Life After Solving Climate Change: Not Mud Huts And Gruel But Clean Air And Warm Homes

USA Today - Elizabeth Weise


President Trump’s pick for leading a climate change panel is notorious for denying the science behind human-caused global warming. We dive into the counter-arguments on climate change. USA TODAY

President Trump’s pick for leading a climate change panel is notorious for denying the science behind human-caused global warming. We dive into the counter-arguments on climate change.
What will life be like after we've solved climate change? Better than today or worse? Mud huts and gruel, or flying cars and the Jetsons?
Comfy homes, good food, whip-smart appliances and robots hopping around on farms all seem pretty likely, experts queried by USA TODAY said. All in all, our living standard will be the same, only a lot greener and more efficient.
That view is in stark contrast to a common complaint by critics who object to making global warming-based changes to the economy, suggesting such changes would destroy America’s standard of living and force everyone to “live in yurts and eat tofu,” as one commenter put it.

EARTH DAY
80 beautiful photos from around the world for Earth Day

The group of monuments at Hampi in India consist of ruins of several beautiful Dravidian temples and palaces - the last remnants of the Vijayanagar kingdom.

“Every single proposed solution will simultaneously improve life and decrease carbon emissions,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of climate science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who has provided testimony and scientific expertise on climate change to the White House, the governor of California and U.S. congressional offices.
These predictions presume the shift to carbon-neutral energy, industrial and transportation systems happens in time to slow and eventually reverse the effects of global warming the planet is already beginning to experience: rising oceans, more flooding, worse storms and increase heat waves and droughts.
That means that whatever happens next, experts say, depends entirely on how quickly we act. Many of these technological and policy changes are already underway, but need to be sped up. Today, humans pour 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually. People must shift away from those carbon emissions within the next 20 years to avoid "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
For Earth Day, let’s presume we've successfully made that shift to a carbon-neutral world and you, your children or your grandchildren are waking up on a crisp fall morning sometime between 2050 and 2100. What’s the day like?

An image of "The Jetsons," the futuristic classic cartoon. (Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution)

When do you need those dishes?
Houses won’t look all that different, though homes will almost certainly have solar power included if it's appropriate for the area. This will be especially important in hot and sunny parts of the country, to decrease the pressure on power production for cooling during the day. California already has a law requiring that all new homes built after 2020 include solar panels.
Homes will still have heat and cooling, electric lights, lots of electronics and big windows. But the systems and appliances will be much more efficient and much smarter.
This shift is already happening — today's refrigerators are about 20% larger but use one-quarter the electricity compared to those sold 20 years ago. The LED lightbulbs you buy at the grocery store use 20% of the energy the incandescent bulbs of a decade ago did, said Jay Apt,  a physicist and professor who directs the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
When occupants get out of bed, the house will likely be a comfortable temperature. Properties will probably still have a furnace or an electric heat pump. But they won’t be used as much because homes will be much better insulated, with windows that keep heat and cold in and out.
The systems used to heat buildings will likely look different than the ones we know today. One example already being used in some U.S. buildings involves pre-heating or chilling water when power is cheap, and then using it during the day when power is more expensive.

A vision of what the German city of Berlin might look like as carbon neutral. (Photo: Courtesy: The Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance.)

“It’s like radiators. In the ceiling of each floor you have a cold-water air heat exchanger, the cold water sits in a series of pipes, the air blows across it and becomes quite cold and it blows in to cool the room,” said Apt.
After getting out of bed, the next step might be to check the dishwasher to get out a cup for coffee. The dishwasher, along with most appliances, will likely be tied to a smart system in your house that knows the power cost at different times of the day. If the local power company gets significant power from wind turbines, the cheapest power may be at night. If it’s from solar, it might be cheapest during the day.
“Your dishwasher may very well communicate with the electric power grid and say ‘OK, Mr. Smith has decided that he only wants to run his dishwasher only when the price of power is less than 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, so your dishwasher may decide to run at 2:00 in the morning,” says Apt.
Or you might set an override to tell the appliance that whatever the price, the dishes have to be done by 6 p.m., in time for dinner.
Another infrastructure change will likely be the more common use of geothermal heat pumps. These take advantage of the fact that the ground beneath our feet tends to stay about 50 degrees Fahrenheit in summer or winter.
That means if you run pipes down 6 to 8 feet below a house or apartment building, you can cool or heat a liquid in those pipes to around 50 degrees. That liquid can then be piped up to the building and used to bring the temperature inside to 50 degrees.
If it's a cold winter day and it's 20 degrees outside, the house is already up to 50 degrees and you only need to heat it another 15 degrees to be comfortable. If it's a hot summer day of 90 degrees, you cool the temperature down with no energy needed, said Apt.

Here a turbine, there a turbine
Coal, oil and many natural gas-fired power plants will have long ago closed. Instead, the nation will likely be powered by a mix of nuclear, wind, solar, hydroelectric and some natural gas.
The power grid will have been rebuilt to accommodate more periodic power inputs, with the positive effect of also allowing it to be protected against physical and cyber attacks.
Driving across America, the sight of large solar arrays or wind turbines will be common, much as seeing oil rigs is an everyday sight in much of the United States now. You might also run across tall arrays that pull carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into fuel and the raw material for industrial uses.

Charging of the electric car. Businessman's hand holding the electric cable to the car. Car features have been changed. (Photo: Getty Images)

Fun cars, fast charging
The car of the future will be electric. That’s because electricity is easy to generate from carbon-neutral sources such as wind, solar and nuclear. It’s a shift that’s already underway. In Norway, 58% of all cars sold in March were electric, according to Norway’s Road Traffic Information Council.
That’s a far cry from the fewer than 1% of cars in the United States that are electric today, but most experts presume the shift will happen relatively quickly. It also won’t be wrenching, said Chris Field, director of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
“The electric car I have right now is the best car I’ve ever had. It’s a Chevy Bolt. It’s very practical, well thought out and fun to drive. It’s a really great car,” he said.
Those future cars will have a range between charges that will likely be much more than today’s 225 miles. Many estimates put it at 400 miles by 2028. There will likely be fast charging outlets nationwide, just as there are gas stations today. Already, new homes in Atlanta must be built to accommodate electric vehicles.

Cities of the future will likely have mostly apartment buildings and townhouses that are walkable and with bike paths built in. (Photo: Tourism Calgary)

Walk to the gym
More and more people will live in cities, which produce dramatically fewer greenhouse gasses per person than suburbs. But the cities will be designed with the kind of human-friendly density that already is being incorporated into city planning across the globe.
They’ll have mostly apartment buildings and townhouses that are walkable and with bike paths built in. Excellent mass transit will be available on electric buses and vans. Businesses and office buildings will be interspersed rather than plunked down miles out of town in office parks and malls.
That shift away from far-flung suburbs is already apparent in today’s generation. “Young people want to be able to walk to the grocery store and the office and the gym,” said Fields.
Others will choose space to spread out or cheaper land and housing, preferences made more sustainable due to the increasing ability to work from home or commute by electric vehicles.

People walk by the co-working space WeWork in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn on March 26, 2019 in New York City. WeWork, which lets freelancers and other non-traditional workers to become members in a shared or flexible office space, has expanded globally over the last year. (Photo: Spencer Platt, Getty Images)

Telecommuting for fun and profit
Work will be more integrated with living areas. But wherever it is, the office will have been built to very high standards to reduce waste, save water and conserve energy. Already more than 33,000 buildings in the United States have gotten LEED certification, marking them as highly efficient.
Not that everyone will still go to an office every day. Telecommuting all or part of the time will become more common as the tools for doing so — fast Internet and good video connections — become cheaper, better and easier to use. More people will also work from communal workspaces near where they live.
Big U.S. companies are already beginning to do this. Amazon, Apple and Google have dozens of offices across the nation where people can work, so they don’t all need to move to Silicon Valley in California or to Seattle. Many young people are already used to working from shared office spaces such as WeWork and ImpactHub.

High-speed train model at the Capitol in Sacramento, California, in 2015. (Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

NYC to Chicago in 5 hours
For travel within the United States, a network of high-speed electric trains will likely crisscross the country, making rapid travel easily accessible. San Francisco and Los Angeles are three hours apart by rail, Chicago to New York five hours.
We’ll still fly places, but it will likely be more expensive than some of today’s rock-bottom prices. Jet fuel has to be very energy dense, so electric planes are out of the question. Instead, they’ll use fuel produced from carbon dioxide pulled out of the air or industrial waste gases, or from aviation biofuel made from organic waste from trash or leftover biomatter from agricultural fields.
Both are already being used. In 2018, Virgin Atlantic flew a Boeing 747 from Orlando to London using fuel made in part from captured greenhouse gas emissions.

A Virgin Atlantic VS16 flight preparing for take off at Orlando International Airport in Florida on October 2, 2018. (Photo: Doug Peters, PA Wire)

Is that a robot in that field?
What’s old will be new again in many ways when it comes to food and farming, experts say. The nation's food supply is likely to be fresher and more wholesome as growers and sellers become better at managing logistics to minimize travel time and loss.
We’ll eat more seasonably than we do now because we’ll be paying more for energy and farmers will be thinking harder about water and energy usage.
“We’ve gotten into this mode that we expect to see blueberries and oranges every week of the year. As energy costs go higher and water becomes even in more short supply in the future, not every type of food will be available at every moment,” said Robert Myers, a professor of agriculture at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, and an expert on climate change and sustainable agriculture.
Not that kiwis won’t be available from New Zealand, or tomatoes in December, but they’ll be more expensive.
Amanda Little, author of the forthcoming book “The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World,” said mankind will likely be eating the same kinds of food we eat today, but it will be produced differently and much more efficiently.
That's especially true of meat, which she predicts will be either plant-based faux meat or tissue grown in vats that is identical to meat on a cellular level.
“It’s very inefficient to raise an entire animal just to eat the edible parts of it,” she said.
Meat from animals will still be available, what we’ll call “craft” or “specialty” meat, but a far bigger portion of the meat industry will come from either plant- or cell-based meats.
Little says cell-based meat is closer than we realize. She had some vat-grown duck just last week.
“It was chewy and greasy but it tasted very meaty. For a very early stage lab meat product, it was very convincing.

Robert Blair bought this multirotor hexacopter, an unmanned aircraft, to monitor his farm in Kendrick, Idaho. (Photo: Robert Blair via AP)

Farms will likely look the same driving by, but a closer look will show differences. Older practices, like planting clover and other cover crops during the winter, will be more common to improve soil health, making it more able to withstand floods or drought and decrease the amount of fertilizer needed. Complex crop rotations, aided by computers, will make farming more efficient and cheaper because they will require less fertilizer and pesticides.
Those fields will likely also incorporate wind turbines or solar panels to give growers additional income. That’s already happening today. Many farms in the Midwest are getting rents of $3,000 to $5,000 per year to put turbines on their land, Apt says.
Fields also might have drones buzzing over them or small robots running down the rows, stopping to test the soil for moisture, nutrients and image the crops for weed or insect infestations. That information will be automatically fed to the farmer, who can use it to precisely water and care for each small land unit as required, rather than needlessly wasting expensive water and chemicals.
Ranchers and dairy farmers can use similar technology to move their cows and cattle from one paddock to another on an almost daily basis, mimicking what a buffalo herd would have done. Called intensive management grazing, it results in healthier land and better forage for the animals, ultimately bringing costs down.

Energy for everyone
The world’s air and water will be cleaner as we stop using polluting energy sources. The planet's resources will also become more equitable, as carbon-neutral energy sources become cheaper and more efficient, making them available to people in parts of the world where energy is currently expensive and difficult to obtain.
And it’s all doable, no breakthroughs required, said Stanford's Diffenbaugh. “The knowledge necessary for getting on that path is available,” he said.

Links

• 99.9999% chance humans are causing global warming, and other science-based facts on climate change for Earth Day
• The Next Reckoning: Capitalism And Climate Change
• Protests And Purchasing Power Could Be Positive Tipping Points In Climate Change
• Tip The Planet: Tackling Climate Change With Small, Sensitive Interventions
• Climate Change: Yes, Your Individual Action Does Make A Difference
• We Have The Tools To Beat Climate Change. Now We Need To Legislate
• Do You Pass These Climate Change Tests?
• Be The Change You Want To See In The World: How Individuals Can Help Save The Planet From Climate Catastrophe
• The Young Minds Solving Climate Change
• Harvard Scientists Want To Limit How Much Sunlight Reaches Earth's Surface In Order To Curb Global Warming
• How 34,500 Tonnes Of Food Waste Is Powering Melbourne Homes

Climate Change Poses A Clear Financial Risk To Australia

The Guardian - Chris Barrett* | Anna Skarbek*

With our world-class solar and wind energy resource base, Australia stands to benefit from a successful – and rapid – low-carbon transition

Cars sit in flood waters outside in south-east Queensland. ‘How much financial risk are we exposed to from the effects of climate change, or from a delayed, bumpy transition to a low-carbon future?’ Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

Climate policy has never been easy in Australia. But despite the debates of the past, Australians are pretty used to many of the policies that seek to regulate carbon emissions in our everyday lives. We know how to purchase green power for our homes; that our buildings are regulated for the energy they use; and that our household appliances come plastered with energy-efficiency star ratings.
But what about our bank accounts, our super, our insurance policies and investment funds? How does our money contribute to causing – or preventing – dangerous climate change? How much financial risk are we exposed to from the effects of climate change, or from a delayed, bumpy transition to a low-carbon future? What are policymakers and regulators doing about those risks? Climate Risk and the Finance System, a new report from the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, addresses these fundamental questions.
This second type of climate risk and opportunity – the massive implications of climate change for the financial system – is a fairly new frontier in climate policy. It has developed rapidly over the last three to four years internationally, and is now reaching Australia, where both the potential risks and opportunities raised by finance sector and regulatory reforms to address climate change are immense.
These reforms have their roots in the last financial crisis and a growing determination by international policymakers to avoid climate change being the cause of any future crisis. Two events pushed them to the top of the agenda: the landmark speech of highly respected Bank of England governor Mark Carney in September 2015 on the potentially grave risks to financial markets from climate change; and the Paris agreement in December of the same year, which firmly and for the first time placed a key responsibility upon the finance sector to shape the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Both raised the clear risk of trillions of dollars of high-emitting assets – including coalmines, power stations, oil rigs and gas plants – becoming “stranded” (ie devalued or worthless) assets in a world shifting rapidly out of high-carbon activities.
Australia is disproportionately exposed to such risks due to its highly carbon-intensive economy and its rebounding levels of emissions since 2013. Yet Australia also stands disproportionately to benefit from a successful low-carbon transition, with a world-class solar and wind energy resource base, mineral resources critical to battery production and a large and sophisticated funds management industry on hand to provide financial services to realise these opportunities.
This makes it all the more important for Australia to study the rapid progress made on the international sustainable finance policy agenda in recent years, and to draw on this experience for its own reform process.
For example, central bankers and financial supervisors have started to tackle the risks of climate change, establishing the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) in 2017. From an initial founding coalition of eight members, the network has grown within 18 months to number 35, including the Reserve Bank of Australia. Each has committed itself to “contribute to the development of environment and climate risk management in the financial sector, and to mobilise mainstream finance to support the transition toward a sustainable economy”. This is new terrain for traditionally conservative institutions, speaking to a growing urgency behind this agenda.
Further, Europe has embarked on a comprehensive sustainable finance policy reform agenda. Initiated in late 2016, and moving to policy design and implementation from early 2018, it includes important down payments in reforming sustainability benchmarks, disclosure regulations, investor duties and in defining a “taxonomy” of sustainable activities. These will have a large impact also beyond Europe’s shores, both since they apply to businesses operating in the vast European Union capital market, but also because of the best practice example they offer for others to copy.
The United Kingdom ran its own related policy reform process, reporting in March 2018. Government has yet to respond, but the process signals an interesting pro-green finance direction at odds with fears that the UK would turn in a deregulatory direction once freed from European frameworks. Both Canada and New Zealand have convened similar expert panels to push sustainable finance reform.
Intriguingly for Australia, our largest trading partner China has moved with speed on the same agenda, mandating liability insurance for environmental pollution and disclosures of environmental information. The potential size of China’s green finance sector gives these reforms an international resonance beyond their domestic impacts.
In conclusion, Australia has numerous positive reform examples to draw on. The recently announced Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative brings together finance sector leaders to develop a roadmap for the sector to address climate risk. Key industry players are aligned, domestic regulators have done solid groundwork, and there is a well-defined set of international best practices and international fora within which best practice can rapidly be transmitted. All the ingredients are there for Australia to catch up with the rest of the world, and quickly.

*Chris Barrett is executive director, finance strategy, at the European Climate Foundation and former Australian Ambassador to the OECD. 
*Anna Skarbek is CEO of ClimateWorks Australia.
They are the authors of Climate Risk and the Finance System.

Links

• Climate Risk and the Financial System - Chris Barrett & Anna Skarbek (pdf)
• The financial sector must be at the heart of tackling climate change - Mark Carney, François Villeroy de Galhau and Frank Elderson
• The RBA has sounded the climate change alarm. Time to sit up and take notice
• Heavyweights Now Speaking With One Voice On Climate Change Risks
• Why Climate Change Risks Are 'Material' For Big Finance
• APRA Demands Banks, Insurers Act On Climate Risk
• The RBA Has Sounded The Climate Change Alarm. Time To Sit Up And Take Notice
• 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
• Financial Giants Can Have A Pivotal Role For Climate Stability
• Australian Businesses Must Do More To Disclose Climate Change Risks To Investors, ASIC Says
• The Global Heatwave Is About To Hit Your Wallet
• 'Carbon Bubble' Could Spark Global Financial Crisis, Study Warns
• ASIC Warns On Climate Risk As Heat Turns On Directors
• Australian Firms Told To Catch Up On Climate Change Risk Checks
• Grave Climate Warning For Governments And Business: "This Is About Money"

Australia Can Be Powered 100% By Renewables By Early 2030s, Says Garnaut

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash

Leading economist and climate change policy expert Professor Ross Garnaut says that Australia could be powered 100 per cent by “intermittent” renewables by the early 2030s, and have a grid that is both reliable and secure and cheaper than it is now.
In the third of a series of six public lectures being delivered by Garnaut in the lead up to the next election, Garnaut says a grid powered by wind and solar, and backed by storage and demand management, could be achieve quite quickly, but it would require the “train wreck” of regulatory failures to be fixed.
“I now have no doubt that intermittent renewables could meet 100 per cent of Australia’s electricity requirements by the 2030s, with high degrees of security and reliability, and at wholesale prices much lower than any experienced in Australia over the past decade,” Garnaut says in his talk last week at the University of Melbourne (a video of which can be seen here).
“More importantly, I now have no doubt that with well designed policy support, firm power in globally transformative quantities could be supplied to industrial locations in each State at globally competitive prices.
“That is around $45 to $50 per MWh today, whenever the power is required. No other developed country has a comparable opportunity.
 “That means that we can contribute our fair share to the global effort to contain temperature increases as close as possible to 1.5°C, even if it takes time to make strong headway in other sectors.”
Garnaut sees the electricity sector as the key to cutting emissions across the economy, and for securing Australia’s long-term economic future and as a global base for low-cost industry.
That’s because decarbonising the grid is the quickest and cheapest option, and in turn can lead to zero, or near zero emissions in transport, much of industry and fugitive emissions.
In turn, the decarbonisation of Australia’s electricity grid can play a big role in global decarbonisation efforts, because it could lead to exports of renewable energy in the form of hydrogen or ammonia to north Asia, and then other economies, and through sub sea cables to Indonesia and beyond.
“Australia’s renewable energy is a path to low cost emissions reduction in the rest of the world,” Garnaut says. “And before that, if wet our act together, we can going to find ourselves as the natural home of energy intensive industry.”



In a series of slides, Garnaut illustrates how this is possible. This slide above is probably the most stunning, because it compares the total cost of solar compared to just the operating costs of coal generation over the past 10 years, and looking forward to 2025.
Garnaut notes that solar was significantly more expensive than coal a decade ago, it is now cheaper than just the operating costs of coal.
Further falls in the cost of solar, to around $30/MWh by 2025, and further rises in the operating costs of coal, would mean it would make no sense to make new investments in coal generation from now on. Even with firming and storage, solar and wind beat fossil fuels, as the CSIRO and the Australian Energy market Operator have recognised.
This, he notes, has come as something of a surprise to most of the major global and national institutions, who have been consistently wrong in their estimations of technology costs.
These next two graphs illustrate how.



First is the cost of solar. International forecasts are the shaded blue and green in the middle. The forecasts from Australian institutions, including the Australian Energy Market Operator and even recent ones from the highly conservative Electric Power Research Institute, are ridiculously out of the ball-park.
The actual cost of solar – as reflected in recent power purchase agreements (PPAs) is revealed in yellow. It is far below even the most optimistic forecast. And it will continue to fall.



The same is true of wind energy (above), where the IEA and the global wind lobby were quite conservative in their forecasts, but in Australia the AEMO and EPRI were again out of the ballpark.
Garnaut worries that AEMO – despite its good work in putting together the Integrated System Plans over the last two years – may still be underestimating the cost falls in solar particularly.




He noted this graph which shows that AEMO’s forecasts have been significantly wrong over the last decade, and even with the major adjustments to the starting point every two years, it still downplays the possibility of future cost falls.
Garnaut says the evidence is clear – for each doubling in capacity, there has been a 24 per cent reduction in costs. This has been happening for the better part of four decades, and there is no reason to expect it would stop now,
“The story of the fall in solar PV prices is a triumph for climate policy,” Garnaut says, pointing to the policies in Germany and Europe at the start of the century that underpinned the growth in manufacturing and scale and the subsequent fall in costs.
Garnaut lamented the policy and political debate over renewable energy in the past decade, and the “train wreck of regulatory failure” that would need to be cleared to make room for the underlying economic forces.
This is particularly significant, because it is now widely recognised that it is not economics, or even engineering that is holding back the clean energy transition, but regulatory hurdles that are looming large as the major impediment.
This goes to the wholesale regulatory capture of regulator by the industry, although Garnaut did note the positive influence of AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman and AER chief Paul Conboy.
“Whoever did those appointments should be recognised as Australian heroes,” he said, adding that regulatory agencies are starting to “do their job” and shifting from the old thinking around the synchronous energy system that had dominated perspectives.
Garnaut noted the state-wide blackout in South Australia, and lamented the fact that rather than being seen as a call to action on climate change, it was used – within hours – by Coalition politicians to argue against the use of renewables.
Thankfully, Garnaut said, it did lead to some forward thinking by then South Australia premier Jay Weatherill, who put in his plans that saw the construction of the highly successful Tesla big battery, and the back-up generators that have been used once, but very successfully since then.
“Since the summer of 2016-17, the Tesla big battery, other batteries, the Government’s gas turbines, and more attentive regulatory agencies have made South Australia possibly the most secure region within the National Energy Market,” Garnaut said.
 He noted that the one area that former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was able to move forward was in the promotion of the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme, probably because it “looked like technology that came from the 1950s”.
However, Garnaut said he was concerned about both the expense of the project, and the potential market power. He suggested taking the Snowy 2.0 scheme and putting it into a separate government owned entity that would provide “reliability services” at minimum cost.
Garnaut concluded his lecture by focusing on the opportunity of a zero carbon grid, powered by wind and solar.
“Australia emerged as a major player in global energy in the later decades of the fossil economy. Australia is by far the world’s biggest exporter of coal when you take thermal and metallurgical coal together. It is currently the second biggest exporter of gas, and is headed soon to be the biggest—at great cost to Australian consumers and industry.
“Australia became the world’s biggest exporter of aluminium in the late twentieth century after the Japanese industry, responding to environmental concerns at home, moved to importing metal, and Australia’s low coal costs made it the logical location for new production.
“Australia lost its old advantages in the fossil energy world economy in the twenty first century through developments discussed this evening.
“The rich natural endowment of potential for renewable energy means that when the whole world has low or zero emissions energy, Australia potentially has the lowest cost energy.
“If we secure the new opportunity, unlike the last, it will be sustainable.”

Links

• Jump In Renewable Energy Jobs As Solar Farms Overtake Hydro Power
• Renewable Energy Could Save $160 Trillion In Climate Change Costs by 2050
• 2018 Was Boom Year For Renewables Despite Political Chaos, Report Finds
• Four Corners Report Shows Climate Change Concerns Heating Up Ahead Of Federal Election
• How 34,500 Tonnes Of Food Waste Is Powering Melbourne Homes
• Australia Has Enough Solar, Wind Storage In Pipeline To Go 100% Renewables
• Snowy 2.0 Project Given Funds And Approval For Early Work Phase By Federal Government
• 100% Renewables Can Be Reached Quickly, But It Needs A Plan
• Australia Could Be 100% Renewables By 2032 At Current Rate Of Wind And Solar Installs
• Wind, Solar Eat Further Into Coal Supply On NEM, As Coalition Pushes For More Coal Supply On NEM

We Underestimate Young People Because It's Convenient

Fairfax - Caitlin Fitzsimmons*

When I was nine, the threat of nuclear war loomed large. I understood that Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States and Mikhail Gorbachev the leader of the Soviet Union. I knew about the nuclear arms race, specifically the Star Wars program and MX Missile, and the movement for nuclear disarmament.
I was a tad precocious but no prodigy, and I remember talking about the nuclear threat with other children.

When I was a child, the threat of nuclear war loomed large. Credit: Reuters

So I’m not remotely surprised that nine-year-olds today are writing about climate change and even the Paris agreement in their school work.
Of course, they are - climate change is an existential threat for Generation Z. Did you think they wouldn’t notice?
In a recent incident that made the news, the NSW Department of Education ordered Ramsgate Public School to remove two letters from students published in an online newsletter.
The children had written letters about climate change, notionally to Prime Minister Scott Morrison though the letters weren’t sent, as part of an exercise in persuasive writing.
A department spokesman told The Sun-Herald the letters were written after a geography lesson about the Great Barrier Reef. The spokesman said there was no problem with the lesson or the letters themselves but because they were addressed to the Prime Minister and were critical of government policy, the publication of the letters breached the Controversial Issues in Schools policy.

Young people are concerned about the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, which is threatened by warming water temperatures.

The incident was reported in The Daily Telegraph, which quoted two right-wing think tanks and a conservative academic in a story about how teachers are ostensibly subjecting children to a political agenda in the classroom and “brainwashing young, immature and vulnerable children with their politically correct ideology”.
The same rhetoric was used to belittle the children and teenagers in the school student strike for climate - even the 17-year-olds who were nearly of voting age were dismissed as “pawns”.
Last week, Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, the girl who started the worldwide school strike movement, addressed the British Parliament.
Predictably, people who don't want to hear her message choose to attack her instead - they mock her appearance and stern manner, her Asperger's, claim she is paid to protest, and dismiss her on the basis that she has only just turned 16.
If you would prefer to listen to an adult who has studied the issue then by all means do so - they will tell you the same as Thunberg. The difference is that Thunberg's youth gives her message about the future a certain moral clout.
Climate change is a tough issue for teachers and not just because they are hamstrung by policy.
A relative who teaches primary school recently confided in me about the emotional cost of teaching Gen Z, when he is increasingly pessimistic about their future given the devastation of our natural world.
Let’s not pretend that children and teenagers can’t understand what’s going on. Young people are young people and they are smarter than we give them credit for.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Professor Tonia Gray, a specialist in pedagogy and learning at the University of Western Sydney: “We underestimate the capabilities and the skills of the modern child. Don’t sell them short and don’t dumb it down.”
Associate Professor Penny Van Bergen, an education expert at Macquarie University, says a child aged nine is old enough to learn complex concepts such as climate change and even the principles of the Paris agreement.
UNICEF recently released its 2019 Young Ambassador Report based on consultations with 1517 Australian children and teenagers and an additional survey of 1007 young people aged 14 to 17. The report found young Australians are “extremely worried about what they see as the ongoing failures of governments, businesses and communities to act as effective stewards for a clean and livable environment”.
Students as young as Year 5 start to clearly express these opinions. Even preschoolers brought up the fact that litter could harm wildlife.
Among the surveyed teenagers, the vast majority (86 per cent) view climate change as a threat to their safety, with 73 per cent saying it affects the world “a lot” now and 84 per cent saying it will affect the world “a lot” in the future.
Three out of four want Australia to be taking action on climate change, to lead by example and play our part in stopping its worsening effects.
Only 8 per cent believe we shouldn’t take action because of negative effects on the economy and only 5 per cent that we are too small a nation to make a difference.
Only 4 per cent do not believe climate change is both real and caused by human activity.
Other environmental concerns such as plastic pollution, extinction of animals, deforestation and coral bleaching also rate highly. (If any readers want to argue about climate change, don’t bother - instead please focus your attention on any of the myriad of environmental problems you do acknowledge).
It suits adults to underestimate children because it means we don’t have to take them or their concerns seriously.
It’s a form of ad hominem argument, where you seek to discredit the person rather than engage with their substantive argument.
No one wins hearts and minds by demonising a child, so they’ll portray them as brainwashed innocents instead.
Young people and all future generations are the ones who will inherit a vastly depleted natural world. The only way to counter that moral authority is to call them “pawns” in a debate they couldn’t possibly understand.
Or we could hear the message and act.
As Thunberg says, we need to act like the house is on fire - because it is.
If we do anything less, the young will never forgive us.

*Caitlin Fitzsimmons is the associate editor of The Sun-Herald.

Links

• Save our minds by saving the world
• Teen activists back Steggall in 'logical next step' to climate strike
• Climate Change Spurs Shannon Loughnane's 700km Cross-Country Protest Hike
• The Young Minds Solving Climate Change
• The Rise Of Students Against Climate Change
• Students Worldwide Skip School To Demand Tough Action On Climate Change
• Climate Change Strikes Across Australia See Student Protesters Defy Calls To Stay In School
• Teenage Climate Activist Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize
• The Uncanny Power Of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric
• The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future
• Greta Thunberg Backs Climate General Strike To Force Leaders To Act
• Humanity Is At A Crossroads, Greta Thunberg Tells Extinction Rebellion
• Forget Brexit And Focus On Climate Change, Greta Thunberg Tells EU

Ocean-Dwelling Species Are Disappearing Twice As Quickly As Land Animals

Smithsonian.Com - Meilan Solly

Researchers point toward marine creatures’ inability to adapt to changing water temperatures, lack of adequate shelter

Kevin Lino NOAA/NMFS/PIFSC/ESD Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Marine animals are twice as vulnerable to climate change-driven habitat loss as their land-dwelling counterparts, a new survey published in the journal Nature finds.
As Mark Kaufman reports for Mashable, the analysis—centered on around 400 cold-blooded species, including fish, mollusks, crustaceans and lizards—suggests marine creatures are ill-equipped to adapt to rising temperatures and, unlike land animals that can seek shelter in the shade or a burrow, largely unable to escape the heat.
“You don't have anywhere to go,” Natalya Gallo, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the study, tells Kaufman. “Maybe you can hide under a kelp leaf, but the entire water around you has warmed.”
Speaking with National Geographic’s Christina Nunez, lead author Malin Pinsky, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, further explains that ocean dwellers “live in an environment that, historically, hasn’t changed temperature all that much.”
Given that cold-blooded creatures rely on their surroundings to regulate body temperature, relatively stable marine ecosystems have actually made their inhabitants more susceptible to significant temperature changes. And while ocean temperatures are still much lower than those on land, as Anthony J. Richardson and David S. Schoeman point out in an accompanying Nature News and Views piece, marine heat waves, increased carbon dioxide pollution and other products of global warming are driving Earth’s oceans to higher temperatures than ever before.
To assess the threat posed by warming waters, Pinsky and her colleagues calculated “thermal safety margins” for 318 terrestrial and 88 marine animals. According to Motherboard’s Becky Ferreira, this measure represents the difference between a species’ upper heat tolerance and its body temperature at both full heat exposure and in “thermal refuge,” or cooled down sanctuaries ranging from shady forests to the depths of the ocean.
The team found that safety margins were slimmest for ocean dwellers living near the equator and land dwellers living near the midlatitudes. Crucially, Nunez writes, the data revealed that more than half of marine species at the higher end of their safety margins had disappeared from their historical habitats—a phenomenon known as local extinction—due to warming. Comparatively, around a quarter of land animals had abandoned their homes in favor of cooler environments.
On average, tropical marine creatures have a safety margin of 10 degrees Celsius. “That sounds like a lot,” Pinsky tells Nunez, “but the key is that populations actually go extinct long before they experience 10 degrees of warming.” In fact, Pinsky notes, just a degree or half-degree shift can dramatically impact such animals’ food-finding skills and reproduction abilities.
While some marine creatures can escape the heat by migrating to colder waters, others have fewer options: As Mashable’s Kaufman observes, surface-dwelling fish can’t simply move to the deep ocean and expect to thrive or even survive. The same is true of marine animals living in the shallow waters off of continental shelves, Bob Berwyn adds for InsideClimate News. And these species, as well as ones forced to flee their long-time habitats, are far from obscure ones likely to have no impact on humans’ livelihood; many, including halibut and winter founder, serve as key food sources for coastal communities.
“This affects our dinner plates in many cases,” Pinsky says to Kaufman.
Berwyn highlights several examples of animals reaching or surpassing their heat threshold. Coral reef-dwelling damselfish and cardinalfish, for example, have started to disappear from some areas, hampering the health of these already threatened ecosystems. Summer flounder, once native to the North Carolina coast, have moved to cooler waters, forcing fishermen to travel some 600 miles further north than before in order to catch them.
Although the new study emphasizes marine dwellers’ plight to an extent little-seen in academia, Alex Gunderson, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at New Orleans’ Tulane University, is quick to point out that terrestrial creatures remain at risk, too: As he tells National Geographic’s Nunez, “Land animals are at lower risk than marine animals only if they can find cool shaded spots to avoid direct sunlight and wait out extreme heat.”
Building on the researchers’ call to lower greenhouse gas emissions, stop overfishing and limit ocean habitat destruction, Gunderson concludes, “The results of this study are a further wake-up call that we need to protect forests and other natural environments because of the temperature buffer that they provide wildlife in a warming world.”

Links

• Sea animals are more vulnerable to warming than are land ones
• Global Warming Is Hitting Ocean Species Hardest, Including Fish Relied on for Food
• Climate change is way worse on ocean animals
• Sea Creatures Getting Wiped Out Twice as Fast by Global Warming
• Ocean Heat Waves Are Threatening Marine Life, Biodiversity
• Greater vulnerability to warming of marine versus terrestrial ectotherms
• Why sea creatures are fleeing their homes

Get Set For Take-Off In Electric Aircraft, The Next Transport Disruption

The Conversation - Jake Whitehead | Michael Kane

Multiple forms of electric aircraft are being developed rapidly. MagniX, Author provided (No reuse)

Move aside electric cars, another disruption set to occur in the next decade is being ignored in current Australian transport infrastructure debates: electric aviation. Electric aircraft technology is rapidly developing locally and overseas, with the aim of potentially reducing emissions and operating costs by over 75%. Other countries are already planning for 100% electric short-haul plane fleets within a couple of decades.
Australia relies heavily on air transport. The country has the most domestic airline seats per person in the world. We have also witnessed flight passenger numbers double over the past 20 years.
Infrastructure projects are typically planned 20 or more years ahead. This makes it more important than ever that we start to adopt a disruptive lens in planning. It’s time to start accounting for electric aviation if we are to capitalise on its potential economic and environmental benefits.

What can these aircraft do?
There are two main types of electric aircraft: short-haul planes and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles, including drones.
The key issue affecting the uptake of electric aircraft is the need to ensure enough battery energy density to support commercial flights. While some major impediments are still to be overcome, we are likely to see short-haul electric flights locally before 2030. Small, two-to-four-seat, electric planes are already flying in Australia today.


An electric plane service has been launched in Perth.

A scan of global electric aircraft development suggests rapid advancements are likely over the coming decade. By 2022, nine-seat planes could be doing short-haul (500-1,000km) flights. Before 2030, small-to-medium 150-seat planes could be flying up to 500 kilometres. Short-range (100-250 km) VTOL aircraft could also become viable in the 2020s.
If these breakthroughs occur, we could see small, commercial, electric aircraft operating on some of Australia’s busiest air routes, including Sydney-Melbourne or Brisbane, as well as opening up new, cost-effective travel routes to and from regional Australia.

Possible short-haul electric aircraft ranges of 500km and 1,000km around Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Author provided

Why go electric?
In addition to new export opportunities, as shown by MagniX, electric aviation could greatly reduce the financial and environmental costs of air transport in Australia.
Two major components of current airline costs are fuel (27%) and maintenance (11%). Electric aircraft could deliver significant price reductions through reduced energy and maintenance costs.
Short-haul electric aircraft are particularly compelling given the inherent energy efficiency, simplicity and longevity of the battery-powered motor and drivetrain. No alternative fuel sources can deliver the same level of savings.
With conventional planes, a high-passenger, high-frequency model comes with a limiting environmental cost of burning fuel. Smaller electric aircraft can avoid the fuel costs and emissions resulting from high-frequency service models. This can lead to increased competition between airlines and between airports, further lowering costs.

What are the implications of this disruption?
Air transport is generally organised in combinations of hub-and-spoke or point-to-point models. Smaller, more energy-efficient planes encourage point-to-point flights, which can also be the spokes on long-haul hub models. This means electric aircraft could lead to higher-frequency services, enabling more competitive point-to-point flights, and increase the dispersion of air services to smaller airports.
While benefiting smaller airports, electric aircraft could also improve the efficiency of some larger constrained airports.
For example, Australia’s largest airport, Sydney Airport, is efficient in both operations and costs. However, due to noise and pollution, physical and regulatory constraints – mainly aircraft movement caps and a curfew – can lead to congestion. With a significant number of sub-1,000km flights originating from Sydney, low-noise, zero-emission, electric aircraft could overcome some of these constraints, increasing airport efficiency and lowering costs.
The increased availability of short-haul, affordable air travel could actively compete with other transport services, including high-speed rail (HSR). Alternatively, if the planning of HSR projects takes account of electric aviation, these services could improve connectivity at regional rail hubs. This could strengthen the business cases for HSR projects by reducing the number of stops and travel times, and increasing overall network coverage.

Synchronised air and rail services could improve connections for travellers. Chuyuss/Shutterstock

What about air freight?
Electric aircraft could also help air freight. International air freight volumes have increased by 80% in the last 20 years. Electric aircraft provide an opportunity to efficiently transport high-value products to key regional transport hubs, as well as directly to consumers via VTOL vehicles or drones.
If properly planned, electric aviation could complement existing freight services, including road, sea and air services. This would reduce the overall cost of transporting high-value goods.

Plan now for the coming disruption
Electric aircraft could significantly disrupt short-haul air transport within the next decade. How quickly will this technology affect conventional infrastructure? It is difficult to say given the many unknown factors. The uncertainties include step-change technologies, such as solid-state batteries, that could radically accelerate the uptake and capabilities of electric aircraft.
What we do know today is that Australia is already struggling with disruptive technological changes in energy, telecommunications and even other transport segments. These challenges highlight the need to start taking account of disruptive technology when planning infrastructure. Where we see billions of dollars being invested in technological transformation, we need to assume disruption is coming.
With electric aircraft we have some time to prepare, so let’s not fall behind the eight ball again – as has happened with electric cars – and start to plan ahead.

Links

• Electric aircraft - Wikipedia
• Why aren't there electric airplanes yet?
• Electric aircraft aren't far off, but we need to prepare
• Airlander 10: £1m grant for craft to go 'all-electric'
• Australia’s magniX chosen to power Eviation electric aircraft
• Harbour Air Is Switching Over To 100% Electric Seaplanes
• The future of flying is electric planes - Mashable
• Fly Electric: The Aircraft of the Future Takes Flight - The Atlantic
• Don't trust the environmental hype about electric vehicles? The economic benefits might convince you
• End of the road for traditional vehicles? Here are the facts

Tim Winton: Our Leaders Are Ignoring Global Warming To The Point Of Criminal Negligence. It's Unforgivable

The Guardian - Tim Winton

Our leaders are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. It's unforgivable

Two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef was hit by back-to-back mass coral bleaching. Photograph: Kerryn Bell/ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies 

I’ve been asking myself a question – and even posing it makes me queasy.
Is it too late – are we beyond saving?
As a culture and a polity, when it comes to climate change, have we arrived at a point where we are now expected – even trained – to abandon hope and submit to the inevitable?
OK, I guess that’s two questions. In good faith I can still say that the answer to the first is no. But I’d be a liar and a fool to give the same response to the second.
No, it isn’t too late. But we’ve squandered decades of opportunities to mitigate and forestall impacts and we’re making a pig’s breakfast of responding to what is now a crisis. Even so, humans are not yet beyond saving themselves from the worst ravages of global warming. There’s fight in us yet, even if it’s a bit shapeless.
The problem – and it’s an existential threat both profound and perverse – is that those who lead us and have power over our shared destiny are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence.
Worse than that, their policies, language, patronal obligations and acts of bad faith are poisoning us, training citizens to accept the prospect of inexorable loss, unstoppable chaos, certain doom. Business as usual is robbing people of hope, white-anting the promise of change. That’s not just delinquent, it’s unforgivable.
Over the last 15 years in Australia our national governments have failed to respond effectively to the challenge of climate change, and for most of that time we actually gave ourselves the luxury of calling it a challenge.
Now it’s more of a crisis. And it’s not as if our leaders are incapable of producing a timely response to a crisis. After all, in 2009 the government took bold steps to avoid an economic depression. And in the matter of refugees arriving by boat, governments still spend billions on emergency-level funding and infrastructure to meet what they view as a crisis of national security.
But in the case of climate change there’s no equivalent sense of immediacy, no sense of priority commensurate with the dangers it poses to our future ability to feed ourselves, defend our largely coastal settlements, insure our homes, maintain national security and keep our children safe from harm.

I worry that this widely-shared grief and unfocussed rage may become the signal human disposition of our time

The message implicit in our governments’ refusal to act is that we should all just suck it up – as in “climate change is bullshit, and even if it’s not there’s nothing you can do about it”.
Once internalised, this narrative is profoundly dangerous, not only for individuals, but for the entire community. It’s a licence for nihilism, a ticket to hell in a handbasket. And the cohort responsible for this mixture of denial and fatalism is far removed from the daily experience of the ordinary citizen, especially the youngest and poorest of us. They have become a threat to our shared future and we must hold them to account, immediately and without reservation.
In the last 25 years I’ve observed a peculiar social phenomenon in individuals and communities that I mistakenly thought I understood because I was a child of the cold war.

Dead fish in the Darling River at Menindee, New South Wales, Australia. Officials on 28 January 2019, found hundreds of thousands of dead fish in the Menindee weir pool and neighbouring waterways. Photograph: Graeme Mccrabb Handout/EPA

While working to help save ecosystems across Australia I’ve noticed a bruised attitude of beleaguerment in individuals and within groups that’s increasingly hard to ignore, a mounting grimness in the faces and language of people barely holding on in the face of steady, cumulative and unrelenting losses.
They’re losing places, ecosystems, potential. It’s not restricted to activists; I see it in neighbourhoods and towns, I read it online, I get it in the mail. Ordinary folks – young and old – watching their waterways curdle, their soils blow away, their green spaces bulldozed, their fish gasping for air. Feeling wounded and betrayed, some are clinging to the last tendrils of hope, others are falling into despair. And that worries me.
Ecological depletion is being experienced communally as a mounting loss of access and an erosion of possibility. In essence, a pruning back of future prospects. It’s expressed as grief, and the most palpable, widespread and immediate expression of it is now brewing over climate change.
Beneath that grief there’s rage.
I worry that this widely-shared grief and unfocussed rage may become the signal human disposition of our time, that the Anthropocene will be marked by fury and hopelessness. This frightens me just as much as the prospect of beachside properties falling into the sea, or even the death of our coral reefs. Acidifying cultures are as chaotic and dangerous as acidifying oceans.
Younger people in particular have begun to feel abandoned by their leaders and elders. They suspect they’ll be left without food or ammunition to stage a fighting retreat in which every battle is a defeat foreseen and every bit of territory was surrendered in advance by politicians and CEOs who deserted them long ago to hide in their privileged bunkers and silos.
So what hope for our kids? Why should we be surprised they’d walk out of school and march? Their futures are being traded away before their eyes. They see what many of their elders and betters refuse to acknowledge. That they’re being robbed.
During the cold war many of us were gripped by dread – it was personal and communal – and in the books and films of the era our anxiety was palpable. We lived every day with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, and sometimes that possibility was clear, present and extremely proximate, a matter of hours and minutes when a possibility became an actual probability.
And for some time now I’ve been trying to see our current crisis through that lived experience. Because we survived, didn’t we? The worst never happened. No one pressed the button. So, chances are, all will be well this time, too – right?

The Great Barrier Reef experienced bleaching events so catastrophic they caused our most senior coral scientists to weep

But the reason humanity survived the cold war is because world leaders paid attention. They took emergent crises seriously. And in each instance of utmost danger, arguments of ideology and nationalism eventually fell away before the sacred importance of life itself. Beneath all the posturing there was, finally, a bedrock of humanity informing the technocrats and generals. Stepping back from the brink was expensive. Think what it cost in terms of pride, political prestige, assets, even territory. Consider the expenditure of ingenuity and infrastructure.
And there’s our problem. Because in this country, when it comes to climate change, there’s no equivalent attention to the crisis. For some there’s no crisis at all.
Our governments and corporations are ensnared in a feedback loop of “common sense” and mutual self-preservation that’s little more than a bespoke form of nihilism. Ideology, prestige, assets and territory are now tacitly understood to be worth more than all life, human or otherwise.
And the four great capacities of humanity to solve a crisis – ingenuity, discipline, courage and sacrifice – these seem to be reserved for more important enterprises. The future, by all accounts, can wait.
But the future is already with us. The button has been pushed – again and again.
In 2011, along hundreds of kilometres of the West Australian coast, abalone crawled off the reefs to die in their untold thousands on the baking white beaches because of a 2-degree spike in sea temperature. A little further north at Shark Bay, the world’s largest seagrass meadows suffered a sudden mortality of 20%. In the Northern Territory two years later, mangrove forests died along a 1,000km stretch of coast. And the Great Barrier Reef experienced successive bleaching events so catastrophic they caused the nation’s most senior coral scientists to weep.
Here’s the thing. To our current national government climate change is but a dry-lightning storm in a district unknown. For the denialists who control policy, the storm itself is an endlessly debatable phenomenon. And if the parish it’s lighting up really does exist, then it can safely be dismissed as remote and insignificant.
But that district is real. Most of us know it as the immediate future. Some know it as the present. And it’s already burning. It’s peopled with folks who weep and seethe and dread what else may lie ahead.
We can no longer wait patiently for our leaders to catch up. We cannot allow ourselves to be trained to accept hopelessness. Not by business, nor by governments. Both have subjected us to a steady diet of loss and depletion. It’s sapped us and left us mourning a future we can see fading before it even arrives.
There’s no good reason to submit to this. No sane purpose in putting up with it. Because grief will paralyse us, and despair renders doom inevitable. We can afford neither.
Australians can make a bad outcome inexorable by submitting to it meekly. Or we can fight for a viable future and meet this crisis shoulder to shoulder. I am of the passionate belief that we can and will. But to do this we’ll need to get our house in order – and fast. That means calling bullshit on what’s been happening in our name for the past 15 years.
It’s time to make sharp demands of our representatives, time to remove those who refuse to act in our common interest, time to elect people with courage, ingenuity and discipline, people who’ll sacrifice pride, privilege and even perks for the sake of something sacred.
Because there’s something bigger at stake here than culture wars and the mediocrity of so-called common-sense. It’s the soil under our feet, the water we drink, the air we breathe.
Life. It’s worth the fight. But, by God, after decades of appeasement, defeatism and denialism, it’s going to take a fight. Time’s short. So, let’s give our grief and fury some shape and purpose and reclaim our future together.
Enough cowardice.
Enough bullshit.
Time for action.

Links

• Enough scandalous time-wasting on climate change. Let's get back to the facts
• 'We’ve been forced into this': Australia's school climate strikes to go global
• This scientist thinks she has the key to curb climate change: super plants
• Greens propose supporting Labor climate policy in environment deal