2030, there are far more jobs in building new renewable
generation than there currently are in operating our ageing fossil fuel
generators,” the institute’s research director Rod Campbell said.
“In
the longer term, the operation of utility scale renewables is likely to
have similar levels of employment to fossil fuel generators.”
The
research has, for the first time, attempted to quantify renewable power
advocates’ boast that moving from fossil fuels would revitalise
employment prospects, particularly in regional areas.
And the findings could be used to reassure voters fearful that a
growth in renewable power generation and a diminished demand for coal
would take jobs from their areas.
The research is based on the
Australian Energy Market Operator’s “Fast Scenario” of reaching 53 per
cent renewable energy by 2030. Labor, which is expected to release a
detailed energy policy tomorrow, has proposed a 50 per cent target in
that time.
Solar power was expected to be the big employer.
Solar power is expected to offer thousands of new jobs. Source: Supplied
The Australia Institute report says ongoing rooftop solar expansion
and the installation phase of utility scale solar and wind projects
deliver the majority of those positions, but more than 10,000 ongoing
jobs could be created, predominantly in regional Australia, in the
maintenance and operation of renewable energy facilities under the
policy.
“A serious renewable energy target could drive a jobs boom in Australia, particularly in regional areas,” Mr Campbell said.
“As
employment in the ageing coal power sector declines, new renewable
energy projects are already coming online and creating jobs in
construction, installation and assembly.
“With strong targets,
stable energy policy and support for manufacturing, Australia can clean
up its energy sector and generate substantial employment opportunities.
“A
large proportion of the jobs being created in renewable energy are
outside of the major city centres, which has the potential to give
regional Australia a much-needed boost.”
The researchers acknowledge renewables are unlikely to be mass employment sources.
“While
the sector is capital intensive and so unlikely to ever employ as many
people as major service industries such as education and health care, it
can make a significant contribution,
particularly in regional areas,” the institute said.
“As
more renewable energy is developed, researchers, decision makers and
the public will hopefully gain a better understanding of these
benefits.”
Humanity is already enduring cumulative effects from climate change
and damages will continue to mount along with carbon emissions, a new
study has found. Tropical coastal regions will be the most exposed to
multiple hazards.
The research – which involved analysis of 3280 research papers and was published on Tuesday by Nature Climate Change – identified
467 pathways that populations were already being hit by a warmer
climate. Those impacts will likely increase and intensify unless
aggressive efforts are taken to curb greenhouse gas pollution.
California burning: Tim Billow, 62, tries to save his plantings in his
backyard as the Woolsey Fire burns in Malibu earlier this month.Credit:Ringo H.W. Chiu
"We
never stopped being surprised by how many impacts had already happened
to us," said Camilo Mora, an associate professor at the University of
Hawaii and lead author of the paper.
"It was also mind-blowing that we just refuse to wake up about how serious this is," he said.
Examples
of impacts cited ranged from famine deaths triggered by droughts and
the increased spread of diseases in a warming world, to worsening heavy
metal contamination in lakes after wild fires and a poor Russian wheat
harvest amid heatwaves in 2010 that led to a doubling of world prices
for the commodity.
IMAGE
The tendency towards more extreme
weather includes accelerated evaporation rates as temperatures rise,
worsening droughts and contributing to more severe wildfires – a
combination currently being played out in California, Professor Mora
said.
Similarly,
with the atmosphere holding about 7 per cent more moisture for each
degree of warming, the potential for more intense rain events increases.
About
20-40 per cent of the rainfall from the record wet Hurricane Harvey
that soaked Houston in 2017 has been attributed to climate change,
Professor Mora said.
Coastal
regions were already being exposed to overlapping hazards from both the
land and the ocean, making them particularly vulnerable locations now
and in the future.
If carbon emissions continued to rise unabated
at their current rate, tropical coastal areas such as in Southeast Asia
could face as many as six climate hazards concurrently, the paper said.
These included rising sea level and the increased acidity of oceans as they absorb more carbon from the atmosphere.
Top-down limitations
While societies often relied on top-down approaches to dealing with emissions, the result was often a fragile policy set-up.
Climate change and rising sea levels are affecting the Kiribati Islands in the Pacific Ocean.Credit:Justin McManus
"One person can come along and reverse the whole thing," Professor Mora said.
"We
need to build the solution for climate change from the bottom up," he
said, citing a project currently being tested in Hawaii to make the US
state fully carbon neutral by tree planting and other efforts.
The UNSW climate dividend proposal will be launched on Wednesday by the Member for Wentworth Kerryn Phelps.
Shutterstock
Today, as part of the UNSW Grand Challenge on Inequality, we release a study entitled A Climate Dividend for Australians that offers a practical solution to the twin problems of climate change and energy affordability.
It’s a serious, market-based approach to address climate change
through a carbon tax, but it would also leave around three-quarters of
Australians financially better off.
It is based on a carbon dividend plan formulated by the Washington-based Climate Leadership Council,
which includes luminaries such as Larry Summers, George Schultz and
James Baker. It is similar to a plan proposed by the US (and Australian)
Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
How it would work
Carbon emissions would be taxed at A$50 per ton, with the proceeds returned to ordinary Australians as carbon dividends.
The dividends would be significant — a tax-free payment of about A$1,300 per adult.
The average household would be A$585 a year better off after taking
account of price increases that would flow through from producers.
If those households also cut their energy consumption as a result of the tax they would be even better off.
And the payment would be progressive, meaning the lowest-earning
households would get the most. The lowest earning quarter would be
A$1,305 a year better off.
Untaxed exports, fewer regulations
For energy and other producers making things to sell to Australians,
the tax would do what all so-called Pigouvian taxes do — make them pay
for the damage they do to others.
But Australian exporters to countries without such schemes would have their payments rebated.
Imports from countries without such schemes would be charged “fees” based on carbon content.
This means Australian companies subjected to the tax wouldn’t be
disadvantaged by imports from countries without it, and nor would
importers from countries with such a tax.
The plan would permit the rollback of other restrictions on carbon emissions and expensive subsidies.
Our estimates suggest the rollbacks have the potential to save the Commonwealth A$2.5 billion per year.
It’s working overseas
Our plan is novel in the Australian context, but similar to one in
the Canadian province of British Columbia which has a carbon tax that
escalates until it reaches C$50 per ton, with proceeds returned to
citizens via a dividends.
Alaska also pays long-term dividends from common-property resources.
The proceeds from its oil reserves have been distributed to citizens
since 1982, totalling up to US$2,000 per person.
It could be phased in
We would be open to a gradual approach. One option we canvass in the
report is beginning with a A$20 per metric ton tax and increasing it by
A$5 a year until it reaches A$50 after six years.
The dividends would grow with the tax rate, but the bulk of
households would immediately be better off in net terms and much better
off over time.
And it would be simple
Our plan doesn’t create loopholes or incentives to get handouts from
the government, as have previous plans that directed proceeds to
polluters.
It will not satisfy climate-change deniers, but then no plan for
action on climate change would do that — other than perhaps the governmment’s direct action policy, which provides a costly taxpayer-funded boondoggle to selected winners.
But for those who understand that climate change is real, our plan
balances the important benefits we gain from economic development and
associated carbon emissions against the social cost of those emissions.
It does it in a way that provides compensation to all Australians,
but on an equal basis, making the lowest-income Australians
substantially better off.
It is the sort of policy that politicians who believe in both the
realities of climate change as well as the power and benefits of markets
ought to support.
A seaside neighborhood in Mexico Beach, Fla., devastated by Hurricane Michael this year. Credit Scott Olson/Getty Images
Global warming is posing such
wide-ranging risks to humanity, involving so many types of phenomena,
that by the end of this century some parts of the world could face as
many as six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers say.
This chilling prospect is described in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, a respected academic journal, that shows the effects of climate change across a broad spectrum of problems, including heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, drought and shortages of clean water.
Such
problems are already coming in combination, said the lead author,
Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He noted that Florida
had recently experienced extreme drought, record high temperatures and
wildfires — and also Hurricane Michael, the powerful Category 4 storm
that slammed into the Panhandle last month. Similarly, California is suffering through the worst wildfires the state has ever seen, as well as drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality that threatens the health of residents.
Things will get worse, the authors wrote. The paper projects future trends
and suggests that, by 2100, unless humanity takes forceful action to
curb the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, some
tropical coastal areas of the planet, like the Atlantic coast of South
and Central America, could be hit by as many as six crises at a time.
That prospect is “like a terror movie that is real,” Dr. Mora said.
The
authors include a list of caveats about the research: Since it is a
review of papers, it will reflect some of the potential biases of
science in this area, which include the possibility that scientists
might focus on negative effects more than positive ones; there is also a
margin of uncertainty involved in discerning the imprint of climate
change from natural variability.
New York can expect to be hit by four climate crises at a time by 2100 if carbon emissions continue at their current pace, the study says, but if emissions are cut significantly that number could be reduced to one. The troubled regions of the coastal tropics could see their number of concurrent hazards reduced from six to three.
The
paper explores the ways that climate change intensifies hazards and
describes the interconnected nature of such crises. Greenhouse gas
emissions, by warming the atmosphere, can enhance drought in places that
are normally dry, “ripening conditions for wildfires and heat waves,”
the researchers say. In wetter areas, a warmer atmosphere retains more
moisture and strengthens downpours, while higher sea levels increase
storm surge and warmer ocean waters can contribute to the overall
destructiveness of storms.
New York can expect to be hit by four climate crises at a time by 2100 if carbon emissions continue at their current pace, the study says, but if emissions are cut significantly that number could be reduced to one. The troubled regions of the coastal tropics could see their number of concurrent hazards reduced from six to three.
The
paper explores the ways that climate change intensifies hazards and
describes the interconnected nature of such crises. Greenhouse gas
emissions, by warming the atmosphere, can enhance drought in places that
are normally dry, “ripening conditions for wildfires and heat waves,”
the researchers say. In wetter areas, a warmer atmosphere retains more
moisture and strengthens downpours, while higher sea levels increase
storm surge and warmer ocean waters can contribute to the overall
destructiveness of storms.
A
search-and-rescue team looking for human remains in the aftermath of
the recent Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif. The state is also suffering
from drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times
In a scientific world marked by specialization and siloed research, this
multidisciplinary effort by 23 authors reviewed more than 3,000 papers
on various effects of climate change. The authors determined 467 ways in
which those changes in climate affect human physical and mental health,
food security, water availability, infrastructure and other facets of
life on Earth.
The paper
concludes that traditional research into one element of climate change
and its effects can miss the bigger picture of interrelation and risk.
Climate
change also has different ramifications for the world’s haves and
have-nots, the authors found: “The largest losses of human life during
extreme climatic events occurred in developing nations, whereas
developed nations commonly face a high economic burden of damages and
requirements for adaptation.”
People
are not generally attuned to dealing with problems like climate change,
Dr. Mora said. “We as humans don’t feel the pain of people who are far
away or far into the future,” he said. “We normally care about people
who are close to us or that are impacting us, or things that will happen
tomorrow.”
And so, he said, people
tend to look at events far in the future and tell themselves, “We can
deal with these things later, we have more pressing problems now.” But,
he added, this research “documented how bad this already is.”
The paper includes an interactive map
of the various hazards under different emissions scenarios for any
location in the world, produced by Esri, which develops geographic
information systems. “We see that climate change is literally redrawing
the lines on the map, and revealing the threats that our world faces at
every level,” said Dawn Wright, the company’s chief scientist.
Michael
E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was
not involved in the paper, said it underscored the urgency for action to
curb the effects of climate change and showed that “the costs of
inaction greatly outweigh the costs of taking action.”
Dr. Mann published a recent paper
suggesting that climate change effects on the jet stream are
contributing to a range of extreme summer weather events, such as heat
waves in North America, Europe and Asia, wildfires in California and
flooding in Japan. The new study, he said, dovetails with that research,
and “is, if anything, overly conservative” — that is, it may
underestimate the threats and costs associated with human-caused climate
change.
A co-author of the new paper, Kerry
Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hailed its
interdisciplinary approach. “There’s more than one kind of risk out
there,” he said, but scientists tend to focus on their area of research.
“Nations, societies in general, have to deal with multiple hazards, and
it’s important to put the whole picture together.”
Like
military leaders developing the capability to fight wars on more than
one front, governments have to be ready to face more than one climate
crisis at a time, Dr. Emanuel said.
Dr.
Mora said he had considered writing a book or a movie that would
reflect the frightening results of the research. His working title,
which describes how dire the situation is for humanity, is unprintable here. His alternate title, he said, is “We Told You So.”
The unsubsidised cost of wind and solar now
beats coal as the cheapest form of bulk generation in all major
economies except Japan, according to the latest levellised cost of
electricity analysis by leading energy analyst BloombergNEF.
The latest report says the biggest news comes in the two fastest
growing energy markets, China and India, where it notes that “not so
long ago coal was king”. Not any more.
“In India, best-in-class solar and wind plants are now half the cost
of new coal plants,” the report says, and this is despite the recent
imposition of import tariffs on solar cells and modules.
The China experience is also significant. While local authorities
have put a brake on local installations, causing the domestic market to
slump by one third in 2018, this has created a “global wave of cheap
equipment” that has more than compensated for increased financing costs
caused by rising interest rates.
The cost of battery storage is also falling – so much so that in
countries like Australia and India, pairing unsubsidised wind and solar
with four hours of battery storage can be cost competitive with new coal
or gas plants.
“Short-duration batteries are today the cheapest source of new
fast-response and peaking capacity in all major economies except the US,
where cheap gas gives peaker gas plants an edge. As electric vehicle
manufacturing ramps-up, battery costs are set to drop another 66 per
cent by 2030, according to our analysis,” the report says.
This is stunning stuff. BloombergNEF’s assessment of the ability of
wind, solar and storage to beat new fossil fuel plants in Australia
comes nearly a full decade before the prediction made by the Australian
Energy Market Operator in its Integrated System Plan.
It would also suggest that the only hope that the current federal
Coalition government has in trying to encourage new investment in coal
is for upgrades and extensions of existing coal plant, which may become
the limit of its rushed attempts to contract new “24/7” or “fair dinkum”
generation.
(RenewEconomy sought more information about the estimated costs, but the report details have been reserved for clients).
BloombergNEF says the emergence of battery storage as a source of
peak power and flexible capacity means that the costs of these services
will fall to levels never reached before by conventional fossil-fuel
peaking plants.
“Batteries co-located with PV or wind are becoming more common,” the report says.
“Our analysis suggests that new-build solar and wind paired with
four-hour battery storage systems can already be cost competitive,
without subsidy, as a source of dispatchable generation compared with
new coal and new gas plants in Australia and India.
The Bloomberg analysis follows quickly on the heals of the recent
annual Lazard uptake, and the voluminous World Energy Outlook from the
more conservative International Energy Agency. All three come to the
same conclusions: wind and solar and storage will beat out fossil fuels.
Globally, BloombergNEF says the benchmark global levellised cost of
new PV (no-tracking) has fallen 13 per cent from the first half of the
year to $US60/MWh, although the lowest costs occur in countries with
excellent solar resources such as Australia.
This graph above shows the costs in China, where solar and wind have now
begun to challenge coal, beat nuclear and also gas. If the combination
of solar and battery appears to put it out of the market, this next
graph may provide some context, as it shows the comparison between
battery storage and the current choice of meeting peak demand, gas
peakers.
It shows that for short one hour durations, battery storage is
already easily the cheapest, and as battery costs continue to fall, even
four hour battery storage will beat the current thermal options for
meeting demand peaks and fast response.
BloombergNEF’s benchmark global levelized cost for onshore wind sits
at $US52/MWh, a six per cent fall from its analysis six months ago,
thanks to cheaper turbines and a stronger US dollar. The technology is
now as cheap as $US27/MWh in India and Texas, without subsidy.
In the US, even with cheap shale gas, wind beats combined-cycle gas
plants (CCGT) as a source of new bulk generation. And if the gas price
rises above $US3/MMBtu, BloombergNEG suggest existing CCGT are going to
run the risk of becoming rapidly undercut by new solar and wind.
“This means fewer run-hours and a stronger case for flexible
technologies such as gas peaker plants and batteries that do well at
lower utilization (capacity factor),” it says.
In the Asia-Pacific, gas is more expensive which means that new-build
combined-cycle gas plants with a levelized cost of $US70-117/MWh
continue to be less competitive than new coal-fired power at
$US59-81/MWh. This remains a major hurdle for reducing the carbon
intensity of electricity generation in this part of the world.
BlombergNEF’s LCOE analysis covers nearly 7,000 projects across 20 technologies and 46 countries globally.
With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.
California is currently ablaze, after a record hot summer and a dry fall set the stage for the most destructive fires in the state’s history. Above: The Woolsey fire, near Los Angeles, seen from the West Hills. Photograph by Kevin Cooley for The New Yorker
Thirty years ago, this magazine published "The End of Nature," a long
article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my
twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate
science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted
with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that
nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its
capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic
metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its
water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began
referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.
I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely
that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988,
George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight
“the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did
his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world,
and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has
become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California
is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu,
and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the
most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of
unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than
half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city
called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten
thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than
six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs,
a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and
anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on
how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.
For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that
conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars
are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better
prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer
signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our
environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the
human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in
2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically
malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started
to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and
fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts
and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling,
was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and
climate-induced disasters.”
In a prolonged warming scenario, the organisms that are most relied upon to sustain food networks will die out first. Photo: istock
It may feel sad but not the end of the word to lose a few species of
plants or animals from global warming. It’s a crowded world, right?
Plenty of species are dying out and life goes on is a common fatalist
mantra.
But a new study from Australia and Italy has proved that idea horribly wrong.
Researchers
from Australia and Italy created 2000 virtual Earths (variations of the
planet we live on) and then subjected them to different stresses such
as runaway global warming, nuclear winter following the detonation of
multiple atomic bombs, and a large asteroid impact.
The domino effect
Each
scenario came to the same disturbing conclusion: plant or animal
species killed off by extreme environmental change dramatically
increases the risk of an extinction domino effect that could annihilate
all life on Earth.
Once certain species fell to oblivion, others followed – and the whole system eventually collapsed.
Even when some species were blessed with artificial adaptations to climate change, the mass of life was lost.
“Even
the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies
among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive ecosystems to
collapse,” said lead author Dr Giovanni Strona of the European
Commission’s Joint Research Centre based in Ispra, northern Italy.
The co-extinction syndrome
As
a statement from Finders University in Adelaide put it: “This is the
worst-case scenario of what scientists call ‘co-extinctions’, where an
organism dies out because it depends on another doomed species.”
The findings were published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
Professor
Corey Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at
Flinders University. He and his team develop models to predict ecosystem
function, resilience, and change in the past, present, and future.
Dr Bradshaw told The New Daily that working with a virtual Earth allowed the team to do any “crazy God-like experiment” they wanted.
“And
so we’d take out species at random and see what happened,” he said.
“We’d do that progressively until we got a full extinction curve for all
life.”
The speediest end
The quickest way to kill the planet, he said, was taking out the most ecologically important species first.
“They’re
the ones with the most connections in a network. Losing them is the
worst-case scenario. When something that is only connected to one or two
species dies off, it isn’t going to be missed so much,” Dr Bradshaw
said.
When the team warmed up the planet, they found that warming
“effectively mimicked the experiment where we knocked out the
ecologically most important species. This is what surprised us: warming
turns out to be the worst case scenario”.
The beginning of the end
comes with the loss of plant life. “Plants have a low tolerance to
temperatures at the top end. When you knock out certain plant
communities, the herbivores have nothing to eat. Then the predators that
eat the herbivores have nothing to eat.”
As the world warms up,
it’s the trees that will begin to die out in greater numbers. “A tree
can only stand a couple of days above 45 degrees. If that heatwave lasts
a couple of weeks, they’re wiped out. Then all the things that live in
the trees, the bird and insects, they all go as well. Warming is the
worst because it affects the plants the most.”
Dr Bradshaw said
that failing to take into account these co-extinctions means we are
underestimating the rate and magnitude of the loss of entire species
from events like climate change “by up to 10 times.”
He said that
humans had evolved to not think about the worst-case scenario “because
it’s psychologically stressful” and easier to say that things will never
get so bad.
“But not taking into account this domino effect gives
an unrealistic and exceedingly optimistic perspective about the impact
of future climate change.”
In a statement, Dr Strona said: “In the
case of global warming in particular, the combination of intolerance to
heat combined with co-extinctions mean that five to six degrees of
average warming globally is enough to wipe out most life on the planet.”
