Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Up For Four Years In A Row

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 rose for a fourth year in a row, an increase at odds with the country's Paris climate pledge, according to a government submission to the United Nations.
The National Inventory Report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change showed emissions last year were 537 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (which include all greenhouse gases), based on preliminary figures.

Yallourn Power Station in Victoria's Latrobe Valley. The power sector has been one of the few to show falling emissions as renewables increase their share. Credit: AAP

That tally, which includes changes to land-use and forestry, was up 0.4 per cent from 2017's 534.7 million tonnes of CO2-e.
The Morrison government is due to release its full figures for 2018 emissions by the end of this month. The UN report provides an indication of which way the trajectory will be pointed.

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Australia's emissions have risen for the past four years

Source: United Nations Climate Change/Australia 2019 National Inventory Report

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The responsibility for emissions now lie with Angus Taylor, who has had emissions added to his energy portfolio following the Coalition's election win earlier this month.
"This government has committed to a sensible and achievable emissions reduction target," Mr Taylor said. "We have a strong track record of meeting and beating our targets."
"Australia has over-achieved on our commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, something few countries have done."
Australia pledged at the 2015 Paris climate summit to lower emissions by 26 to 28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.
About half that abatement effort, though, will come from the use of so-called carry-over credits generated by exceeding targets during the Kyoto periods.
Labor campaigned on a promise to achieve a 45 per cent reduction on 2005 levels without using Kyoto credits.

On the rise
Tim Baxter, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, said it was not surprising 2018 showed an increase in annual emissions since "there's no meaningful policy to reduce them".
He added that with fugitive emissions increasing rapidly in particular "there's no reason to think" 2019's emissions won't make it five years in a row of rising pollution.

Land-use gain
The government's emissions figures would have shown a faster increase if not for land use, land-use change and forestry - known by the acronym LULUCF - serving as a carbon sink for the past four years. The report noted that Australia's forest area had increased by an estimated 772,000 hectares in 2017, and by 4.6 million hectares since 2010.
Those estimates, though, have been disputed by some environmental groups. They point to the Queensland government data showing a rapid rise in land-clearing in recent years, while NSW has also loosened its native vegetation laws in the past two years.
Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens environment spokeswoman, said pollution was "skyrocketing under the Liberals as the climate emergency threatening our country and planet continues".
“This is a slap in the face to those who say the election means the climate wars are over," Senator Hanson-Young said. “Our environment laws need fixing so pollution monstrosities like Adani and oil drilling in the [Great Australian] Bight are assessed for their climate impact."
Meanwhile in Brisbane, Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel on Wednesday said the Morrison government should use vehicle emissions standards to help meet climate targets if it won’t introduce a price on carbon.
Speaking at the annual APPEA conference, Dr Finkel said he hoped the government would look at all means of achieving its Paris target, adding "an alternative to a carbon tax is regulated requirements".
"So if you think about transport, just the need to have an emissions cap on carbon dioxide per kilometre, would be a big part of an emissions reduction policy," he said.
According to the most recently released quarterly greenhouse gas figures for Australia, the fastest growing sources of pollution were so-called fugitive emissions from the energy sector - such as extraction of fossil fuels - and from processing of gas.
The electricity sector reported a 3.2 per cent year-on-year drop in emissions for the 12 months to September 2018 but remained the largest source, accounting for about a third of Australia's total.

Links

• Australia Keeps Voting For Coal, But Investors Are Quietly Abandoning Plans For New Mines
• Australians Could Have Saved Over $1 Billion In Fuel If Car Emissions Standards Were Introduced 3 Years Ago
• National Grid Has More Immediate Challenges Than Electric Cars
• Renewable Energy Could Save $160 Trillion In Climate Change Costs by 2050
• Poll Shows 50% Of Australians Support Shifting All Sales Of New Cars To Electric Vehicles By 2025
• Four Corners Report Shows Climate Change Concerns Heating Up Ahead Of Federal Election
• 'Woefully Dirty': Government Accused Over Australia's Failure To Cut Vehicle Emissions
• 'Coal To Blame' For Last Year's Record Emissions From Energy
• Australian Faces Free Trade Agreement Pressure To Cut Emissions
• Expanding Gas Mining Threatens Our Climate, Water And Health
• 'Death blow': Corals, algae don't acclimatise to more acidic seas

'Death Blow': Corals, Algae Don't Acclimatise To More Acidic Seas

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Coral and algae species subjected to more acidic seawater showed no acclimatisation to the new conditions for over a year, a new study has found, suggesting that vulnerable reefs may not be able adapt fast enough to cope with climate change.
With oceans absorbing about 22 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a day, seas have already become about 30 per cent more acidic over the past two centuries.
Shell-forming creatures from oysters to types of plankton are increasingly at risk from the changes, which have been called the "evil twin" - along with higher temperatures - of climate change.

Research into coral reefs extends from studying how they cope with higher temperature to what happens when waters turn more acidic.Credit: Jason South

A team of scientists exposed four coral and two coralline, or calcifying algal, species to varying ocean acidity levels for a year at the Moorea reef in French Polynesia to test their responses.
They found "completely no change over a year", said Christopher Cornwall, a researcher based at Victoria University in Wellington, and an author of the paper published in Nature Climate Change on Tuesday.
"We expected that over the course of the year they would slowly get acclimatised," Dr Cornwall said. "In reality they displayed the same responses at the start and the end of the experiment."

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The acidity of waters around Australia is increasing (pH is decreasing)
pH Australian waters

Source: CSIRO

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Since some coral species are known to be more tolerant of lower pH water than others, they would be expected to become more dominant over time as ocean acidification increases - provided they can cope with the marine heatwaves that trigger bleaching events.
The stability of the reefs themselves, though, could be undermined if the calcifying algae become less productive, Dr Cornwall said.
"The reef itself will start to erode as all of those calcifying organisms are no longer producing that calcium carbonate," Dr Cornwall said. "Ocean acidification is kind of like the death blow after these warming events  have been happening ... there's nowhere to get refuge from that."
Ken Anthony, principal research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said ocean acidification was a "more precise indicator than temperature" of what's happening in the biosphere as CO2 levels rise.
On current emissions trajectories, global ocean pH levels could drop to as low as 7.8, Dr Anthony said. Even at 8, all sorts of physiological changes can be expected, including entire ocean food chains being placed at risk.
"Even fish larvae's nervous systems get affected [by more acidic water]," he said. "Macro algae also grows faster so that suddenly weedy algae are much more successful in over-growing corals."
Dr Anthony, who was not one of the paper's authors, said he was "not surprised by these results", adding it "would have been wonderful" if adaptation had happened so fast.
He noted the study had focused on adult corals and algae, and future studies could be extended to look at juvenile and larvae "that are often more susceptible". Longer studies would also be helpful.
A separate study by AIMS researchers, meanwhile, has found the relatively pristine and remote coral reefs of Western Australia are increasingly being affected by heat stress and coral bleaching.
"For most (75 per cent) reef systems with long-term data (of five to 26 years), mean coral cover is currently at (or near) the lowest on record and a full recovery is unlikely if disturbances continue to intensify with climate change," the paper found.
Research should focus on identifying which reef systems are "least susceptible to future disturbances" and they should be preserved "through networks of protected areas", it said.

Links

• Ocean Acidification
• Resistance to ocean acidification in coral reef taxa is not gained by acclimatization
• Marine heatwaves threaten global biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services
• Australian Institute of Marine Science
• New report shows record low coral cover at many WA reefs
• The state of Western Australia’s coral reefs
• NSW's threatened species rise, climate impacts increase, major report finds

The Smithsonian’s Renewed Fossil Hall Sends A Forceful Message About Climate Change

Washington Post - Sarah Kaplan

A giant sea turtle that lived 83 to 81 million years ago, found in Kansas, is part of the “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils: Deep Time” exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The fossil hall will open June 8 after a five-year renovation. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

As a young paleontologist, Kirk Johnson traveled to the Arctic to excavate fossils from 50 million years ago, a time when the air was thick with carbon dioxide and so warm that even the North Pole had no ice.
Johnson and his colleagues dug up fossilized crocodiles, turtles, and palm trees.
“Palm trees!” Johnson recalled. “In the Arctic! . . . It blew my mind that the Earth could change that much.”
Since that expedition in the 1980s, global carbon dioxide concentrations have soared to levels not seen in the history of humankind. New temperature records are set almost every year. Savannah is turning to desert, coasts are consumed by floods, the Arctic is losing ice once more.
Those ancient palms are not only evidence of how much the planet has changed in the past, Johnson said. They also are a key to understanding the changes we see today.
When the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History took on the absorbing task of revamping its celebrated fossil hall, it was “dead obvious” that this would have to be one of the exhibit’s central themes, said Johnson, who became the museum’s director in 2012.
“Paleontology is the backstory to what’s happening today,” he said. “We have a responsibility to present that science to the nation . . . and to make clear the implications for the future.”
The “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils — Deep Time,” which opens to the public on June 8, is a radically new kind of natural history exhibition. It features all the classic beasts of a traditional paleontology hall: a colossal mammoth skeleton, a long-necked diplodocus, a ferocious new T-rex. But every fossil is presented in the context of Earth’s past climates and its present crisis.
Although the science of climate change has been settled for decades, exhibitions on the subject have prompted political debates. In 2007, a former administrator at the National Museum of Natural History alleged that an exhibition on the Arctic had been “toned down” by museum officials who feared angering Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush. (While the Smithsonian is not part of the government, it gets more than 60 percent of its funding from tax dollars.) The exhibition, which ran for six months in 2006, discussed the Arctic’s shrinking ice and snow cover but made no mention of what was causing the changes.
Most of the planning on the new fossil hall was done during the Obama administration, which made action against climate change one of its top priorities. But even after the inauguration of President Trump, who has questioned the scientific consensus on the subject, Johnson said that there was never any hesitation about the exhibition’s approach.
“I have no doubt that the kind of individual who is inclined to deny climate change will find it in their soul to do that to this exhibit,” he said. “But this is basic science. . . . We’re actually looking at facts about our planet’s history, and then just saying it looks like these facts have implications for the future.”

A diplodocus that lived 152 million years ago looms over the National Museum of Natural History. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

The new fossil hall takes a radical new approach to discussing Earth's past by using paleontology to explain modern day climate change. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

The fossil hall will reopen June 8. The original was open from 1911 to 2014, without undergoing a major overhaul. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Sarah George, the executive director of the Natural History Museum of Utah, said that the National Museum of Natural History’s approach is “quite new” for the museum world. As president of the Association of Science Museum Directors and a board member for the Association of Science and Technology Centers, George has seen many institutions add climate change installations in the past few decades. But no museum she knows of has so completely integrated an environmental message into one of its main exhibits. Especially not one containing the crown jewels of any natural history museum: its dinosaurs.
“I have to give them kudos,” George said, “for less focus on didactic interpretations [of the fossils] and more focus on what we really need to be thinking about today.”
Gigantic black pillars around the hall mark displays about mass extinctions, including the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and humans’ devastation of animals in recent history. A scale model of a Virginia coal mine explains the origin of the word “fossil” in fossil fuels — coal beds are essentially compressed layers of dead plants, and often preserve the outlines of ancient plants in exquisite detail. Videos show stories from the sinking bayous of Louisiana, a Chicago neighborhood where residents have withstood brutal heat waves and a Texas farm that is testing a more sustainablemethod of growing crops that could reduce erosion and suck up carbon. An interactive game teaches visitors about the effects of climate change on their favorite things — soccer, chocolate, beaches, flowers — and discusses ways people can reduce their environmental impacts.
The cumulative effect is that no person will be able to walk through the hall, which Johnson said is the most visited room at the most visited science museum in the world, without contemplating climate change and humans’ role in it.
“People do come for the dinosaurs,” said Siobhan Starrs, the project manager for the exhibit. “And they’re going to get a lot more than dinosaurs.”
The old fossil hall was open from 1911 to 2014, without undergoing a major overhaul. Many of the original fossil mounts predated the modern understanding of dinosaurs, and new displays were added piecemeal, leading to an exhibition that lacked an overarching theme.
Partial updates addressed some issues, but new discoveries in paleontology kept cropping up even faster. Some of the most important realizations about dinosaurs — that they’re the ancestors of birds, that an asteroid strike ended their reign — were made after the hall was last renovated, in the early 1980s.
New research on Earth’s history revealed a past that was far more dramatic than most people knew. Chief among the new discoveries is an event called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, a specialty of curator Scott Wing.
Some 50 million years ago, well after the demise of the dinosaurs, temperatures rose as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of a few thousand years — a rate of warming faster and more dramatic than at any time in history, except the present.
“This [exhibition] is very much a creation of the scientific knowledge of the past 20 or 30 years,” Wing said. “To understand that the magnitude of human effects are really on a scale that is geological.”
Last year, Wing worked at the National Museum of Natural History with a group of paleoclimate experts to develop a graph of Earth’s average temperatures over the past half-billion years. It is featured in the center of the exhibit, with text pointing out the link between periods of dramatic warmth and high levels of carbon dioxide.
In the past, that carbon came from erupting volcanoes. Now, the exhibition notes, it comes from us.

A pterodactyl is suspended above the gallery at the National Museum of Natural History. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Links

• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
• Climate change could render many of Earth’s ecosystems unrecognizable
• Past and future global transformation of terrestrial ecosystems under climate change
• A mystery dinosaur in the nation’s basement
• How do you make a predatory dinosaur relatable? Show it as a parent.
• This ancient climate catastrophe is our best clue about Earth’s future

Climate Index Reveals A Summer Of Record Extremes

Insurance Business Australia - Mina Martin

New Climate Index  The Actuaries Institute has developed a new tool for monitoring climate trends. The Australian Actuaries Climate Index (AACI) tracks changes in the frequency of extreme high and low temperatures, heavy precipitation, dry days, strong wind, and changes in sea level to help people understand how extreme weather – and risk levels – may be shifting as a result of climate change. Elayne Grace, Actuaries Institute chief executive, said the index “will assist businesses to assess and report risks from climate change, and Australians more generally will be able to look at the data and see what’s going on.” Read more

Australia has experienced a season of extremes last summer, with the Australian Actuaries Climate Index posting a record-number of hot days, extreme rainfall in tropical regions, as well as ongoing drought in some parts of NSW.
The climate index showed a 200% rise in the frequency of extreme high temperatures in the summer of 2018-19 compared to the reference period 1980-2010.
“The most recent summer has been the hottest on record, both in terms of average temperatures as reported by the Bureau of Meteorology, and in terms of the frequency of extreme temperatures as measured by the Australian Actuaries Climate Index,” said Tim Andrews, who led the development of the index.
“The Bureau of Meteorology predicted this summer’s hot weather and reported it would be driven by a combination of the long-term increasing trend in global air and ocean temperatures, and the El Niño weather conditions.”
The climate index also showed clear evidence of the sustained rainfall that caused the 1-in-100-year flooding in North Queensland in February, as well as the continuing drought experienced in central NSW.
“The attribution of individual events to climate change is challenging to assess due to high levels of natural variability, but the Townsville event is consistent with expectations for rainfall intensity to increase,” Andrews said.
Andrews also noted that despite the heavy rainfall in north Australia, there were significant parts of NSW and Southern Queensland experiencing extremely dry conditions during the summer months.
The climate index, launched last year, tracks changes in the frequency of extreme high and low temperatures, heavy precipitation, dry days, strong wind, and changes in sea levels, to help businesses better assess how weather extremes translate into financial risk.

Tim Andrews, a Principal at Finity Consulting with 30-years of actuarial experience, collated the Climate Index, using data from Australia's Bureau of Meteorology’s (BOM) extensive network of weather stations and tide gauge facilities.

Links

• New climate index launched
• About the Australian Actuaries Climate Index
• Australian Actuaries Climate Index
• Australian Actuaries Climate Index shows Summer of record extremes: temperatures, rainfall, drought
• Climate index shows increasing frequency of hot days in Australia
• Climate Risk Disclosure – financial institutions feel the heat
• The Impact of Climate Change on Insurance against Catastrophes
• Climate Risk Management for Financial Institutions
• Can actuaries really afford to ignore climate change?

New Studies Increase Confidence In NASA's Measure Of Earth's Temperature

NASA - Jessica Merzdorf

Earth’s long-term warming trend can be seen in this visualization of NASA’s global temperature record, which shows how the planet’s temperatures are changing over time, compared to a baseline average from 1951 to 1980. The record is shown as a running five-year average. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Kathryn Mersmann. Download related visualizations here.

A new assessment of NASA's record of global temperatures revealed that the agency's estimate of Earth's long-term temperature rise in recent decades is accurate to within less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, providing confidence that past and future research is correctly capturing rising surface temperatures.
The most complete assessment ever of statistical uncertainty within the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) data product shows that the annual values are likely accurate to within 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit (0.05 degrees Celsius) in recent decades, and 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit (0.15 degrees C) at the beginning of the nearly 140-year record.
This data record, maintained by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, is one of a handful kept by major science institutions around the world that track Earth's temperature and how it has risen in recent decades. This global temperature record has provided one of the most direct benchmarks of how our home planet's climate has changed as greenhouse gas concentrations rise.
The study also confirms what researchers have been saying for some time now: that Earth's global temperature increase since 1880 – about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or a little more than 1 degree Celsius – cannot be explained by any uncertainty or error in the data. Going forward, this assessment will give scientists the tools to explain their results with greater confidence.
GISTEMP is a widely used index of global mean surface temperature anomaly — it shows how much warmer or cooler than normal Earth’s surface is in a given year. "Normal" is defined as the average during a baseline period of 1951-80.
NASA uses GISTEMP in its annual global temperature update, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (In 2019, NASA and NOAA found that 2018 was the fourth-warmest year on record, with 2016 holding the top spot.) The index includes land and sea surface temperature data back to 1880, and today incorporates measurements from 6,300 weather stations, research stations, ships and buoys around the world.
Previously, GISTEMP provided an estimate of uncertainty accounting for the spatial gaps between weather stations. Like other surface temperature records, GISTEMP estimates the temperatures between weather stations using data from the closest stations, a process called interpolation. Quantifying the statistical uncertainty present in those estimates helped researchers to be confident that the interpolation was accurate.
“Uncertainty is important to understand because we know that in the real world we don’t know everything perfectly,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS and a co-author on the study. “All science is based on knowing the limitations of the numbers that you come up with, and those uncertainties can determine whether what you’re seeing is a shift or a change that is actually important.”
The study found that individual and systematic changes in measuring temperature over time were the most significant source of uncertainty. Also contributing was the degree of weather station coverage. Data interpolation between stations contributed some uncertainty, as did the process of standardizing data that was collected with different methods at different points in history.
After adding these components together, GISTEMP’s uncertainty value in recent years was still less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, which is “very small,” Schmidt said.
The team used the updated model to reaffirm that 2016 was very probably the warmest year in the record, with an 86.2 percent likelihood. The next most likely candidate for warmest year on record was 2017, with a 12.5 percent probability.
“We’ve made the uncertainty quantification more rigorous, and the conclusion to come out of the study was that we can have confidence in the accuracy of our global temperature series,” said lead author Nathan Lenssen, a doctoral student at Columbia University. “We don’t have to restate any conclusions based on this analysis.”
Another recent study evaluated GISTEMP in a different way that also added confidence to its estimate of long-term warming. A paper published in March 2019, led by Joel Susskind of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, compared GISTEMP data with that of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), onboard NASA's Aqua satellite.
GISTEMP uses air temperature recorded with thermometers slightly above the ground or sea, while AIRS uses infrared sensing to measure the temperature right at the Earth's surface (or “skin temperature”) from space. The AIRS record of temperature change since 2003 (which begins when Aqua launched) closely matched the GISTEMP record.
Comparing two measurements that were similar but recorded in very different ways ensured that they were independent of each other, Schmidt said. One difference was that AIRS showed more warming in the northernmost latitudes.
“The Arctic is one of the places we already detected was warming the most. The AIRS data suggests that it’s warming even faster than we thought,” said Schmidt, who was also a co-author on the Susskind paper.
Taken together, Schmidt said, the two studies help establish GISTEMP as a reliable index for current and future climate research.
“Each of those is a way in which you can try and provide evidence that what you’re doing is real,” Schmidt said. “We’re testing the robustness of the method itself, the robustness of the assumptions, and of the final result against a totally independent data set.”
In all cases, he said, the resulting trends are more robust than what can be accounted for by any uncertainty in the data or methods.

Links

• Improvements in the uncertainty model in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature (GISTEMP) analysis
• Seasonal Monsoon Rains Block Key Ocean Current
• NASA Study: Human Influence on Global Droughts Goes Back 100 Years
• OCO-3 Ready to Extend NASA's Study of Carbon
• Antarctica's Effect on Sea Level Rise in Coming Centuries
• Time lapse: Watch glaciers rise, fall in thousands of years per second
• 2015-2016 El Niño triggered disease outbreaks across globe
• Fire below, ice above: volcanoes, glaciers and sea level rise
• 2018 fourth warmest year in continued warming trend, according to NASA, NOAA
• Huge cavity in Antarctic glacier signals rapid decay
• Warming seas may increase frequency of extreme storms

United Nations Says 80 Countries May Ramp Up Climate Pledges

New York Times - Somini Sengupta

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has made climate change a signature issue. Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS — About 80 countries want to increase their climate pledges ahead of schedule under the Paris climate accord, the United Nations said Tuesday, signaling that some of them would do so at a summit of world leaders in September.
Luis Alfonso de Alba, a Mexican diplomat who is currently the United Nations Secretary General’s envoy on climate change, declined to say which countries were expected to announce higher climate ambitions, nor whether they would be enough to make a difference to the fate of the world.
Even if every country were to meet the pledges already made under the 2015 Paris agreement — and they are nowhere on track to do so — it would be insufficient to avert the worst effects of climate change. An “exponential increase in ambition,” Mr. de Alba said, is needed.
“We need to step up ambition quite radically. We are not talking about a small incremental approach,” he said.
The Paris Agreement is designed to let countries set their own targets to control their greenhouse gas emissions, and then to ramp up those commitments in the coming years. The first formal deadline to ramp up those pledges is 2020. The Trump administration has said it intends to pull out of the agreement — making the United States an outlier — but that also can’t formally happen until the end of 2020.
Whether the United Nations can persuade big polluting countries, like China and those within the European Union, to hasten their own reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is an important test for the world body. The Secretary General, António Guterres, has made climate change a signature issue of his administration, and he has encouraged world leaders to tax carbon and quickly dump coal, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel.
At its climate summit in September, the day before the high-level meeting of the General Assembly begins, the United Nations says it aims to showcase the best examples of what is being done now to reduce the use of planet-warming fossil fuels, and to encourage countries to commit to more ambitious climate goals.
Mr. de Alba said he is “hopeful” that China would announce new climate pledges at the September summit. At least 80 countries, he said, have signaled to the United Nations that they want to do so. But “it doesn’t mean they are ready to do that in the scale we need and by September,” Mr. de Alba said.
Among the invitees to the climate summit is the Swedish youth activist, Greta Thunberg. Mr. de Alba said she wants to come, but he did not know whether she would come, or how. Ms. Thunberg does not fly because of her concern about emissions from aviation fuel, and once suggested that she might travel to New York on a cargo ship.

Links

• UN envoy says 80 countries ready to step up on climate
• The Paris Accord Promised a Climate Solution. Here’s Where We Are Now
• Trump Will Withdraw U.S. From Paris Climate Agreement
• The Paris Climate Deal: What You Need to Know
• U.S.-China Friction Threatens to Undercut the Fight Against Climate Change

Australia Keeps Voting For Coal, But Investors Are Quietly Abandoning Plans For New Mines

Quartz - Akshat Rathi

Numbers don't add up

Nowhere to go… for now. Reuters/Jason Reed

On May 18, Australians surprised the pollsters.
At the federal election, the expectation was for the incumbent coalition to be thumped by the pro-climate Labor party.
Instead, citizens of Queensland, Australia’s coal-rich province, swung hard to support the coalition backing the construction of new coal mines.
It was enough to ensure the coalition remains in power.
Queensland’s Carmichael coal mine lies at the heart of the debate. Many political campaigns were focused on the mine, using hashtags like #StopAdani or #StartAdani.
Adani, the Indian conglomerate that has an exploration license for the coal mine, plans to build it into one of the world’s largest.
Emissions from the process of mining at Carmichael, and the burning of the coal produced, would each separately be more than emissions produced by entire countries like Austria, Denmark, and Norway.
But Adani has struggled to first get the environmental licenses it needs, as well as the financing to pull off the project.
Last year, the company announced that it would move ahead with a scaled-down version of the Carmichael mine, producing only 10 million metric tons of coal each year of the possible annual capacity of 60 million metric tons.
Environmentalists around the world see the Adani mine, located in the Galilee basin, as a bellwether for the future of the dirtiest fossil fuel.
That’s because the basin has potential to provide a lot more coal beyond the Adani mine, at a time when Australia (and the world) is struggling to cut its emissions and hit ambitious climate goals.
Among rich nations, Australia is expected to suffer the most damages because of the climate crisis.
In the past few months, the country has experienced its hottest summer on record, extreme flooding in Queensland, and mass die-off of a million fish in New South Wales.
While the Australian elections didn’t go as environmentalists wanted, they do have something, perhaps even bigger, to celebrate.
On May 23, Australian broadcaster ABC found that investors have abandoned plans to build a much larger mine that was supposed to be located only 30 km away from the Carmichael mine.
The China Stone project, run by MacMines AustAsia and wholly owned by the Meijin Energy Group, which is China’s largest producer of metallurgical coke, was expected to produce 38 million metric tons of coal each year.
The A$6.7 billion ($4.6 billion) mine would have supported 3,000 jobs and contributed A$188 million to the Queensland government’s coffers each year for the 25 years the mining was expected to last.
All that now seems to be up in the air.
ABC revealed that MacMines terminated the process of acquiring mining leases from the government in March. Though the company wouldn’t comment on why it did that, analysts believe that the coal mine is neither financially viable nor in China’s interests any more.
“China has made it very, very clear it wants to progressively reduce exposure to highly polluting coal-fired power generation. That won’t happen overnight, it will take decades to come,” Tim Buckley of the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis told ABC.
“But if you are moving in that direction, the last thing you want to do is introduce a whole lot more expensive imported thermal coal.”
Notably, the China Stone mine’s financial viability is expected to be similar to the Carmichael mine.
David Fickling, a Bloomberg columnist, did the math on the latter.
After taking into consideration the cost to build the mine, the railway line, the operating expenses, and the interest payments on the loans taken, he found that each metric ton of coal would cost about $88.
That’s much higher than the open-market cost for the same quality of coal, which can be bought from Indonesia’s Adaro Energy for as little as $66 per metric ton.
MacMines still owns an exploration license for the China Stone project, so no other company can develop it.
That means, for now, the China Stone coal will stay in the ground.

Links

• Australia Plans Coalfield The Size Of Britain In Climate Change U-Turn
• Morrison Sprints To Adani Approval
• Coal Catastrophe: Why Scott Morrison Can't Give In To Queensland Triumphalism
• Adani Water Plan Ticked Off Within Hours Despite Lack Of Detail, Internal CSIRO Emails Reveal
• I'm Willing To Go To Jail To Stop Adani And Save Our Beloved Country. Will You Stand With Me?
• ABC News: What We Know About Adani's Carmichael Coal Mine Project
• Adani Did Not 'Accept In Full' Changes Sought By Scientists During Approval Stages, Meeting Notes Show